[officedweller]

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except you have stories like this Courier article from Sept 26, 2019 due to the DTES:

Downtown Eastside venue owners, promoters report losses amid increased crime and violence
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Tarmohamed bought the Rickshaw Theatre in 2011, knowing full well its location just steps east of Main and Hastings could be bad for business.

He had little idea at the time that the area would deteriorate to the point it now has.

“It was somewhat tolerable before, but that’s because we’ve normalized it so much,” Tarmohamed said. “What’s tolerable to us, should not be tolerable. It was bad eight years ago, and even then I thought it wasn’t normal. Now it’s 10-fold worse.”

Tarmohamed estimates his 2018 losses were between $50,000 and $75,000, solely because bands don’t want to be in the area. Tarmohamed sees tours that landed at the Rickshaw in years past go elsewhere, typically to the Venue on Granville Street. In some cases, those tours won’t come to Vancouver at all.

Tarmohamed follows up with booking agents and promoters, asking why those shows aren’t coming. The reasons are almost always the same.

“The bands that do come here, they’re like a deer caught in the headlights. These are guys from Chicago, Baltimore, Detroit and New York who are saying, ‘Whoa, this is crazy,’” Tarmohamed said.

It doesn’t help his businesses that musicians the world over post videos and photos on social media of needles, feces and scores of people intoxicated in the immediate vicinity of his venue.

Last summer, a band loaded in the back alley of the Rickshaw as a drug user pretended to be playing darts — except the darts were needles and the dartboard was a telephone poll near the band’s tour van.

Hank Von Hell, former frontman of Norwegian rock band Turbonegro, played the Rickshaw in late August and was initially scheduled to perform somewhere between 60 to 80 minutes. Von Hell cut his set to 40 minutes so he could “get the hell out of the neighbourhood, not the venue,” according to Tarmohamed.
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https://www.vancourier.com/news/downtown...-increased-crime-and-violence-1.23958582