MB …we are on the same page. There are two classic issues in planning:

(1) Getting all the ducks together; and

(2) Getting them all in a row, identifying which comes first and which comes next, etc.

However, in the DTES some of the “ducks” are being ruled out a priori.

When I am at my best behaviour, I call that “old paradigm planning”.

Four Pillars evolved into Two and a Half Pillars primarily because of a lack of jurisdictional overlap. Instead, we have jurisdictional vacuum.

I don’t blame the city, because they try as they will to fill the vacuum when the feds pigheadedly try to overturn every attempt treat addiction as a healthcare issue, as Insite does, and as NAOMI did. The matter is now before the supreme court of Canada.

Housing the homeless alone without extensive, long-term on-site treatment for addiction and mental illness will be an incomplete (and I believe largely unsuccessful) project. The goal is to recognize that these are potentially productive members of society who have fallen through the gaping holes left by previous politicians under all party monikers, including the NDP.

In my opinion, this should be the Number One action. Number Two could be a grassroots neighbourhood revitalization, much as Lewis describes. But #2 will be unsuccessful if #1 isn’t concurrently realized and people continue to shoot up with rainbow-hued puddle water leaking from alley dumpsters, or die in shopping cart bonfires, or red tents are still necessary to get a message across. In a perfect world a program taking both courses of action on behalf of three levels of government will be designed.

Dream on, eh?

The current crop of feds prefer to bail out GM, and Gordo prefers to build long term Olympic and Gateway Project debt. Both are ideologically biased to cut back healthcare and housing to pay down debt. Just wait and see.

To me practising tough guy neocon economics (i.e. cut backs to social services while increasing funds to the military or megaprojects) is a sign of weakness and leads to a less resilient society. There are huge challenges just ahead with housing and healthcare being only a part of them.

Leadership requires the boldness to reorient an existing budget framework toward strengthening society as a whole, not just rewarding a few lobbying components, and possible actions like raising the GST back to 7% or higher as a debt reduction strategy AND to finance a national housing and healthcare program in our poorest neighbourghoods needs to be considered. This may actually lower the costs to our healthcare system in the long run.

Those who complain about taxes being raised should first consider that we’re talking about the equivalent of a handful of lattes a month for the average adult living in our extraordinarily wealthy society.

(Would the anti-tax crowd please focus once in your lives on our public road system, one of the most draining elements on public tax draws in existence? Reorienting even 3% or 4% of the annual car subsidy would do wonders for housing, healthcare, transit AND lowering public debt.)

The Roundtable Report met with a chorus of “this is already city policy”. However, when you read the DTES Housing Plan it is clear that ‘city policy’ is to erect protectionist walls around the neighbourhoods, and not allow any growth in (economic stimulus). When the floodgates are opened, we get Woodwards and 5.0 FSR.

Every year as the slide becomes ever steeper it becomes more and more difficult to understand exactly what is being ‘protected’.

http://thevancouvermanifesto.blogspot.com/2010/02/olympic-log-day-5-pivots-tent-city-good.html

“The last two years has brought a sea change in the province”

I am not at all sure that we have seen the “tide that will lift all boats” manifest itself quite yet. The most troubling signs from the Ministry—part of a provincial government lead by a former Mayor of the City of Vancouver—are actions coming from Broadway and Fraser, in Mount Pleasant, a neighbourhood far removed from the so-called Downtown Eastside (DTES).

In Mount Pleasant, social housing is being proposed in a tower.

Add to that our Council’s recent Heritage Area Heights Review—proposing building towers as panacea for economic renewal, while turning a back to historically significant urban fabric—and this looks very much like “Business as Usual”.

What is clearly needed is what has not been seen in the 40 years that I have been here: a massive investment by the City and its senior government partners aimed at turning the fate of these blighted neighbourhoods around.

Not “gentrification” but just plain, common sense.

There is a “pillar” missing in the 4-Pillar Harm Reduction Strategy. It is bringing a sense of economic functioning to the five neighbourhoods that together comprise the Cradle of our City.

No functioning economy, no recovery, no reality check.