With the 21st Winter Olympics being held in Vancouver next year, the city has received quite a bit of attention over the last couple of years.
What can easily be forgotten by all of the attention being netted for Vancouver by the Olympics is that a group of people facing some of the most unique challenges in Canada are hidden away in the city.
The Downtown East Side of Vancouver was home to 16,590 people during the last count in 2001. However, since many residents of the neighbourhood move frequently from place to place, this number often fluctuates.
The notorious East Hastings Street is the backbone of the neighbourhood and is evidence of all of the complex issues faced by the residents. Homelessness, an open-air drug market and the sex trade industry thrive on East Hastings, a sign of a people struggling to survive from day-to-day.
Look a bit further and you will find an area known as Blood Alley, which many of the Downtown’s homeless population call home.
Huddled under the shelter of the extended roofs of many of the small businesses in the area, the street population of Vancouver take refuge from the elements year-round on Blood Alley.
It begs the question of how these people became concentrated into one area, and why they seem to be forgotten.
Few understand the complex social issues of the Downtown East Side as well as Mark Townsend.
Townsend is a manager at the Portland Hotel Society, a non-profit organization in the Downtown East Side offering services and advocacy to those who have been left behind by the system; the most vulnerable.
Townsend says that the main issue plaguing the Downtown East Side is poverty. Clean, safe housing might be the first step to improving the quality of life for the poor.
“There could be better housing. Decent housing goes a long way to making a better life,” says Townsend.
“If you are sharing a bathroom and kitchen with many other people and living in an 80-square foot room with no resources, cable or money, it’s not very fun.”
Townsend is referring to the many former hotels in the Downtown that have been converted to rooming houses to meet an overwhelming need for cheap housing.
In addition to being very cramped, the conditions inside of these rooms are often unsanitary and almost squalor, with drug paraphernalia littering the premises.
“If that’s all that your life consists of, it will really affect you,” says Townsend.
Living in unsanitary conditions with no means of escape can be mentally debilitating, making it hard for people to maintain their dignity. This is when many people turn to addiction.
Paul Ryan of Hope in Shadows, an organization ran by the Pivot Legal Society, agrees that housing could be the big difference.
“There is a major problem with homelessness. People who are homeless are often targeted more by drug dealers,” admits Ryan, who has worked in the area for four or five years now.
Located on the west end of Hastings Street, the Portland Hotel Society offers shelter for residents with nowhere else to go. Most notably, they run Insite, North America’s only safe injection site.
Insite allows intravenous drug users to inject in a sterile area with clean needles. They are monitored by staff members after they inject to ensure that no one overdoses.
Insite also offers a detox program, advocacy and most importantly, a place for addicts to come and sit and have a coffee with other people from the community.
The project has been highly controversial, with the current Conservative government calling for it to be shut down more than once, saying that the site is not helping enough people to warrant staying open and that it encourages drug use.
Townsend argues that people need to look at who is being helped rather than who is not.
“It saves lives, money, and there is no evidence that it encourages drug use,” says Townsend.
Ryan agrees, saying that if 70 people use Insite, that is 70 people that would be at risk of overdosing or contracting diseases like HIV/AIDS if Insite did not exist.
“It’s really, really busy – they are running to capacity,” he says.
“The fact that it can’t help everyone doesn’t mean that that it’s not working.”
Ryan blames the need for expensive programs like Insite on a policy of containment practiced in the last 10 years which has forced all of the low-income people in Vancouver to migrate to the Downtown East Side.
He says that working wages and social assistance rates were better in the 1990s and the problem of containment in the Downtown has only gotten worse since then.
Townsend thinks that the area needs to develop a sense of community instead of adopting a fully mixed income situation.
“Mixed is not necessarily the solution. We need to create a community and embrace that there are neighbourhoods of poor people.
“It’s not just one big ghetto that should be bulldozed.”
Creating a sense of community is precisely what Paul Ryan’s organization, Hope in Shadows, is all about.
Through their annual photo contest, they enable residents to share their neighbourhood through snapshots taken from their perspective.
Carolyn Wong, who also works with Hope in Shadows, says that they then create a medium for the best photographers to sell their work in a calendar and make their own profits. It gives them something to be proud of.
“We wanted to do something to highlight the community and its strengths,” says Wong.
“The feeling was that the marginalized people in the area deserve and need that opportunity to represent a positive self-identity.”
Positive things like the Hope in Shadows project are often overshadowed by negative things going on in the neighbourhood, according to Lani Russwurm, who works with the Downtown East Side Community Arts Network.
“Media coverage almost exclusively focuses on the social ills concentrated in the area,” says Russwurm.
“The underreported part of the story is that there is a very strong sense of community solidarity here, more than in any other neighbourhood I know of.”
The group looks at art not only as a feasible way to make a living, but also a method of healing.
“For people without much money, the ability to create is often the one thing that can’t be taken away from them.”
It does not matter how much media attention is directed towards the problems of Canada’s forgotten slum, or how many band-aid fixes are implemented. It can only be fixed if people in poverty are humanized and a sense of community is emphasized.
Through photography, art or even the small pieces of communication between fellow addicts at Insite, positive things are happening on the Downtown East Side; people are blooming where they are.
