'The Downtown Eastside needs to be destroyed' long

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'The Downtown Eastside needs to be destroyed'
Vancouver council has put plans on hold for allowing higher buildings in the Downtown Eastside, in response to pressure from groups concerned about the fate of slum dwellers.

“The community in the Downtown Eastside is right to say that there has not been enough study on the social impacts on the low-income population,” said Mayor Gregor Robertson.

This pause for more evaluation and consultation is a good thing, as long as it doesn’t lead the city to back down from increasing Downtown Eastside building heights to as high as 15 stories.

The proposed building-height allowance would bring in condo towers and lead to gentrification and higher rents, pushing out low-income people. It’s no surprise that Downtown Eastsiders object to the plans. Their community is, in many cases, all they have. It’s a close-knit neighbourhood where troubled people help each other out, and it’s probably the friendliest postal code in the Lower Mainland.

It’s also a community rife with violence, where the disadvantaged, traumatized, and mentally ill are targeted by drug dealers and transformed into addicts with no hope for a better life. Its life-sucking appetite for human dignity vastly outweighs its benefits as a supportive environment for the poverty-stricken.

The Downtown Eastside needs to be destroyed. The more residents who are pushed out, the better. It is unconscionable that such a hellhole should exist in a province as wealthy as B.C., in a country as advanced as Canada.

Unfortunately, municipal and provincial planners have a tendency to put most new housing for Downtown Eastsiders exactly where it doesn’t belong: in the Downtown Eastside. And the city is now considering a development deal with Concord Pacific that would allow the company to build four new condo towers near BC Place in exchange for giving to the city two Downtown Eastside properties to be used for social housing.

Two years ago, the province embarked on a project to create 600 units of “supportive” housing for low-income people with issues such as addiction, disability and mental illness. More than half these units were slated for the Downtown Eastside.

Why are we putting vulnerable people in the middle of a violent, open-air drug market?

In re-evaluating the allowable height increase, the primary question should not be, “What can we do to ensure it doesn’t force poor people out of the Downtown Eastside?” Council should go ahead and raise the heights, but resist the temptation to require condo developers to devote a certain number of units in each development to low-income housing. Instead, developers must be required to provide land elsewhere in Vancouver upon which the city can create social housing.

Discussions with Downtown Eastside residents — which the mayor’s office said will be done through a committee that will “engage” with locals and report to council by the end of the year — should elicit from them what those who leave the community will require in the way of support to integrate them into new neighbourhoods.

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The Pennsylvania Hotel at the corner of Carrall and Hastings Streets is one of the many supported housing sites operating in the Downtown Eastside. The building is owned and operated by PHS Community Services Society aka Portland Hotel Society, which has assets of $62-million, mostly in the DTES.