It’s time to deal with the Downtown Eastside

With the 2010 Olympics now less than a year away, there is a growing amount of national interest in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side (DTES).
The area has long been Vancouver’s black eye – a district, home to appalling levels of homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness. Few people are there by choice, and almost everyone avoids it if they can. Only a few square blocks, the DTES borders on some of the most expensive areas of Vancouver. Stand at the intersection of Main and Hastings, and you’re right in the heart of the worst slum in Canada, walk two minutes West and suddenly you’ll find yourself in one of the country’s most expensive neighbourhoods.
The DTES is a curious place. Terrible slum that it is, one can feel relatively safe walking through it. The people there seem so destroyed by whatever substances they’re on that they pose little threat to anybody. Many people talk to themselves or behave erratically, but most just sit around without much else better to do, and certainly with nowhere else to go.
There have been growing calls, especially as the Olympics draw near, to clean up the neighbourhood. There is a consensus that something, anything, needs to be done, but there are no easy solutions. It is not simply a matter of law enforcement. The central Vancouver police station is located in the DTES itself, and the area is among Vancouver’s most heavily patrolled. Nor is the problem simply money – around $1.4 billion has been invested in the area since 2000, the effects of which have been negligible.
The problem is that nobody wants to deal with the kind of people who inhabit the DTES. People do not like seeing drug dealers, prostitutes or the mentally ill on their street corners; as a result they have been increasingly forced out of all Vancouver neighbourhoods and put into one small ghetto. If a halfway home needs to be constructed for the mentally ill, it’s far easier to build it where its out of sight. If you can’t stop all of the drug trade, you can at least try to contain it all into one area. Try to sell heroin openly in a pleasant neighbourhood, and you’ll be handcuffed within 15 minutes. Do it in the Downtown East Side, while cops drive by, and you’ll probably be fine.
The DTES has become what it is because subconsciously we want it that way, the mentality is better there than here. It is far easier to simply force our wretched and sick into one area, and then steer clear of it than to try and fix the underlying causes. The results of this policy are exactly what you’d expect.
This might make Vancouverites seem callous, though the problem is certainly not unique to one city. But its understandable. Its easy to see why a person working 40 hours a week might not want to have a homeless person sleeping on the street in front of their $800,000 house, or why they’d oppose a soup kitchen or a home for the mentally ill in their neighbourhood.
If this mentality isn’t changed though, there isn’t much reason to be hopeful that anything will be accomplished beyond a brief cleanup before the Olympics. The problems that cause the DTES are deeper than money and cops. If these are the only remedies on the table there’s no reason to think that, after the Olympics, things won’t go back to being just the way they were.