Downtown Eastside - DTES Issues

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by Klazu

How many thousand social housing units have been built in the past few years and it's still not enough, even as some 1,750 die from overdose every year. Vancouver is trying to house and take care of every junkie in Canada. How about we don't do that.

San Francisco has been doing the same for years and has now tens of thousands homeless junkies living in the city. It's like induced demand and highways, you just can't build your way out of this.

1,550 new non-market housing units have been completed Downtown and in the DTES in 10 years. Those aren't all net gain - some are redevelopments of older SRO and non-market buildings. Hundreds of rooms that were previously welfare rate have, in the meantime, been gentrified (like the micro lofts in the Burns Block that now rent at over $1,000 a month).

Many of the tenants of the non-market housing aren't 'junkies'. One reason there's a concentration of homeless in Vancouver is that there is some new non-market housing, and the City is trying to build more. How many non-market units have Burnaby completed in the past ten years?

The people who are dying of overdoses aren't, mostly, in non-market housing or in the DTES. Under a quarter of the deaths last year were in Vancouver. They're dying in their own homes, using recreational drugs that aren't what they thought they'd bought. Suburban and smaller cities have a proportionally higher death rate. Abbotsford (65), Kelowna (61), Kamloops (60) and Prince George (58) saw significant increases in deaths from 2019 to 2020. It's a BC-wide problem, not just a problem in the DTES.

San Francisco is, as you say, much, much worse. There are over 8,000 homeless counted just in the city, probably really double that number in reality, and many more in the wider region. LA is much worse - tens of thounsands in LA County. One reason is that they have hardly built any non-market housing in the past dedcade - just like we haven't built enough here.

It's unlikely we can build a wall to stop people coming here, hoping to find work, or better housing, or escaping domestic abuse at home. Some of them will fail. Some will have underlying mental illness - or will develop it. We either try to house them, or they're homeless, and on our streets or in our parks. We can't 'send them back', or 'send them away'. We can theoretically lock them up, if they've broken laws, but it actually costs a lot more to do that than to provide reasonably priced housing and support services.

There are way more programs and initiatives that we could be looking at and funded to make things better. The current status quo isn't acceptable. Having a home for everyone who needs it would go some way to starting to solve the problems Downtown, in the DTES - and in all the other municipalities. Not housing people guarantees the problems won't go away. We don't want to be San Francisco.

[Skook]

I think one of the reasons we have been so unsuccessful is that we keep framing the problem wrong - we can't solve the homelessness problem because it's not actually a homelessness problem, it is a drug and mental illness problem, and until we figure out what to do about that, there will be an endless supply of new addicts ready to overwhelm whatever housing we do build.

Unfortunately, the approach we are currently taking - permitting open drug use, tolerance of drug related crime and civil disorder, handing out free drugs, allowing the take over of public parks, activists working to preserve the dtes in it's current form, efforts to reduce the stigma of drug use, legalizing all drugs, and so on - will almost certainly result in greater drug use, not less, and thereby render the homelessness problem insoluble.

[SeymourDrake]

I think we all have to ask ourselves what have we done to make our community better.

My wife and i do not. We donate our time and money one day at a time which is the way homeless people live. We leave the BS to the BSers and try and put a smile on someones face as best we can.

I really feel some of you are out of touch with what is actually going on in our city. You base your opinions on what the coorporate media says.

Get out and look for yourselves. Talk to people. They are all real people with a variety of issues.

Getting them housing is day 1 for them if they are willing to put the work into being a member of society again. But some may not be mentally capable to handle that level of resposibility.

This is an issue in every city in north america and around the glove i suspect. There is no last day for these issues it's a journey that never ends.

[logicbomb]

Originally Posted by SeymourDrake

I think we all have to ask ourselves what have we done to make our community better.

My wife and i do not. We donate our time and money one day at a time which is the way homeless people live. We leave the BS to the BSers and try and put a smile on someones face as best we can.

I really feel some of you are out of touch with what is actually going on in our city. You base your opinions on what the coorporate media says.

Get out and look for yourselves. Talk to people. They are all real people with a variety of issues.

Getting them housing is day 1 for them if they are willing to put the work into being a member of society again. But some may not be mentally capable to handle that level of resposibility.

This is an issue in every city in north america and around the glove i suspect. There is no last day for these issues it's a journey that never ends.

Nope. These people do not want housing. They want drugs. It was quite telling to do work in a SRO and see they had to mount all appliances and light fixtures in. These junkies destroy everything they can get their hands on and will even cut out drywall to steal copper or precious metals for scrap dealers.

Getting them into housing does them no good. Many of them should be in prisions and facilities to detox.

[Alex Mackinnon]

Originally Posted by SeymourDrake

Getting them housing is day 1 for them if they are willing to put the work into being a member of society again. But some may not be mentally capable to handle that level of resposibility.

I don't think housing for the difficult-to-house category is the win you make it out to be unless it's programmed to help bring these folks back to some semblance of working within societal norms. The people who are marginally homeless, and just need a hand to get going again, yes. Most of the entrenched ones, probably not.

The park crowd is essentially asking for unprogrammed space, with free drugs, food, alcohol, smokes and money provided. Basically an all-inclusive storage space for the substance dependent without a path back to societal norms. I'm not sure where you'd really go from there.

The housing first strategy the gov't is running is all about getting the health costs of homelessness down. The health care costs for someone living outside are much higher than someone who is housed, to the point where housing them is cheaper. That economy falls apart if they aren't capable of living inside without damaging the space. It doesn't take much to do six-figures worth of damage to a building. One flood, a small fire, etc.

The open-air asylum shouldn't have been allowed to happen in the DTES. Institutionalized asylum (at least temporarily) needs to be considered for many cases.

[djmk]

I'm not a lawyer or medical professional, however, I think there should be broader powers to detain someone under the Mental Health Act (and of course of facilities to do so).

I can see why huge institutions like Riverview were tossed out, however, I think our society can comprise on a new model that can deal with addictions and mental health.

There is a fine balance between respecting the rights of the mentally ill and incarcerating them.

[MIPS]

Institutionalizing is a voluntary commitment. Making it involuntary violates the charter. If someone for example repeatedly pushes pedestrians into traffic at the whispers of angels they have to ask to be committed, otherwise it's a per-case challenge of the charter to say it doesn't apply to this person.

It gets messy, fast. Catch and Release was brought in to deal with cases like this and petty crime completely overwhelming the lower courts. My run through the system saw court dates spaced weeks apart even though they lasted less than ten minutes each.

[djmk]

Originally Posted by MIPS

Institutionalizing is a voluntary commitment. Making it involuntary violates the charter. If someone for example repeatedly pushes pedestrians into traffic at the whispers of angels they have to ask to be committed, otherwise it's a per-case challenge of the charter to say it doesn't apply to this person.

that's not exactly true. for more information:

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/health...mental-health-review-board/mha_plain.pdf

[scryer]

Originally Posted by Changing City

The people who are dying of overdoses aren't, mostly, in non-market housing or in the DTES. Under a quarter of the deaths last year were in Vancouver. They're dying in their own homes, using recreational drugs that aren't what they thought they'd bought. Suburban and smaller cities have a proportionally higher death rate. Abbotsford (65), Kelowna (61), Kamloops (60) and Prince George (58) saw significant increases in deaths from 2019 to 2020. It's a BC-wide problem, not just a problem in the DTES.

Access to Naloxone and regular citizens trained to use it on someone else, has a huge influence on this statistic though. And I would argue that the concentration of anti-harm programs in Vancouver (specifically DTES) has prevented a lot of overdose deaths. Plus there's also the take-home Naloxone kit program available to all BC residents. Just because people are no longer dying in Vancouver from overdoses, it doesn't mean that the problem is going away or that solutions should shift from the DTES to other areas - which I realize you aren't suggesting.

The reduction in overdose deaths just means that one of the four pillars of the COV drug strategy is working. It doesn't deny that this issue has spread to other areas of the COV or that East Hastings is any less dangerous. IJS.

Originally Posted by Changing City

It's unlikely we can build a wall to stop people coming here, hoping to find work, or better housing, or escaping domestic abuse at home. Some of them will fail. Some will have underlying mental illness - or will develop it. We either try to house them, or they're homeless, and on our streets or in our parks. We can't 'send them back', or 'send them away'.

We also can't be the only city in Canada that has to sustain the entire country's homeless population. We do need a more national approach to the situation otherwise the people who work in this region will disproportionately pay for country's homeless. For the record I would be open to having our provincially funded programs become federally funded programs if we really want to go down this route.

Originally Posted by Changing City

We can theoretically lock them up, if they've broken laws...,

Full stop. We should always be appropriately punishing criminals if they have broken laws. No one is above any law. Why is this only a "theoretical" in your mind? Would you care to explain to this rape victim that her perpetrators will not be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because they are homeless? Why are we perpetuating a mentality that individuals who are homeless are above the law? The change begins with us.

Originally Posted by Changing City

but it actually costs a lot more to do that than to provide reasonably priced housing and support services.

I agree that prevention is the most ideal strategy in this case. But when laws are broken, real victims deserve justice. We need to balance out the harm-reduction pillar with the other 3 pillars from the COV drug strategy. And one of them is enforcement. We need to keep our communities safe and these homeless camps are anything but safe for the surrounding working people that support the harm reduction programs.

[rofina]

Originally Posted by Klazu

How many thousand social housing units have been built in the past few years and it's still not enough, even as some 1,750 die from overdose every year. Vancouver is trying to house and take care of every junkie in Canada. How about we don't do that.

San Francisco has been doing the same for years and has now tens of thousands homeless junkies living in the city. It's like induced demand and highways, you just can't build your way out of this.

This is what is so frustrating.

We have the ability to see how these policies turn out - see San Francisco.

Do the opposite, and get opposite results.

[Migrant_Coconut]

Originally Posted by scryer

We also can't be the only city in Canada that has to sustain the entire country's homeless population. We do need a more national approach to the situation otherwise the people who work in this region will disproportionately pay for country's homeless. For the record I would be open to having our provincially funded programs become federally funded programs if we really want to go down this route.

A little hard to make that work though, when some provinces' only homeless strategy is buying them a ticket to BC.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by Changing City View Post
We can theoretically lock them up, if they've broken laws...,

Originally Posted by scryer

Full stop. We should always be appropriately punishing criminals if they have broken laws. No one is above any law. Why is this only a "theoretical" in your mind? Would you care to explain to this rape victim that her perpetrators will not be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law because they are homeless? Why are we perpetuating a mentality that individuals who are homeless are above the law? The change begins with us.

Theoretically we could lock up more criminals, but that's not what the law requires. "The Criminal Code mandates that all sanctions other than imprisonment are to be considered for all offenders. Historically, persons sentenced to community supervision have been shown to have a reduced risk of recidivism, when compared to those sentenced to custody".[source] There are at least twice as many convicted criminals on probation or some other form of community sentence than there are locked up. You would need to have a prison system like the US to adopt a 'lock them all up' approach. You might think the US system is better. I don't share that view.

[spacebjorn]

Originally Posted by Changing City

Originally Posted by Changing City View Post
We can theoretically lock them up, if they've broken laws...,



Theoretically we could lock up more criminals, but that's not what the law requires. "The Criminal Code mandates that all sanctions other than imprisonment are to be considered for all offenders. Historically, persons sentenced to community supervision have been shown to have a reduced risk of recidivism, when compared to those sentenced to custody".[source] There are at least twice as many convicted criminals on probation or some other form of community sentence than there are locked up. You would need to have a prison system like the US to adopt a 'lock them all up' approach. You might think the US system is better. I don't share that view.

Thanks for citing a 2 decade-old study back when fentanyl wasn’t even in circulation as a street drug

No one is saying that the prison systems in the U.S. is better. In fact, the efficacy of the correctional program isn’t really at question at all.

Everyone is just appalled at how difficult it is to get the (criminally) homeless off the streets. There are literally no consequences for homeless people committing crimes while on the other hand I would be in cuffs immediately if I decided to shoot up in my community during broad daylight.

The total lack of consequences aka ‘permanent get of jail free card’ isn’t really a rehabilitation model that anyone here should support.

Imagine 12-24 months of DTES being clean street.

[Changing City]

I don't see anything positive coming out of debating the problems of the DTES on here. So I'll stop.

[scryer]

Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut

A little hard to make that work though, when some provinces' only homeless strategy is buying them a ticket to BC.

I am always entertained by that slip-up .

I'm just saying that if Canada's strategy to the homeless problem is to make Vancouver homeless-city then the anti-harm programs should be federally funded. I said what I said as a more hollow compromise to paint the picture that Vancouver upholds a disproportionate amount of homeless Canadians due to its progressive anti-harm strategies.

Unless I'm corrected, I am quite surprised that the province of BC didn't try to sue Saskatchewan for increased health costs for taking care of 1 homeless person for 1 year. That would send a message to other provinces quite quickly.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by scryer

I said what I said as a more hollow compromise to paint the picture that Vancouver upholds a disproportionate amount of homeless Canadians due to its progressive anti-harm strategies.

We don't. Numbers here.

[spacebjorn]

I do resonate with what you wrote in your last bit before the post was edited.

There is really no good job opportunities to offer to the people on the streets. And as most have already pointed out, the allure of getting a free, endless supply of drugs + zero consequences of being a crime offender overrides any incentives for them to get 'clean'. The affordability issue also applies here like you mentioned as many aren't even using drugs but I'd argue if we're specially talking about the DTES, the drug problem is the priority — an eye test should already confirm that if you've been in & out of the area.

I agree no ideal solutions are on the table, but I think one of the logical approach would be to decouple this horrible, concentrated network at the core and tactically nibble away the dependency of this so-called 'homeless tribe' it has on the homeless. Sure, they'll probably migrate into different//less dense/suburban areas and we'll see this issue resurface but I feel like with this way more population in metro van will have visibility to the problem and would feel personally more compelled to enact than sit around since it's not in their backyard like it is right now. Not to mention this should discourage more migration to the DTES at a national level.

Anyways, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this palliative style of support for the DTES needs to end. We should dispense with the sympathy and allocate efforts into more rigid planning.

[casper]

Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut

A little hard to make that work though, when some provinces' only homeless strategy is buying them a ticket to BC.

This article is talking about something that happened five years ago and covered two individuals. Extrapolating that being reflective of the problems in the DTES I think is a stretch.

One of the two people had connections to BC and repatriating someone on the street with family to me sounds like a viable solution if the family is willing to take them in.

The Lighthouse in Saskatchewan is a non-governmental not-for-profit that runs shelter that at the time was having a significant argument with the provincial government over their programs.

Even if you assume that is reflective of what other governments are doing, Greyhound bus service has disappeared from Western Canada has it not.

[casper]

Originally Posted by spacebjorn

I do resonate with what you wrote in your last bit before the post was edited.

There is really no good job opportunities to offer to the people on the streets. And as most have already pointed out, the allure of getting a free, endless supply of drugs + zero consequences of being a crime offender overrides any incentives for them to get 'clean'. The affordability issue also applies here like you mentioned as many aren't even using drugs but I'd argue if we're specially talking about the DTES, the drug problem is the priority — an eye test should already confirm that if you've been in & out of the area.

I agree no ideal solutions are on the table, but I think one of the logical approach would be to decouple this horrible, concentrated network at the core and tactically nibble away the dependency of this so-called 'homeless tribe' it has on the homeless. Sure, they'll probably migrate into different//less dense/suburban areas and we'll see this issue resurface but I feel like with this way more population in metro van will have visibility to the problem and would feel personally more compelled to enact than sit around since it's not in their backyard like it is right now. Not to mention this should discourage more migration to the DTES at a national level.

Anyways, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this palliative style of support for the DTES needs to end. We should dispense with the sympathy and allocate efforts into more rigid planning.

There are no good job opportunities in the private sector. These government funded non-government organizations should work on creating those opportunities as part of their program delivery. Have one of the NGO open a coffee shop or a co-op grocery store. Create opportunities with the goal of graduating people into the regular economy.

I agree the palliative support for tent cities and a culture without accountability needs to come to an end.

[Migrant_Coconut]

Greyhound still ran to Vancouver up to two years after the article; after that, it's almost as easy to buy train tickets.

If you want numbers, our own homeless count from 2019 shows that 75% of our homeless come from outside Vancouver, and that 44% come from outside BC. I've personally known a student from Alberta (as of that same year) living in a shelter.