Shelter plan is unfair to hard-pressed area
Beverley Bowes
Times Colonist
Friday, June 20, 2008
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest postal code, is the result of flawed policy and poor decision-making. Today, a Victoria neighbourhood is headed down the same slippery slope.
Practical, rather than moral, grounds were the order of the day in the early 1980s when prostitution was chased out of Vancouver's middle-class West End and Mount Pleasant districts into the Downtown Eastside. The same situation occurred in 2003 in Victoria when sex-trade workers were pushed out of the downtown core and into Rock Bay and Burnside Gorge. Along with The Stroll came the drug dealers and higher crime rates.
The neighbourhood managed to absorb the influx because it is a strong and diversified community. The area comprises light industrial, middle- to lower-income single-family dwellings and condos, transient accommodation offered by single-room-occupancy motels, pockets of executive condo developments, office buildings, subsidized housing complexes, residential drug and alcohol treatment facilities, housing for the hardest-to-house and housing for federal prison parolees.
This community is now teetering on the edge of an abyss, at the bottom of which lies a hell similar to the Downtown Eastside.
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If the City of Victoria has its way, we will lose one of only three tiny community green spaces in the neighbourhoods bounded by Bay Street, Harriet Road, Blanshard Street and the Gorge Waterway. That green space will become the site of a five-storey, $11-million homeless shelter and our community will once again be expected to absorb the residue of the city's latest purge of the downtown core.
Construction of the massive shelter will likely lead to closure of our Single-Parent Resource Centre and Centennial Day Care. Loss of the revenue-generating daycare would then place the financial future of the Centennial United Church congregation in jeopardy.
The latest blow comes in the form of the mobile needle exchange route that is, with the exception of one square block, entirely within the Rock Bay area. The route does not encompass the five drug-use "hot spots" identified in the downtown core. The route will draw in the city's intravenous drug users, perhaps leading to proposals for a permanent needle exchange in Rock Bay to service the clientele attracted by the mobile route.
Since the city's announcement of plans to build a new Streetlink shelter in Rock Bay, the overarching message sent by Rock Bay and Burnside Gorge has been that the location is wrong. We have not said that we do not want a shelter; we have asked that our park be left intact and that community consultation takes place to find a better location.
Warehousing the homeless in a light industrial area will not solve a problem that belongs to the entire city. The money earmarked for the shelter could be better utilized by purchasing existing houses or failing motels and creating small apartments -- permanent homes -- to help people get off, and stay off, the streets.
The bottom line is that available funding must be used wisely to create a solution to the region's homeless issue. It's shameful to use $11 million to simply move the problem out of the downtown core and in to a community that is already struggling to survive.
Vancouver lives with the unending squalour of its Downtown Eastside. I question whether the current mayor and council really want to be remembered as the administration that created Victoria's Uptown Westside.
Beverley Bowes lives and works in Rock Bay. She is committed to saving Ellice Park and finding real solutions to end homelessness in the capital region.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008
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