Trying to House homeless people is some of the most expensive real estate in the world is a stupid idea.

Well, that would make for a pretty big 'fuck you'.

"Hey, you're homeless...so we're gonna put you up in a new place. Chilliwack!"

They are here. They are going to continue to BE here. We need to deal with it. Here.

It's better than sorry we don't have enough money to house you. Whats next serving steak and lobster at homeless shelters. A roof over a person in Chilliwack is better than living on the street in the DTES.

To us? Yes. To them...no, its not. Logic is out the window.

^ Suburbs and valley would be a better place for some of them to secure employment than DT Van.

The really stupid thing about these dorks attacking Save On Meats is, SOM actually supports and helps out the community down there. For example, for a few bucks you can buy "tokens" from them that can be used to exchange for food; you can then give those out to residents of the area, if you so choose... so if some bum is asking for money for food, and you don't want to give him cash just to have him blow it on booze or meth, you can give him tokens that he can "spend" at SOM to get a sandwich.

They also support the community by giving the people there work and chores to do, paying them with the tokens as well. It's a great way to help people get back on their feet.

A few weeks ago I heard a talk show on CBC addressing the whole "gentrification" thing when it came up around the Pidgin Cafe. One older lady recounted how, as a girl, she had visited the area with her parents to go shopping at Woodwards, visit the Carnegie library, etc. That made me think... I remember visiting that area back then as well. It was a really nice neighborhood in the day. We used to take the bus down with my grandmother, never any fear of being attacked or tripping over a bum or picking up a stray needle.

The way the "anti-gentrification" and "anti-poverty" lot go on about it, you'd think the homeless folks had built the whole area up by themselves and now the nasty rich people were trying to take it away from them. They forget that it was once a bustling middle-class area that THEY gradually took over, with the buildings left to fall apart because nobody who COULD look after them wanted to live there anymore. They've run everything into the ground, then complain that governments should force someone to clean them up... oh, but they can't actually charge more rent to cover any of those repairs.

If all these "advocate" types put half the energy they spend whining and trying to get someone else to do something, into actually DOING SOMETHING THEMSELVES, I bet everyone would be shocked at how much got accomplished. Pick up a paint brush, pick up a fucking hammer... instead of bitching that someone else needs to make a place livable, get in there and bloody well put nail to board yourself.

Completely agree.

But Gregor is a 2 faced bitch, he says he's all for affordable housing, but he'll, even high earners find it hard to live here

All levels of government has failed these people, and u, and me

The problem is not they can't find work it's that they are not capable or do not want to work.

Although I somewhat agree...I wouldn't make a blanket statement like that. I think with the right training, rehab, support, and outreach many have the ability and would eventually have to want to work.

What I fundamentally disagree with is continuously building social housing. Hell, the whole DTES can be one gigantic apartment block of social housing...it won't make a lick of difference long-term. Give it 5-10 years and all those lovely apartments will be torn to shit and destroyed.

A lot of what's wrong is that many of these people are In a Vicious circle of drugs, mental health issues, dependence, abuse (drug and physical)

To say they can't or don't want to help is ignorant, some or even many may not want to, but I would bet most want to get out of the hell they currently live in

I find it so sad that in such a socialist country, these people are left to rot

We have the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism here (and I'm a staunch capitalist) - if we're going to have socialism, at least take the benefits of helping those in need, it'd make me sleep better knowing my stupidly high income taxes are helping, Not lining hte pockets of corrupt, selfish politicians

I have sympathy for the former... NONE whatsoever for the latter.

It's one thing if you're not capable of working, for reasons beyond your immediate control.

But someone who doesn't work simply because they don't want to? They don't "deserve" jack shit.

This classic tale seems appropriate:

I think that a lot of people want to get help and/or have gotten help but its just so easy to relapse into their old state.

Social housing works and sadly enough, it only works when you have the right people selected to live in these social housing. I was working with Vancouver Coastal Health Authority for a 3 month practicum and you will see 2 extreme ends of the spectrum. We walked the DTES and inspected a few apartments that are social housing.

There are people who are in these social housing and have gotten help, rehabilitated and working and are getting by decently. They pay their rent and keep their place clean and make the best with what they have. Hell, these folks even keep their room cleaner than mine!

Then there are the neighbors. People who take advantage of social housing and not give 2 shits about them. All they do is do drugs and turn their units into a shithole of a storage room with no respect to what they have, to themselves, or to others who live in the complex. I kid you not, there was this one tenant they want to evict and they were building a case. We went to the door and knocked, no one answered. We had police with us. We got the landlord to open the door for us and there were cockroaches roaming and scurrying on the WHOLE ledge of the entire door. The entire ceiling is covered in cobwebs and the entire floor is covered with newspaper. I imagined they were used to cover piss and/or shit because the whole room reaked of it. And that was just 2 rooms in one building.

If you guys can find the series called "walking the beat", its a good insight to DTES. But take it for what its worth, because its only from "one point of view".

U say that, but I'm yaletown there are two places near my place for hobos, there's a couple low income housing units In coal harbour...

May be stupid, but I'd rather it be done in the dtes where they can be where they have been of late, and then let the capitalists slowly improve the area and their life, than in yaletown and coal harbour - get the hobos out of yaletown and coal harbour amongst $0.5M - $1M condos - that doesn't make sense

It doesn't make sense anywhere in Vancouver. If don't have a job or have a chance of having a job that makes more than min wage you should not be living in Vancouver.

I'm making a "train wreck" face. It looks like this: :yuno::facepalm::fulloffuck::seriously:

So we're cool with everything as long as they have their place and you have yours?

That's a very reasonable argument but there's one inescapable issue - concentrating social housing destroys neighborhoods.

I haven't seen a study, but it seems possible that evenly distributing social housing would be less expensive. Yaletown and Coal Harbour's property values aren't significantly lowered because there's social housing in their communities, so the full potential of property tax revenues are fulfilled. The DTES's property values are significantly lowered by the concentration of social housing and low-rent rooming houses, so there's a huge loss of potential property tax revenue. It also seems reasonable to say, concentrating drug addicts is not a good idea; the DTES is like a giant reverse Al-Anon meeting.

Let's face facts...we're all in the same boat. All of us.

A summation of the thread on this page:

Here's my problem. Most people are not *that* far off from the folks on the DTES(minus the debilitating drug problem-that makes it unique)

So yeah, we have the pretty little condos that are ridiculously expensive. We have pretty little urbanites that live in them.

Let's say that interest rates increased at the same time that real estate took a 20-30% drop. Not a hugely unlikely scenario. Who really knows.

Well, that down payment that everyone went and saved up to buy in suddenly disappeared. Now you are working your ass off to pay a mortgage that is mortgaging non-existent value.

"Hey. Screw you fools. I rent"

Ok. Are you going to be happy to continue to rent for 1500/month when there are now apartments up and down Homer for $1000? What happens to that owner when you move? How long do you think they are going to subsidize the rent to make the mortgage?

Suddenly, all these pretty little urbanites are facing a financial dilemma.

It's a house of cards based on an assumption that living here and living the downtown lifestyle is desirable to those outside that bubble, and more people will pay more to enter in. Fine. It's acceptable and its worked for 20 years. It's worked a lot for that last 10.

But...and here's my problem. It's a little snobbish to now dictate where those a class lower than you can go and what they can do. It's that snobbery, ps, that makes me love working in yaletown, but hates the idea of living there.

I'm all about not letting the status quo continue on the DTES-and someone above made an excellent point about how they created the neighborhood decay, and now are fighting for it. I think it hits the point well. But we don't have the right to say Vancouver is now too good for you. Saying, "well, we live in Yaletown, and we're rich" is a false economy in the greatest scale. First, you DON'T own that fancy condo...you own a portion of it. Some of you, a very small portion of it. The banks own the rest. And even THEY don't own it as they made up the money to put in the bank account of the last guy that "owned" it, so even THEY only own a small portion of the condo. And that banker made some arbitrary decision based on what you look like on paper in deciding whether you were worthy of the right to get access to this made up money in the first place.

So in that world, I say, the true victory to the DTES probably ISN'T what to do with the people that are there. Are they a lost cause? Who knows if you can bring them back. Where do you house them. Is it in the DTES? Probably a lot of it should be...as I said, that's where they are, and they'll just migrate back if you try a forced relocation. No, victory to the DTES is the people that aren't there yet. It will be a self solving problem if you stop the flow of people in, and you do that by making improvements to the social structure of reserves(a big source) and re-establishing mental health as a "thing" so that people don't need the DTES anymore.

I may be a soft capitalist, but I don't look at that as a hand out-I look at that as good fiscal sense to stop the tide of hand outs later. We seem to have lost that in the desire for short term savings.

arguing saying 'putting them all here vs spread out' or whatever is pointless (inclusive of my arguments) as the truth is no one is doing anything, and the people who truly can do something (the politicians) are saying nice things, but doing jack

all we have is half arse measures that help very few and hinder an equal, if not greater number (yes, i am a douche bag, and i don't want ANY down and out centres in yaletown, merely blocks away from me, no i don't want to walk past hobos who are begging for money, or who are making drug deals in ally ways in and around my area).

i want the useless pieces of shit who take upwards of 40% of my marginal paycheque to use that money to help these people and stop lining their own pockets or furthering their own personal interests

the weird thing is, i want these people to get help for two reasons, first, i think everyone deserves a chance to get 'better', but i also don't want to get hassled for money every morning by at least 2, or 3 bums on my walk to work, they get the same response everyday, and this will never change, but they should be getting help from the government

I think the reason they've started targeting SOM despite Mark Brand being very passionate about helping the community is the amount of media attention it brings. They are getting way more attention by stealing a sign from Mark Brand, DTES's messiah, than they were getting by picketing in front of Pidgin. He's a tough guy though, none of this will change his mind about doing business down there. He's even opening a new restaurant next month

This just popped up on my newsfeed:

Anti-Gentrification Bullies Threaten Legal Action Against Gastown News Startup | The Gastown Gazette

The job of the politician is to get re-elected and ultimately, we employ the politicians. Part of the solution lies in reducing the concentration of low-income housing in the DTES. Other municipalities should be shouldering the burden of housing and employing the poor, but everyone is a NIMBY and no one wants the poor in their own city. If you want examples of how people regard those in a different social class than them, read the threads here on Translink, for instance.

You just proved the point that I made above. We all have to take responsibility.

I hear the US is a great place to live for people who make lots of money. You can also completely shut yourself out from poverty by living in one of thousands of gated communities down there. I don't know see how ranting about how high our taxes are here is going to change anything.

Beggars can't be choosers. Secondly, I think the problem is magnified cause we get homeless migrating from other provinces cause the weather is more tolerable here. The media has been running articles that show the number of social housing increased yet their numbers have increased also. It shouldn't be our problem but Canada's problem.

You could build nice shiny new apartments for every homeless person in Vancouver...and we'd start getting more from other areas and creating our own when people see what the true homeless got and walk away from their shitty SRO.

You called?

Bottom line really is you have a group of leeches who thinks everything should be handed to them because they're poor. If you can afford to buy all the properties in DTES then you can decide what happens there.

Most of the residents there are only really still living there cause they've fucked up the community so much that no one else wants to live there. If they were all law-abiding citizens, they would've already been priced out of that area ages ago.

I just don't get why it has to be there. I'm guessing most of them didn't grow up there. And I don't think they have to be so close to downtown, they don't have jobs to go to. Housing them out somewhere in the suburbs makes sense to me.