Three downtown streets identified as hot spots
Photo by Mordechai Dangerfield on flickr
The three streets in the city’s downtown business improvement area were identified recently as crime hot spots in city assessments to determine the need for expansion of the Downtown Ambassadors Program.
Vancouver city hall is recommending that council adopt a one-year $237,000 contract with the Downtown Business Improvement Association to extend the program.
The three streets are Granville, Georgia and Robson. They are “hot spots” because of people identified as “druggies, panhandlers and rough sleepers”. In fact the same people fit all three “categories”. And the Ambassadors do nothing more than move them along to another street somewhere else. They do nothing to solve the problem.
This is the same approach that failed with street prostitution.
And it is promoted by the same mindset that sees the needle exchange and the safe injection site as causes of more “problems”. And is not going to work this time any more than it has worked in the past.
Of course the customers of downtown businesses do not like seeing reminders of how useless our social policies are. The failures are societal, not just of the individuals who find they can only cope with adversity though self medication.
The problem has been growing steadily. The Tyee recently showed how inadequate even an apparently simple count of those affected was recently. And the response has been - from all levels of government - totally inadequate. But shows no sign of change. $237,000 might provide a few beds for a few nights. Or some dry socks. But the City and the BIA would rather chivvy people than help them.
City needs to push the envelope to stay on top
Miro Cernetig talks to Larry Beasely
The ostensible reason for the article is that we have moved up another of those best city lists.
These rankings take our attention off the question that’s really at hand: With a million more people expected to be here by 2030, how are we going to stay on the cutting edge of urban planning that’s put us in the livability big leagues?
Larry of course is building not one but two cities in the dessert of Abu Dhabi and
“I’m learning we’re not as far ahead on some of this stuff as I thought we were,” he says.
Which is refreshing. The problem with these rankings is they have gone to our head - or at least to the collective heads of the planners. And upstart furriners like me who keep saying “The Emperor has no clothes” are simply not listened to. But Larry, with his OC and new perspective will be.
The trouble I have is that they think it is about buildings and especially cultural institutions. Which seems to me to reflect the priorities of Marie Antoinnette.
There are some very basic things we need to be doing - and architects are not going to be the most important component of that, neither are the problems or their solutions the exclusive domain of the City of Vancouver. No doubt working for a Crown Prince with few budget constraints is a heck of a lot easier than herding cats, but in a metropolitan area being run (and ruined) by the province, that is what has to be done.
For starters, there is the problem of housing, and the related issues of mental health and welfare. These are basic social problems - and in my mind the quality of society is measured not by its glitzy buildings or cultural institutions, but by the way it treats its most vulnerable citizens. And right now the only thing that seems to be grabbing our attention is how to conceal the extent of our social policy collapse during the weeks of and around the 2010 Olympics. Lack of affordability of homes to buy is actually the least of it. We are supposed to have free at the point of service for public health, yet people with multiple diagnoses are simply turned away from treatment. We shy away from creating more and better public spaces for fear that the homeless will move in. We cannot buy a decent bus shelter or bench in case somebody finds it a better place to sleep than a doorway. And instead of building more public housing, we simply buy up a few more roach infested SROs, and do a half hearted job of trying to clean them up, displacing more people in the process. And actually destroying some of the best public housing we have, and rebuilding it to provide more marketable homes!
It is not the buildings that are the problem. They simply reflect what we are willing to pay for. And the answer here at present seem to be not much since the land costs so much. But it is the spaces in between the buildings that matter - and in the words of that tired old cliché we have private affluence and public squalor. We devote more space to car parking than almost any other activity. Our streets may be broad, but the sidewalks are mean. And public places where people gather are few and inadequate. And we concentrate on Vancouver - and especially downtown - as if that were the only place worth considering.
And I haven’t even started on our infrastructure. “World class” cities surely need good waste disposal (liquid and solid) as well as reasonable movement alternatives for goods as well as people.
Oddly enough there is no need to “push the envelope” with any of this, the solutions have been around for decades. We have just turned our back on them in our obsession with finance and profitability, as if that is the only way to measure worth. How can we boast of our GDP per capita - when so many of those heads have no pillow?
Sarkozy’s rescue plan for suburbs
There is absolutely no doubt that something must be done. The scene of riots on more than occasion, and of continuing deep alienation of a significant number of people. What is depressing is that Sarkozy has absolutely no idea of what is needed, and simply goes to the standard right wing play book. A crack down on drug dealing, bussing school kids, some new houses and the right to buy. I am surprised he left out the tax cut. When, anywhere, have these policies done any good?
What these young people need are jobs. The problem, surely, is 40% youth unemployment. Where is the strategy to deal with that? And yes there are things that work. There is an Australian company that contracts to governments and is paid by results that gets people out of long term unemployment and into good, permanent jobs. The company only gets paid for results and is one of the best examples I know of that shows contracting out can work. They have been working in France long before Sarkozy got into power. The company was created by Therese Rein wife of Australian PM Kevin Rudd, and to avoid the appearance of conflict no longer works for the parent company but goes around the world setting up companies like workdirections. (And yes, she did visit Vancouver, and was told she was not needed here!) The only reason I know all this is my sister works for them.
A number of US cities have “welfare to work” programs. One of the things they tackle is that people who live in deprived areas and have no jobs also find it hard to travel - they cannot afford the car that most US cities require as a minimum of any kind of life at all. They will give people bus tickets so they can get to a job for the time it takes for the employer to actually pay them something. They will work with transit agencies to ensure that services run at the right times and to the right places.
Either of these approaches has impeccable right wing credentials. Neither has a lot of opportunity for grand gestures like pulling down an ugly tower block. So guess which one Sarkozy will chose.
Grow food on the Garden City Lands
This proposal appears in the paper version of the Richmond Review but not at the time of writing on their web site. The Richmond Food Security task Force has proposed that an urban farm with community gardens, a farmers’ market, organic farms, a food bank and perhaps a restaurant could go on the contested site between Garden City, No 4 Road, Alderbridge and Westminster Hwy. There will be a public Town Hall on Wednesday May 23 between 7 and 9 pm at Kwantlen’s Conference Room.
There is more about the proposal at the Richmond Food Bank’s web site or you can email the Food Security Task Force coordinator.
This seems to me to be a very good idea indeed. It helps address a number of issues that will only grow in importance as the cost of oil rises, and with it the cost of moving food to us. Moreover, Richmond is being developed very rapidly for dense residential property with very little open space or recreation area. This proposal could help that and also ensure that food banks and community gardens are actually accessible for those without cars.
Update June 7
The Richmond Review is now reporting on an open letter it has recieved from Chief Ernie Campbell, who is threatening legal action if his band’s demands are not met.
Housing and poverty
Two pieces in today’s Vancouver Sun are worth reading. First the lead story on the loss of affordable rental housing. Secondly, Paul Willcox’s opinion piece “Is it really okay for little kids to go hungry because of our choices?”
When I went to the London School of Economics [1976-1978] I had to make a choice of which courses to take, and chose transport over housing for my economics option. But the economics of the housing market, and the callous political treatment of poverty in recent years, have been a growing concern. It is now not possible to rent a decent two bedroom flat for under $1500 in Vancouver. This is roughly what we are currently paying for the mortgage on our three bedroom house in Richmond, but then we managed by the skin of our teeth to scrape back into the housing market six years ago. If we had left it any longer, we would have been stuck. (We lost all our equity in the great crash of the house market in Toronto in 1990).
The point about poverty is that it awaits all of us, if we are not very lucky or very careful. We like to distance ourselves from the poor (who are always with us) in the hopes that it won’t rub off on us. And as Canadians we like to think that there is a social safety net. But it is clear that the net has been reduced to well below the point where it is effective. And children in BC are malnourished because of it. And the downtown eastside beckons for those who slip and fall. Mental illness being one of the commonest causes of poverty. In a society that likes to pretend it has a public health system. Where you have to pay even for the ambulance that picks you up from the street.
Your job is not secure. Your family could be split asunder (family fission now being the mode) in an instant. You probably have limited savings. You could be the victim of a random event. Ty Pennington is not going to come and rescue you, any more than the Lottery Corporation is.
The time for activism is now.
