On Vancouver's Skid Row,about 15,000 people with no place else to go survive

 

Published: Financial Post magazine, September 1, 1995

Deborah Jones

 

    They call it Mardi Gras. As dawn breaks over one of the world's most wealthy and amenable cities, in Vancouver's downtown east side men start arriving at 6:30 at each of four area social services offices, forming queues of hundreds that will last all day. By mid-morning those at the front emerge with cheques in hand. A thirty-something blond man leaps out a door, vaults over a concrete wall, and jumps gleefully down to the sidewalk four feet below. ``Yaaaaaaa Hooo!'' he yells. It's Welfare Wednesday, the day once a month taxpayers pump about $4.3 million in social assistance into Canada's biggest and roughest inner-city district.

 

    This morning as the cheques hit the street, the Skid Row entrepreneurs gear up. On Main Street, kitty corner from two welfare offices, a truck delivers pallets of beer to the Number 5 Orange bar and striptease. Several men set up tables on the urine-soaked sidewalks to display sunglasses. Cars known to police, some with children in the back, stop by the sidewalks to dispense heroin and cocaine out of windows while other dealers stand on corners and sell openly to passersby. The pawnshops open, the local Bank of Montreal stations a security guard outside and the money marts--cheque-cashing agencies where welfare recipients pay a percentage of their cheques for cash--roll up steel shutters. At the police station, ambulance headquarters and hospital emergency rooms, extra shifts clock in. In the handful of family housing complexes, residents hunker down to wait out the party.

 

    Mardi Gras is when the problems and joys of Skid Row peak--and when the siege atmosphere in the community becomes most evident, as tensions build between people entrenched in a Skid Row lifestyle and folks with middle-class sensibilities, who now crowd the community on all sides and have begun moving in.

 

    For decades, Vancouver's Skid Row has been home for approximately 15,000 people with no place else to go. It has pockets of serenity and cleanliness, but mostly it's a world that is parallel to the one most Canadians know, the bottom of the slippery slope that our children, siblings, friends or neighbors--or ourselves--sometimes stumble onto. Here are the welfare-dependent Ontarians who've taken to heart their government's advice about British Columbia's great weather, men from across Canada on the lam to avoid outstanding warrants, people who've fallen through the cracks of the new economy and into addiction, poor elderly resource-industry workers, prostitutes at the bottom of the pecking order, refugees with no job skills, natives, people whose mental illness or childhood abuse consumes them. In Vancouver, they jostle together within the postal code with the lowest mean income--less than $9,000--in Canada, and seem largely impervious to the efforts of some 180 organizations set up to protect them, jail them, detoxify them, cure them, house them.

 

    Whether these organizations should try to integrate or simply contain skid row, no one knows. But the organization that's most visible is the police force, which in order to have any impact at all here has adopted a role far different from the traditional one of cops and robbers. Considering how far skid row is from the world most Canadians inhabit, the fact that the police have a whole different way of dealing with things down here only makes sense.

 

    ``Police!'' calls Sergeant Pat Harrison, knocking on the door of a seventh-floor hotel room the day after Welfare Wednesday. Surprisingly, it opens. A young woman is hunched over two lines of cocaine, her dirty face startled. ``Thought I was joking when I said police, didn't you?'' says Harrison to the man holding the door. Inside there's barely space for a double bed, a battered desk, a chair. Harrison searches the room, rifles the woman's belongings--a folded wallet, a cheap black purse, a cigarette pack holding two smokes. He finds a two-dollar bill rolled with an elastic, a plastic bag of baking soda, and some folded papers holding maybe $100 worth of cocaine: leftovers of the Mardi Gras.

 

    Harrison, a 25-year veteran of the city police force, looks around the room. The window is filthy, the threadbare yellow bed-sheet is smeared with blood, the walls, stained and pocked. The stench of aged urine and feces drifts in from the hall. ``Do you have ID?'' he asks the pair. Two heads shake, No. There is no point to further questions--the courts are so backlogged with drug and assault charges that the police don't bother with relatively minor offences any more. And so, one by one, Harrison lifts the papers with cocaine to his face and blows gently. Puffs of white powder disappear in the fug of smoky air. ``Please, I'm sick, can you leave me just one?'' says the woman, her face white under the dirt. ``I'm sorry, I can't do that,'' says Harrison. ``That would be trafficking.''

 

    As he walks away, Harrison explains, ``If it would have stopped them from using or selling the stuff, I would have arrested them. But it wouldn't.... There's a lot of help here if people want it. But it only works if people want help.''

 

    This hotel is an example of how attempts to ``help'' often fail. Most of the rooms off this hallway are silent and empty, despite the fact that provincial social services pays this hotel an estimated $55,000 a month to provide rooms for welfare recipients unable to manage their own money. Police suspect--but have not yet proven--that most tenants are absent because the hotel has bought the rooms back from them at cut rates, for under-the-table cash, in order to rent them out again. The hotel wins every way, because as often as not, the cash is spent in the pub downstairs.

 

    Police are not ignoring the problems, but as Sergeant Kash Heed, head of community policing explains, they try to attack the causes as much as the symptoms. In one project, police found that out of nine bars surveyed, two were causing most of the problems. Not only were stolen goods and drugs being trafficked inside the bars, but, Heed says, ``if someone was passed out at a table, the waiter would put more beer in front of them.'' Police persuaded other agencies like the fire department and the City to crack down on the bars, then negotiated a settlement with the owners. This year, police have broadened the targets of multiple-agency cleanups to include entire hotels. Still, their efforts barely scratch the surface.

 

    Skid Row residents share the same air and water and sewage lines as others in this prosperous city, but do without basic amenities like telephones (80% lack them) and cooking facilities (50% have no means to heat water, let alone cook a meal). Says one longtime community advocate, ``Everything you take for granted as a Canadian, you set aside as a downtown east-sider.''

 

    The commercial vacancy rate around Hastings and Main is about 40% at street level and 50% upstairs. Below dusty ``For Lease'' or ``For Sale'' signs, plywood has replaced the windows once used to display goods. There are a few bare-bones eateries, a couple of banks with guards out front, a few video arcades, the cheque-cashing operations. Some 300 pawnshops and second-hand stores hawk mountain bikes, car stereos, leather coats, power tools--stolen throughout the city and fenced in Skid Row. A handful of grotty convenience stores sell pop alongside the high-alcohol shoe polish and Chinese cooking wine. A busy community centre maintains bouncers at the door to keep out the drunks. There is no visible activity at all at the Gold Budda monastery, incongruously located a block from Hastings and Main. A film crew has set up a shoot on a corner favored by Hollywood producers filming scenes ostensibly set in New York's inner core. Dotting the streetscape are the helping agencies run by government, religious groups and non-government organizations. And dominating everything are the dim smoky pubs, in which an astonishing 6,000 seats--some 60 to 70% of the total pub seating capacity in Vancouver--create the base of a rough playground for locals and visitors who come here to slum. On top of most pubs sit some 7,000 hotel rooms, many of them no more than a bed with a shared toilet in the hallway. The stinking garbage-filled alley southwest of Hastings and Main is a favored shooting gallery for heroin addicts, who often stumble out onto the bright sidewalk with needles still inserted in their veins. ``This reminds me,'' remarks a police officer one night as his cruiser bounces over a discarded mattress and detours around piles of garbage overflowing from dumpsters in the alley, ``of those medieval woodblock prints of someone's vision of hell.''

 

    This June day, Mardi Gras arrives in a heat wave, and over the course of each day, more and more people gather on the blazing sidewalks or inside the dark bars. It's too hot to do much more than drink, shoot up or stand around eyeing passersby and watching the cars roar down Hastings, a thoroughfare between the city centre and the east side. People wander back and forth across Hastings, one or two pirouette to music only they can hear. Late one afternoon, Harrison's police cruiser pauses by a grey-haired man wearing a torn blue shirt and white slacks streaked with brown on the seat, who is puking violently at the side of an alley. Before Harrison can speak, the man looks up, blue eyes bloodshot. ``F--- you, too!'' he screams and staggers off. ``I guess he's OK,'' shrugs Harrison.

 

    Later, back in one of the hotels, Harrison pauses in a hallway at a broken janitor's sink, where a small mouse scrabbles in the bottom, trapped. Harrison lifts a pail off the floor, scoops up the creature and sets it free. The mouse, at least, had something rare in Skid Row: a problem easily solved.

 

    In her cotton jumpsuit, backpack and sports sandals, the young woman walking into the Main Street needle exchange doesn't look like a candidate for sudden death, but that's what she is. She walks briskly to a counter, rummages through her pack and drops eight ``rigs'' into the top compartment of a plexiglass box. Greg, a lean young man with long blond hair counts the syringes, pulls back a divider panel and lets them drop into the bottom of the clear box already half full. He takes a good look at the woman,taps information into a computer, and hands her eight syringes. She turns away and the next customer, with a bruised face, crooked nose and dirty torn clothes gets served.

 

    A former heroin addict who has been ``clean'' for four years now, Greg says that on this Welfare Wednesday he expects to hand out some 7,500 needles to about 1,200 people. On any other day of the month, he distributes about 3,000 syringes to 700 users. The needle exchange, funded through various government agencies as a preventive measure to stop the spread of diseases like AIDS and hepatitis, has 5,050 registered clients and serves any others among the estimated 10,000 drug users--visitors and residents--who shoot up on Skid Row. There are no questions asked and only one ``charge,'' sort of: the exchange gives users information on needle use that may help them avoid disease or death.

 

    Other efforts to improve the health of Skid Row residents include home-care nursing, a street-nurse program, a pregnancy outreach program and several specialty clinics. Still, people on Skid Row live shorter lives than other British Columbians--because they don't take care of themselves. Of the city's 200 annual fatal drug overdoses, 150 of them occur on Skid Row.

 

    The problems are huge. And they come to the fore each Welfare Wednesday. Dr. Jeremy Etherington is the chair of the department of emergency medicine at St. Paul's Hospital in downtown Vancouver, where most emergency medical cases on Skid Row end up. Medical staff are frustrated, says Etherington, by the once-a-month deluge of people who blow their welfare money on self-destructive binges. ``The amount of waste is incredible. People spend their money on drugs and alcohol and then they drain other resources like shelters and the food lines. Many of us are altruistic and want to help people who require assistance, but we're frustrated when we see it wasted.''

 

    Dr. Elizabeth Whynot, a medical health officer who oversees the area, points out that most of the people involved in destructive behavior were victims of trauma, often at very young ages. Poverty and stress in society are increasing, ``and we're producing a whole generation of people who are going to cause problems in the future.'' In Skid Row today, she says, ``babies have a 30 to 40% chance of significant prenatal exposure to alcohol or drugs. Of the kids working the streets, endless studies show that 60 to 70% were abused in their homes. And with the aboriginal population, you'd have to be blind not to understand what happened to that community over the last 40 years.''

 

    Whynot fears if there's a public backlash against social spending, it will merely worsen the problem. ``If out of our fear all we can figure out to do is isolate those parts of town more and more and build bigger and bigger walls around our own neighborhoods, the quality of life for everyone suffers. There will be more break-and-enters, crime will go up. If you go downtown you'll climb over people with no place to stay, and if you go into stores, you'll have to harden yourself to not care about stepping over people dying on the street.''

 

    The fear is that is what will happen to the displaced residents of Skid Row through current attempts at gentrification.

 

    Near midnight in the middle of the Mardi Gras two police cars careen down a side street. On a sidewalk near a park they find an ambulance, two guards in the uniform of a private security firm and three drunks--two men and a woman. One of the drunk men is screaming, holding one leg with blood running out through his blue jeans, while the other two are swearing that the guards set an attack dog on them. The police persuade the guards to go back to work. An ambulance attendant bandages the injury. The police question all parties. A muddled tale emerges: three drunks ventured into a city park adjacent to Skid Row and the security guards, hired by the city to protect the park, showed up to evict them and were unable to control their dog.

 

    The lavish park is part of a condo development under construction directly to the south of Skid Row, on Expo 86 lands. If the park is left unprotected, it will become inhabited by drunks and junkies and strewn with used syringes and bottles. The rent-a-cops and their dog are part of the city's attempt to contain Skid Row activities within the downtown east side--or at least to exclude them from the upscale housing going up all around. The problem, say Skid Row advocates, is that again, Skid Row itself is being squeezed ever tighter.

 

    At the turn of the century, the area was Vancouver's downtown core, and the handsome exteriors of some of the buildings--the former Carnegie Library, the first city hall, several former banks--still exude the fresh promise of a frontier village, which got its name from being where the logs were ``skidded'' to a local pulp mill. From the start, the street life was raw: seasonal workers in from the bush stayed in cheap hotels, bought sex and drank at the pubs, which proliferated downtown because they were restricted to the area. Also, the neighborhood has long been an arrival point for immigrants. Back then, as now, the downtown east side changed because of the constant pull and push of development: new housing in the city's west end lured Vancouver's wealthier and more established families, leaving the less wealthy residents and the stores, cheap hotels and pubs downtown. Eventually the smaller upswept shops moved west as well. The area was finally abandoned by its biggest commercial anchor, the Woodward's Department Store, which closed its doors for good early this decade.

 

    The character of many of the hotels changed during Expo 86. Some owners evicted the old-timers--mostly old men--and tarted up the buildings in a futile attempt to attract tourists. When Expo was over and with the old-timers gone, a new, much more violent group moved in. ``Now they're full of drug addicts and pushers,'' says one community advocate.

 

    Paradoxically, despite the heightened fear of violence, gentrification of Skid Row itself is well underway. Housing costs in Vancouver have steadily risen over the past decade, the city has moved to close illegal basement suites and people without much money but who hold middle-class expectations have begun to move into the area around Skid Row. John Turvey, who came to the area as a teenage heroin addict and now, decades later, heads an agency that runs the needle exchange and several other programs with 30 employees and a budget of $7.5 million, fears what will happen to existing residents as more and more people with such sensibilities move in. For Skid Row residents, he says, ``it's going to make Expo look like f---ing Disneyland.''

 

    What can be done? One argument goes that leaving the slums in Skid Row alone will ensure that people who are down-and-out will continue to have a home, even if the community is dysfunctional. The other side--the official position of the City--argues that price-controlled housing can be built along with market housing. That's why Vancouver this year approved developments in the downtown east side. ``We do not build ghettoes in Vancouver,'' states Mayor Phillip Owen.

 

    Treading a fine line between the two positions is the Downtown East Side Residents Association, which provides advocacy, practical services and unofficial social work for the inhabitants of Skid Row. DERA has helped build or renovate several housing complexes in the area and manages others. Its members include addicts, alcoholics, disabled people, a few families and others who chose to live in the area, like DERA's executive director Barb Daniel, who resides with her children in the Four Sisters housing co-op, a stone's throw from the community needle exchange. Daniel says her family knows most of the residents of the community and generally feels safer in the crowded streets than in wealthier, less dense areas. Still, the Four Sisters resembles an oasis under siege: its clean and recently painted buildings surround a lush green courtyard protected by towering iron bars, while the alley behind is barricaded with a high wire fence--the only gated alley in the city.

 

    Ralph Buckley, the director of the Strathcona Mental Health Team, which serves some 730 people with serious mental diseases like schizophrenia, notes that folk who look out of place elsewhere are tolerated on the row simply because all kinds of behavior are accepted here. ``It's quite a supportive community for people down on their luck,'' says Buckley. His fear, shared by others, is what will happen to current residents when the Yuppies move in. ``There are going to be problems with more affluent people wanting to clean up the streets, especially if you start bringing children in among some of the mentally ill who look strange but are not violent. To a two-year-old, they could be scary.''

 

    Down the road from the needle exchange, at the corner of Main and Hastings, two native men are passed out underneath the cool pillars of a former bank. Inside, in the cavernous and almost empty lobby, provincial civil servants work to set up a new kind of ``bank'' for Skid Row residents. The institution, called the Four Corners Community Savings and run by the province, will cash cheques or open accounts for welfare recipients--many of whom lack identification--who are turned down by the local chartered banks. Until it opens this fall, says Jim Green, a local activist hired by British Columbia's NDP government to oversee the bank's establishment, welfare recipients must pay fees to cash their cheques at a money mart.

 

    In addition to the bank, Green is working on two job creation projects. The GM Place stadium and a new live-entertainment facility being built in the area have each pledged to hire workers from the downtown east side, and the province is sponsoring job-training programs in a renovated office building in Skid Row. (Skid Row is in Premier Michael Harcourt's riding)

 

    But for all the job-creation attempts, the real primary industry on Skid Row is welfare. The four social services ministry offices in the downtown east side are distinct from all others in the province because most of the clients pick up their cheques in person, rather than waiting for them in the mail.

 

    On each Welfare Wednesday the four Skid Row offices issue cheques to about 8,000 people. There are two family housing complexes in the area where households receive more--by mail--but most of the single people in the lineups get about $546 each--$325 for shelter plus $221 for all other needs for the month. Almost 70% of them are men over 35. Most have not completed high school and, if they can work at all, they are only marginally employable at casual laboring jobs.

 

    Skid Row is Canada's welfare capital. And for social-service agencies, that makes for a Catch-22 situation. There are so many support services in Skid Row that people in need flock there. Says Inspector Bob Taylor, who heads up most of the police resources in Skid Row, ``We're carrying the Skid Row burden for Western Canada.''

 

    It's Saturday night. Mardi Gras is winding down. The computer in Taylor's cruiser shows there are 23 cars on duty in his quarter of Vancouver, and 21 of them are currently responding to calls from the downtown east side, a tiny area that sucks up a disproportionate amount of Vancouver's total policing budget. In addition, there are 16 police officers on foot and bicycle patrols in Skid Row tonight.

 

    Throughout the night, Taylor will meet with community police officers, tour the alleys and streets and search for under-age prostitutes on nearby Franklin Street, the hooker's stroll. Constantly, he and other officers deal with overdoses. Sirens resonate; the two paddy wagons are kept busy picking up drunks or junkies who cannot stand up by themselves. Each emergency call involving an overdose costs about $1,100 for ambulance, fire and police agencies to respond.

 

    At 1 a.m. Taylor stops his dark blue cruiser by a sidewalk where a couple lie motionless, legs intertwined. He bends over them, and the woman staggers up complaining incoherently about a taxi driver who refused to drive them to their home a few blocks away. The man does not stir and Taylor tells her that he must call the paddy wagon. Alarmed, the woman starts hitting the man with her purse. ``You f-- shit, get up!'' she yells, pleading with Taylor not to take her man away. ``I'm f-- pregnant, that's my old man, I need him,'' she cries. Finally the man rolls over and flails at her face with his fist. The two fight for a minute, until the man sees Taylor. He reels towards the policeman, fists out. Taylor, unbudging, calmly squirts pepper spray into his face. Eyes streaming, the man staggers off down the sidewalk, the woman holding onto his shoulder, her unborn child bulging in front of them like an omen.