One of those properties, 58 West Hastings, was the object of protests and demonstrations before and during the Olympics as Concord proposed to build market condos there.

We now have various people opining that, if the city builds just social housing there, it will just entrench income segregation in the city. NPAers Suzanne Anton, on council, and Michael Geller, not, are saying that the city should instead have asked Concord to give the city one or more of the six sites already reserved on other portions of Concord’s False Creek developments and that the city should instead have lobbied to get provincial money for supportive social housing there.

Downtown Eastside activists, of course, would like to see Hastings sites become strictly social housing.

And the city, in public and elsewhere, is saying that it may consider other options besides just provincially subsidized social housing, at least for the 58 West Hastings site, to create some housing that’s aimed at a bigger range of low-income households than just the most seriously challenged that the province is focusing all of its efforts on these days.

First off, Gregor’s comments in full to me and other media.

In the scrum early Tuesday morning, he said this: “He’s provided good leadership at the city for the past few years, and he’ll be missed for sure. I don’t think it’s unusual to see a turnover with a change in government; we have a really ambitious agenda and people will decide a time to move on when it makes sense in their careers. James has got a great opportunity at UBC and he’ll be around through the end of May for a smooth transition and we’ve certainly appreciated his work for the city. He’s been a big asset and he’ll be missed.”

I’m told by the mayor’s office that the comments to Jeff Lee about why staff were leaving (pressures of the Olympics and the new demanding agenda) were made in response to Jeff’s questions about why there seemed to be a general exodus, not why James Ridge was leaving.

My interview later, where I was asking him at once about both the departure of James Ridge and the exodus of many other senior staffers. (He didn’t say this all in one go, I had intervening questions.)

“We have an ambitious agenda, we’re dealing with unprecedented challenges. It’s meant that people who are considering a change have all the more reason to leave. It’s not uncommon for there to be a turnover of a management team when there’s a big change and a new political direction I think it’s not uncommon. I have no doubt our city can still attract top-notch talent. It’s Penny’s decision on what we do now. She knows full well how much we want to get done. There’s certainly a new culture of high productivity and big expectations at city all. There’s great people filling the gaps. The talent at city hall is deep. Peter Judd stepping up to fill in for Dave Rudberg, it’s good to see him get that. I’m hopeful this is creating opportunities for good people to step up.”

And are you politicizing city hall? “If it was that, James wouldn’t be waiting over a month to go. He’s respectful of the situation. There’s no doubt the culture is shifting here.”

Are you concerned more people will be leaving? “I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s beyond the normal rate of attrition.”

A few more points from Suzanne that didn’t make it into print: “I’m very disappointed but I can’t say I’m surprised. When we stole [James] from North Vancouver, I’d been gloating about what a great theft it was. He’s masterful, pragmatic, even-tempered. I’m very very sorry he’s left the city. This is a failure of leadership from the mayor, a failure to keep his top people there.”

And finally, a very tactful (and funny) note from James himself in response to all the uproar:

FROM WENDY PEDERSEN

Hello. If you want to know what low-income DTES residents think about their neighbourhood, you can read this report: http://ccapvancouver.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/ccapvisionwebsm.pdf
Its called Nothing About Us Without Us and its written for an association of 5000 low-income residents called the Carnegie Association.
I’ve been in the DTES for 20 years, both my kids were born here and it reminds me of the fishing community I grew up in – and it has the same economic pressures that threaten to disperse it….big market forces do squeeze out the little guys.
Right now we’re doing a mapping sessions with low-income residents – we’re mapping people’s most meaningful places and asking them why. We have some UBC students helping and both of them say that they cannot believe the interconnection, depth of history, connection to place and meaningfulness that exists here. They say they could not make a similar map of their own neighbourhood. Here’s some things people said about Oppenheimer Park (direct quotes): I helped raise the totem pole with the eagle on top…..we had a kissing booth at the hard times festival…its like zocalo Mexico where everyone sits on the outside looking in…its where 1000’s of people gathered for the On To Ottawa trek…there’s always someone there to have a conversation with about what’s happening….years ago we had a vision quest there.
And the Carnegie Centre: “Its our living room…..its my kitchen….its a place of change…it means alot to me…its the first place I’ve ever found with people who are comfortable with who I am…its the centre of my community, my social life is tied here, it branches out from here…..Carnegie kitchen was my first volunteer position. It was the first time in my life that I was open and honest about my drug addiction. When I told them in the kitchen, they didn’t judge me, and accepted me. It was a big step towards my recovery……In the early 1980’s i was the president of the united acupuncture centre of BC, we used to meet here in the Learning Centre. That was what made acupuncture legal to have it and covered by medical. It was very important what you did, says someone else…..its where I can be a pow wow dancer.” At some of these sessions, people have burst into tears when talking about the missing women. We also talk about the uncomfortable places. People say the forlorn places with no lights are not safe. They don’t like condos because people who move in them look down on you etc.
I don’t think the public really understands (or maybe even cares) who lives here and what they think. Institutionalization of people in the are is not the answer. Building on community and good relationships definitely is.
As a researcher whose job it is to help the low-income community develop a vision for the future, I’m fairly obsessed with Francis’ questions and I thank her for framing them so well.
Are there any unexpected upsides to having such a concentration in one area?, she asks. What some people call ghetto, we call community. People give you a cigarette if you need one. Most people nod at you as you walk down the street. Sometimes it takes a long time to get home because you have so many conversations at street corners. People tell lots of stories about you at your funeral. At one of the visioning sessions someone at the Aboriginal Front Door said: I like being me and I like being known. We quote that in the report.
There are 5000 hotel rooms in the area and not many of them are rented at $375 any more and welfare/min wage are not keeping up with inflation. This survival mode has made it easier for the black market to take hold of people for sure. 30 years ago, people would go to the store and buy a newspaper, or out for breakfast, even if on welfare. 2 million a month has been sucked out of the neighbourhood because welfare has not kept up to the 1970’s level in terms of cost of living.
Why the Downtown Eastside bothers people so much? Is it the visible drug-selling and drug-taking? says Francis. I think the open drug market has been a double edged sword too. It has sheltered the 10,000 or so low-income people not in the drug trade from the impact of gentrification because I agree, its just too hard for the upper classes to take. But for those of us willing to live with it, we get cheaper stores, cheaper housing, tight knit community, decades long friendships and a sharing of resources that builds a sense of how to be together that doesn’t exist in other places in Vancouver. That’s the part that reminds me of the old fishing community. We also have the rich Indigenous, Chinese and working class cultures that have been established here for a century or more to enjoy. Suprisingly few low-income residents name the outside drug market as a problem. When we probe about this we find that most residents have a sophisticated view of addiction and want treatment on demand and housing etc….they care more about getting at the roots of the problem than punishing those who are trapped by it. The Carnegie Association won’t ask the police to move people off the corner because of this.
So, to everyone who is reading this, maybe this challenges your view of my neighbourhood, maybe not. Think of me with my 2 kids who have the priviledge of growing up in a really tight community like their grandparents did. We wouldn’t get that in any other area of Vancouver except maybe for some remaining pockets of Italians around Commercial Drive, if we were Italian.
I would take away the drug trade any day, but then we need something in its place (like zoning, rate of change bylaw, replace the hotels with decent housing, more low-income housing, commitment to a mix of incomes 75% low to 25% high?) to shelter this area from losing the concentration of low-income people, oops, I mean the community, that wants to stay together (95% of the 650 surveyed in the report above said they want to stay if they have decent housing).

The unspoken message behind all of this is, “Yikes, the world is going to be here in exactly a year and this is going to be so embarrassing to explain. Let’s get some action.”

It is fascinating to see how this neighbourhood attracts attention, concern, calls for change in a way that the same 15,000 poor, mentally ill or addicted people spread out over a larger area never would. And whenever people call for change, I always wonder what they really mean and what parts of the Downtown Eastside they’re really trying to change.

The message in so many reports over the last umpteen years has been that if the Downtown Eastside could somehow be dispersed, it would be better.

Some people seem to imply it wouldn’t cost as much if the 15,000 people were scattered around more. Others seem to be implying that if they were scattered around more, then they wouldn’t have the critical mass they do now — a critical mass that creates a different code of acceptable behaviour in those few blocks. And if that large group of people, acting in ways that people outside the area often find intimidating or troubling, were gone or at least less visible, then the street economy would recover.

It’s true that in other cities I’ve visited — and I got to see a lot when I had a year to research homelessness with the Atkinson Fellowship 10 years ago — there is no neighbourhood quite like this one that combines both extreme poverty, a high concentration of drug addiction, a noticeable street culture of its own, and a very prominent place in the city.

In Toronto, there are a lot of poor, mentally ill and addicted people but they seem to be spread out over a wider swathe, one that extends from Parkdale in the west to Jarvis in the east along Queen. So you never feel quite so much a minority walking through even the worst area of Toronto as you do here.

In American cities, there are frightening and concentrated dysfunctional places, but they’re not so public as our Downtown Eastside, which butts right up against the central city and which becomes a public spectacle for thousands of commuters who drive through every day.

Even Winnipeg, though it has some scary sections, is scary more the way Surrey Central can be scary — just rundown and creepy-feeling, as opposed to having the very public street culture that the Downtown Eastside does.

It’s a subject for a book, why the Downtown Eastside exists in Vancouver. My personal theory is that it exists BECAUSE the rest of the city is doing so well. Vancouver always did a better job of attracting people to live in the central city, with the result that the well-off ended up crowding out the extreme poor. UBC geographer David Ley has documented how cheap housing and rooming houses throughout the West End, Kitsilano and Fairview got torn down as the city gentrified, pushing low-income people into a tighter and tighter area.

And the only way the Downtown Eastside got preserved — the only way the poorest didn’t get pushed right out to Surrey and Burnaby and all the other places they’re now starting to migrate — was because it was so concentrated, so problematic, that even the most diligent gentrifiers were hesitant to move in. In a strange, Darwinian kind of way, the people there managed to preserve their housing and a space to exist by being so completely outside the norms.

But what would be fascinating for some enterprising researcher to take a close look at is: Are there any unexpected upsides to having such a concentration in one area? Are there any economies of scale that are created by having so many people with so many problems within a few blocks? I’d be interested to know if the cost of the social services for all the service-heavy people who live there is higher or lower if they were more dispersed.

And what about the social side? Does the dense level of services and sense of community provide a benefit in any way, one that would be missing if people were dispersed?

Another question I’d be interested in finding out more about: How much of the public disorder is created by outside buyers and sellers using the Downtown Eastside as a drive-by drug market? That’s one of the side effects of critical mass that almost never gets covered. I have to say I’ve never really looked at it myself, in spite of writing about the DTES forever.

That same enterprising researcher could take also look at why the Downtown Eastside bothers people so much. Is it the visible drug-selling and drug-taking? Or is it mainly that it’s a lot of poor people dressed in scruffy clothes and acting kind of weird and selling stuff on the sidewalk? If people were just poor, but weren’t staggering around with crack pipes and needles in their hands, would we find it any more acceptable?

I know I’m opening myself up for a lot of people to say I’m a liberal idiot or blind to the real tragedies in that community. I hope I’m actually neither, although, as with all issues, I’m willing to be convinced that I’m wrong. Though I’d ask those people — why are we so blind to the equally real tragedies taking place in neighbourhoods outside the Downtown Eastside, where many of these problems also exist?

On a final note, I was walking through the Downtown Eastside recently at 2 a.m. doing research. And, once again, I was struck, as I have been so often in the past, by how much like a neighbourhood it feels. Yes, there are terrible things. A young native girl who looked like she was still in her teens was injecting on the steps of First United while a talked with a couple of other people. A nasty looking guy — her pimp or dealer — kept hanging around checking on how she was doing.

But further down the street, in front of the Owl Drugs, a young native guy, Patrick, was sitting on the street, talking with another guy and an older woman in a wheelchair. Patrick had wood shavings piled all around him as he worked on carving the head of a walking stick. He showed off the others he had, the head of one of them as intricate and fine as lacework, a mini-totem pole with eyelash-size knife marks that created faces and wings and a fretwork of Kwakuitl design.

As I left to continue walking towards the downtown, Patrick called out “Have a good night.” I heard that a lot during my night-time stroll, except for those said instead, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

That sparked concern from various groups, as you can read in my Globe story here.

His question was essentially: What next?

What I didn’t get into in the story is exactly that question, though I did talk to a few knowledgeable people around town on that.

No one disputes that the centre is taking on some of the province’s most troubled citizens, that it’s helping them get to a calm place they haven’t been for a long time, and that it’s providing some respite for the agencies who’ve been caring for those people with far fewer resources.

But the centre is so expensive that it’s hard to imagine expanding it by much. It’s still not clear where the current residents will go once their nine months or year is up. And it can’t possible cope with all the people with a similar level of problems. The staff there estimate there are something like 12,000-15,000 people in the province with concurrent disorders, and the really severe cases number around 3,000-6,000.

St. Paul’s psychiatrist Bill McEwan, who has been working in the Downtown Eastside for a few years treating a lot of people like the ones now at Burnaby, thinks the facility is an amazing resource. But he is concerned about how 100 beds, where people stay an average of nine months to a year, is going to make a dent in the rather large problem

“For the one person who gets in at the right time, it’s wonderful,” McEwan told me. “But you need an action plan for what to do with all the others who are extremely ill but can’t get in. We have nothing for that.”

He is also worried that local mental-health/addictions agencies will simply use the Burnaby centre as their relief valve for all problems. Instead of providing some kind of immediate and intensive care for dual-diagnosed residents out in the community, they’ll put them on the wait list for Burnaby and that will be the solution. Except that it won’t be because they won’t get in for a long time.

And Patrick Smith, the vice-president of research for mental health at the Provincial Health Services Authority and the head of addictive psychiatry at UBC, said something similar.

“There’s no way this in isolation can do everything. This is a significant step forward, but for a sustainable approach, you need investments along the continuum.”

It didn’t sound to me like anyone envisaged the province expanding the Burnaby model in any huge way. It’s just so expensive. It’s seen by all as a place to give the current housing/mental-health agencies some respite in dealing with these very challenged people, both by temporarily removing them for some intensive care and then, presumably, returning them to the community in a much more stabilized, less chaotic state. Like I said in the story, it’s seen as the G.F. Strong Centre — the emergency, high-intensity place.

But that means for the rest, who aren’t going to make it into that centre anytime soon (and the waiting list is already 300-400, I think I heard), that means there needs to be housing and then at least some of the same kinds of supports available to the 100 people out in Burnaby.

Most of the mental-health and housing agencies now dealing with dual-diagnosed people in their housing, get funded to provided anywhere from two to at most five staffers per shift for a similar number of their residents. That works out to about, at most, 20 or 25 staff overall, when you factor in three shifts a day plus weekends. That’s less than one-fifth of the staffing out in Burnaby.

So now everyone’s waiting to see what the provincial budget might provide when it comes to those kinds of supports for the social housing it’s been developing (the 12 new buildings and the hotels that have been bought). No one expects the same level of staffing, but there clearly needs to be more than two or three staffers on per shift in a building of 100 or 120 very troubled, recently homeless, mentally ill, HIV or Hep C or disabled people, many of whom have some pretty severe problems interacting calmly with others.

It’s been open since June and taking on some of the most troubled in the Downtown Eastside, people who have a lot of problems and weren’t using the existing services down there for whatever reason. You can read my story about the dream facility they’ve created here.

To see what the Pennsylvania and its sign used to look like in their heyday, there’s a picture on this blog devoted to Carrall Street. I’m trying to get a picture of the new sign, which I’ll post when I receive. (And someone has kindly sent me a link here.)

Anyway, the sign looks gorgeous, as does the building, which is slowly being renovated for use as social housing. The hotel is where the Portland Hotel Society and psychiatric nurse Liz Evans started the first housing project aimed at people with mental illnesses, back in 1993.

The Portland’s Tom Laviolette says the sign, done by Knight Signs, cost $50,000, with $45,000 of the money coming from the city’s Great Beginnings, Great Streets project and $5,000 from the Vancouver Heritage Foundation.

As Vancouver history fans know, those few blocks of Hastings used to be lit up with neon. There are still some remnants left, notably the Balmoral Hotel and the Ovaltine Cafe signs.