Vancouver could lead the world by transforming the Downtown Eastside into a community where everyone has a home, drug treatment is available on demand and drugs are decriminalized, according to a vision created by the Carnegie Community Action Project.
Carnagie Centre, Main & Hastings, Vancouver, BC
"You need to be able to access [the drugs] you need right away, safely from nurses or doctors, not from the Hells Angels," report co-author Wendy Pedersen said at the vision's launch Tuesday. "The black market is punishing us and it needs to end. We need to stop sending those billions of dollars out of this community."
The vision report, Assets to Action, was developed over two years with consultation from 1,200 Downtown Eastside residents and several community groups, who endorsed the plan in front of a crowd of about 100 people gathered at the Carnegie Community Centre on the corner of Hastings and Main.
The No. 1 concern of most residents was housing.
Report co-author Jean Swanson said 5,000 people in the Downtown Eastside live in horrific conditions in 10-by-10 single room occupancy hotels with shared bathrooms and cockroach infestations.
"The city says SROs should be replaced, but at the present rate, that will take 40 years," Swanson said. The vision calls for Vancouver city council to buy five lots a year in the Downtown Eastside for social housing over the next 10 years.
The report says people living in the area are proud of their community and want to drive the transformation of their neighbourhood.
"Low income residents are saying they want to have more control over their own community," said Phoenix Winter, a board member at the Carnegie Community Centre. "We don't want others coming here and telling us what's wrong with us and what we need. We have good ideas about solving problems ourselves."
Pedersen called for the city to build permanent social housing, not more temporary shelters. The project's organizers will only accept development if all residents have housing first, Pedersen said.
"That would be the icing on the cake. Right now we have no cake," Pedersen said.
When asked how the illegal drug market could be replaced with a regulated legal market, Swanson said, "Maybe we can invent a way to do it on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside."
Ninety-five per cent of the people surveyed for the vision want to stay living in the Downtown Eastside, Swanson said.
A sense of community and belonging cited by many of the people who spoke at the launch appears to back that up.
"The feeling of acceptance was the first thing that came up when we asked residents, and they said it was crucial to their recovery from addiction," Gena Thompson, chair of the Carnegie Community Centre, told the crowd. "When I first moved here, I felt safer than I had in Kitsilano because it felt like everyone here was looking out for me."
Organizers called for a slowed pace of gentrification, until existing residents and homeless people have social housing.
"Our character and our flavour — all of our beautiful little stores — are starting to get wiped out," Pedersen said adding that residents are being pushed out of the area.
City communications coordinator Theresa Beer said the report would be discussed at forthcoming meetings between the city and the Carnegie Community Action Project.
tsherlock@vancouversun.com
