Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside:

A Community in Need of Balance

Summary

Strathcona Business Improvement Association Ray-Cam Community Association Inner City Safety Society

This paper has been developed by the Strathcona Business Improvement Association, the Ray-Cam Cooperative Community Centre, and the Inner City Safety Society. The contents are based on earlier work undertaken by the Board of Trade’s Downtown Eastside Task Force, supported by further extensive research and literature search, including local documents. Key research, writing and editing was provided by Judy McGuire, with input and support from Dave Park, Economist Emeritus of the Vancouver Board of Trade.

Contacts: Joji Kumagai Judy McGuire Executive Director Coordinator Strathcona Business Improvement Association Inner City Safety Society (604) 258-2727 (604) 889-8430 [email protected] [email protected]

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: A Community in Need of Balance Summary

The Strathcona Business Improvement Association and the Ray-Cam Association recently engaged in a historical review of the interventions applied in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to investigate why, after years of attention and millions of dollars being directed to solving the issues, the situation in the neighbourhood has not appreciably changed and is arguably becoming worse.

The DTES neighbourhood, for the purpose of the review, was defined as being bordered by to the west, Clark Drive to the east, Venables Street/Prior Avenue to the south, and the waterfront to the north. The DTES includes many sub-areas, making it one the most

diverse neighbourhoods in Vancouver. These areas include; , Victory Square, Chinatown, Thornton Park, Oppenheimer, Strathcona, and the Industrial area. The center of the neighbourhood runs along Hastings Street. Approximately 38% of residents live in families,

slightly under 15% are under 19 and over one- third are seniors.

The process incorporated a historical review of the frames of reference used by governments and bureaucrats in developing the many programs and implementation strategies, including concerns that have been raised that the strategies chosen may have set up these initiatives for failure. In essence, four key areas of concern were commonly cited:  Programs were developed in isolation of other initiatives and targeted to one specific problem or even to one specific approach to the problem.  Funding was awarded to deal with individualized issues rather than to support comprehensive strategies, often utilizing a competitive process which placed community-based organizations at odds with each other, while resulting in a significant disruption in the continuum of community supports.  Strategizing on solutions on issues tended to occur among professionals, mainly in isolation from the diverse community of residents, businesses and structures that make up this community. These solutions frequently ended up at odds with community planning and priorities, resulting in unnecessary opposition, flawed implementation, unintended consequences, and too often failure.  The philosophy adopted by governments and other senior partners was to develop strategies targeted to address community deficits rather than building on community capacities, resulting in symptom management rather than community healing.

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An examination of certain key issues --- and housing, and mental illness, the health crisis, crime, community planning, the business community --- based on the roles the system played in determining appropriate responses, demonstrates why even arguably successful programs too often failed to really alter the community’s realities.

The overview has pointed to the need for a paradigm shift in the systemic approach to community planning. Promising and best practice strategies build on the community’s strengths and successes to better evaluate the issues, develop a realistic community vision (reflecting broad community engagement) and implementation strategies.

Governments continue to have a key role to play in community development, not as policy developers or program specific funders but as conveners of broad community process. They can bring community members together across lines that divide them: facilitating shared experience in identification, visioning and planning of a desired attainable future in the community. By supporting collaborative governance, multi-organizational management systems and advancing the implementation of community plans and by funding these systems through cross-organizational grants, governments can not only support community aspirations but help them achieve measureable outcomes.

The challenges faced by the Downtown Eastside are not insurmountable. It is time to give the community a true opportunity to find stability and sustainability for everyone.

Key Points:

Homelessness and Housing:

 Maintaining the Downtown Eastside as a high or special needs social housing enclave will not help to stabilize either the community or the city as a whole. The term vulnerability now describes not only a majority of community residents but also the neighbourhood itself. Continued expansion or concentration of vulnerable individuals into already adverse social conditions will lead to neither their safety and health nor that of the neighbourhood. Affordable housing and special needs inclusive services, designed with the capacity to be truly welcoming and safe, need to be concurrently developed in a balanced, integrated manner in other neighbourhoods.

 The vast majority of social housing units – both those newly built and renovated -- have been targeted to the highest risk, street-involved individuals and have deliberately excluded others within the low-income population who face fewer obvious challenges, seriously unbalancing what was a stable albeit poor neighbourhood.

 Community resources are also facing increasing pressures. City development policies and guidelines inadvertently compound the situation as amenity funding is generally not available to support neighbourhood infrastructure when the majority of development in that area represents the special-needs social housing market.

 Area families, seniors, working people, schools, community centres and business argue that no neighbourhood can remain healthy when populated by an over-abundance of high-risk or high- impact individuals. These individuals also fail to receive the support they need in a community where capacity is already compromised and overwhelmed by existing needs.

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Addiction and Mental Illness:

 Since the 1990s, a high number of visibly addicted individuals have congregated into the area as affordable housing disappeared from other parts of the city. This localized population grew as other provinces cut rates years before cutbacks occurred in BC, while drugs became cheaper and more available. Ultimately poverty, addiction and psychiatric disabilities have kept many rooted in the neighbourhood.

 The deinstitutionalization of BC’s mentally ill since the mid-twentieth century has been disastrous, plagued by inadequate funding and lack of coherent planning. The chaos that resulted was predicted and reported but never properly addressed. Individuals with psychiatric problems ended up poor and on the streets of the Downtown Eastside, victims of predatory drug dealers and too often cycling into and out of the prison system. Resources and supports remain completely inadequate.

Crime:

 Although it is acknowledged that many crimes are not reported to police, statistics still report the area to have the second highest number of robberies and assaults in the city; assault numbers have more than doubled since 2002.

 The area’s most vulnerable residents – seniors, youth, women, the mentally ill – tend to be most targeted by predators. Violence is increasingly spilling over into neighbourhood community centres, housing, offices and businesses.

 Despite almost 20 years of interventions, drug use and drug dealing continue on the streets; police and courts cannot by themselves control the problem.

Community Planning:

 For at least the past 25 years, community planning in the Downtown Eastside has been mainly reactive, designed to address perceived crises rather than to develop a comprehensive strategy for maximizing community capacity. Initiatives have been largely targeted at individuals and issues deemed most at risk and/or having the highest negative impact. Most of the neighbourhood has been ignored.

 In the mid 1990s two overlapping health crises -- the significant rise in overdose deaths and the jump in HIV and HCV infection rates -- led to the coordination of community development within a medical context – preventing disease transmission and treating vulnerable or already affected individuals – which deliberately moved community planning into prioritizing risk management and planning by shortcomings.

 The City of Vancouver’s Four Pillars Strategy never achieved full implementation and remains a contentious and largely unfulfilled vision. The overwhelming emphasis placed on initiatives targeted to symptom management appears to have primarily maintained the status quo.

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 Harm Reduction has been selectively applied. Initiatives such as needle distribution address the needs of one segment of the population, but put other community members at risk; children have been injured. The overwhelming presence of methadone clinics impacts neighbourhood health, the viability of local businesses, and impacts the balance of social fabric of the community as it draws many of it clients from outside the area without any compensatory benefit. Harm reduction for one group should not increase harm for others.

 The chaotic environment and lack of investment in proper supports is placing neighbourhood children in crisis. Families are pressured by low-incomes, language issues, few social supports, insufficient food and shelter, and health challenges. Children enter the school system already marginalized. Local families are also incredibly short-changed by the overwhelming focus of community health resources on meeting the needs of high impact individuals.

 Measurements from UBC’s Human Early Learning Partnership clearly indicate that children in Strathcona are the most vulnerable group in the Province on every scale and their level of vulnerability has been steadily increasing over the past 9 years. They are now at highest risk of school failure among groups measured in all BC urban centres. To further compound the problem, there has been a recent upward surge in the population of vulnerable infants to 6- year olds living in the area, compounded with a net loss over the past few years of over 40 local childcare spaces.

 Youth at risk, even those on Ministry youth agreements, are being housed in the Downtown Eastside, making them easy prey for pimps and drug dealers.

A Business Community in Survival Mode:

 The Downtown Eastside business community tends to go unnoticed, yet it is a strong component of Vancouver’s economic engine. Safety and security are overwhelmingly cited as primary concerns. It remains a huge challenge for even the most committed businesses to create economic viability in the inner city.

 The DTES business community is hugely diverse, including manufacturing, service industries, retail, and social enterprises. Many businesses in all categories hire local residents when at all possible.

 The City of Vancouver’s Official Development Plan for the area mandates that any development above a floor space ratio of 1.0 must include 20% social housing. The result is that this policy is actively discouraging establishments from investing in the area, driving commerce and jobs to other parts of the Lower Mainland.

 After 11 years and an investment of $27.9 million, the Vancouver Agreement failed to make a visible difference in the area. Ultimately, it was a worthy idea which was fell short due to having a structure that worked primarily to align the policy and funding objectives of participating government ministries and allied institutions and the inability of that structure to exercise leadership by aligning government collaborations, public policy and funding with local knowledge and capacity.

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A New Approach:

 All the various ‘strategic’ initiatives targeted to deal with multiple community ‘problems’ have resulted in a neighbourhood that is seriously out of balance. Locating thousands of units of social housing and shelter beds for high needs individuals, along with numerous organizations which support them, within this overly small geographic area has led to no appreciable improvement in conditions for those individuals but has significantly destabilized the neighbourhood.

 The current approach of generally isolating and addressing issues individually does not account for what can happen when people or areas have a combination of linked problems such as low incomes, poor housing, health challenges, compromised safety, crime etc – a toxic mix which erodes the social fabric at expense of childcare, grocery stores, seniors’ well- being, family safety, locally-owned small businesses.

 The vast majority of research into the practice of concentrating the housing of individuals with low incomes, particularly those who could be deemed ‘high impact’, into a single neighbourhood affirms that such overconcentration leads to significant problems. As a result, for the past 30 years communities in the US have been systematically demolishing what is referred to as ghetto housing and rebuilding on a more scatter-site or at least more dispersed model, respecting the rights of all individuals to be part of a balanced, safe environment and to have a home. No clear reason has been found to explain why Vancouver has adopted a housing model now so roundly rejected in other cities.

 Everyone in this community has a right to thrive. Local economic and social amenities and resources should reflect the needs of children, youth, families and seniors, not just those with addiction issues. Allowing the operation of 23 methadone clinics and an abundance of addiction physicians, for instance, should be balanced with provision of family doctors, services for the elderly, and local business and employment opportunities that contribute to the overall social fabric of the community. Many area problems, particularly those faced by children and seniors, arise from poverty not addiction. Dealing with their issues as a priority would be relatively simple and doing so would do much to strengthen the already stable parts of the community. Changing the view of the community to one that is functional, albeit with problems, would go a very long way toward building a truly healthy neighbourhood.

 The Downtown Eastside requires a full place-specific development process involving all residents, businesses and organizations from all neighbourhoods that comprise the widest definition of the area. This plan must address not just housing issues but also crime prevention, street chaos, business enhancement, resident safety, health promotion, childhood development, and strategies for harnessing and increasing community capacity as defined by the community itself.

The challenges faced by the Downtown Eastside are not insurmountable. It is time to give the community a true opportunity to find stability and sustainability for everyone.