Ask yourself if you have ever thought this:

You drive down Hastings Street through the Downtown Eastside. You see the roiling parade of stumblebums and addicts on the sidewalks, the rows of ruined buildings.

You feel disgust. Or perhaps pity. Or anger and frustration that the efforts of police, government and a multitude of social welfare agencies encamped there have, for decades, had no effect on the obvious problems you see, that this festering sore in the heart of Vancouver continues to be a sinkhole to hundreds of millions of your tax dollars.

I have felt all that myself.

But what if those problems were a matter of perspective? What if you were not looking in at the Downtown Eastside but looking out from it? What if you lived or worked there, just as you do in your neighbourhood?

Your sense of blame might be different. You might see those problems as something forced upon you — by government, by do-gooding academics and poverty activists, and most especially by the residents of every other neighbourhood in Metro Vancouver who, despite their insistence that Something Should Be Done About The Downtown Eastside, really want nothing to be done about the Downtown Eastside because they have tacitly agreed to allow the continued ghettoization of the city’s mental health and addiction problems for fear those problems might spread to their own neighbourhoods.



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From the perspective of being on the inside looking out, you might see government, academia and the rest of Metro Vancouver’s residents as hypocrites or, worse, co-conspirators.

“I cannot emphasize enough,” said Scott Clark, who has lived and worked in the Downtown Eastside for the past 20 years, “it’s the NIMBYism of the other 23 communities in the city that is the Downtown Eastside’s greatest problem. And what the city needs to do is work to put significantly more services in different communities.”

Clark is the executive director of ALIVE, the Aboriginal Live in Vancouver Enhancement Society. It’s a small First Nations group working on a shoestring budget out of the Ray-Cam neighbourhood centre. Clark is a smart and articulate guy, and he has a jaundiced view of the forces that have shaped the neighbourhood. He’s fed up with government policies that load more and more social services and social housing in the Downtown Eastside, and he dismisses of claims that things are getting better in the area.

“The city identified 178 non-profits in the Downtown Eastside, and another 40 in the neighbouring Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood, and what we find is that this creates a pipeline for vulnerable populations, that it’s the last place that a person can afford or access services. And so it’s become a magnet over the years. And these service providers, and the government managers that keep funding these agencies, they refuse to look at the evidence that says putting these many vulnerable people in one building, in one community, is simply not healthy for anyone.

“It is just madness down there. The planners don’t connect the dots, the policy analysts don’t connect the dots, it’s really just (every social welfare agency) on their own trying to increase the capacity ‘to serve’ people.”

Clark wants to see social housing and social services decentralized throughout the city of Vancouver. Studies show scattered social housing sites are the healthiest alternative for at-risk populations. He also wants to see the other neighbourhood centres offer their services to low-income people for free, as Ray-Cam does.

He wants the Downtown Eastside to become a true neighbourhood, not a stand-in asylum.

Nonetheless, the city’s recently published local area plan calls for another 6,000 social housing units to be built over the next 30 years. That social housing, and the community of agencies that will continue to exist there, will perpetuate the social welfare ghetto well into the future.

Reinforcing that is the rising sentiment of NIMBYism that fights any spread of social welfare work outside of the Downtown Eastside. Over the vociferous opposition of neighbours, it took almost a decade for the city to establish a social housing complex for recovering addicts at Dunbar and 16th — the only one on the entire west side. The city faced the same complaints for a treatment centre on Fraser Street. Eleven thousand Richmondites signed a petition to block the establishment of a treatment centre there. The availability of such services in the outer suburbs is thin to nonexistent. Burnaby, for example, does not have a permanent street shelter. NIMBYism does not confine itself to any particular kind of neighbourhood. It’s everywhere.

Reopen Riverview?

Even Clark said he would like to see something along those lines.

But the provincial government up until now has said no to it. The health care establishment is against it.

An alternative is decentralization. This would mean the government appealing to all our better natures, of asking all of us to take our share of the social welfare load so that the Downtown Eastside doesn’t bear it all.

I don’t see that happening.

Until it does, we might stop with the expressions of moral outrage, and admit to our culpability in the mess that is the Downtown Eastside, and to our complicity in perpetuating it.

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com