Can upscale condos balance low-rent housing?

New buildings could revitalize the Downtown Eastside, the city says, but others worry poor residents will be displaced
WENDY STUECK
June 25, 2008
The Globe and Mail

VANCOUVER -- As Vancouver activists battle a proposal to plunk high-priced condominiums on the city's skid row, another debate is humming in the background: whether such developments could help revitalize the neighbourhood without displacing low-income residents.

That's the position taken by the city, which says developer Concord Pacific's proposed Greenwich condominium project at 58 West Hastings is consistent with policies that call for a mix of housing types in the Downtown Eastside, and require any low-income units lost as a result of development to be replaced on a one-to-one basis.

Restricting private development won't necessarily protect low-income housing or its most vulnerable residents, heritage consultant Donald Luxton said yesterday.

Read the rest here

Condo project would fuel 'class hatred,' activists say

Fearing it would hurt the poor, demonstrators want proposed development quashed
WENDY STUECK
The Globe and Mail
June 24, 2008

VANCOUVER -- Housing activists made a last-ditch effort to derail a Downtown Eastside condominium project at a city hall hearing yesterday, claiming the development would fuel "class hatred" and make it more difficult for low-income people who live in the neighbourhood to obtain decent housing and services.

"We need some indication that there is a future for poor people in this neighbourhood - otherwise these condos are a slap in the face," Carnegie Community Action Project spokeswoman Wendy Pedersen said yesterday at a development permit board meeting.

Ms. Pedersen and other activists attended the meeting to register their objections to the 160-unit Greenwich condominium project, which developer Concord Pacific has proposed for a downtown site at 58 West Hastings St.

Read the rest here
See also Downtown Eastside condo plan needs social housing, opponents say

Letters Not Condos

Please join with us to oppose a significant proposal for condos covering 6 lots at 58 W. Hastings in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. We literally need hundreds of Vancouver residents to write a letter AND sign up to speak at the Development Permit Hearing to make an impact. The hearing is on June 23. It is essential that our letters are in by Friday, May 17 so the Planning Department can reference them in the report that will be submitted to the DP Board who will make the decision. Your letter does not have to be long or profound. A few sentences to object will do just fine. Elaborating is good too. Feel free to use the information below and use the information in CCAP's letter posted at: http://ccapvancouver.wordpress.com.

Background:

The Concord Pacific development at 58 W. Hastings must be stopped. The rapid gentrification of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) is overwhelming the low-income residents of this neighborhood, who make up 75% of its population. The current rate of development, in which new condos outstrip social housing 3 to 1, is a grave threat to the neighborhood. The feverish planning, approval and construction of market condos in the DTES is a destructive force setting off massive shocks in this community. Rising real estate prices are already resulting in increased rents, conversions and closures of residential hotels (SRO’s), creating a constant flow of displacement and evictions of low-income residents, and consequent homelessness. Condo construction will be accompanied by a flood of upscale amenities catering to the new residents of the area, which will further marginalize the low-income residents who have made this neighborhood home for many years.

Unlike people with significant resources, whose lives are marked by independence and mobility, people living in poverty form communities of interdependence, located in a specific geographical area, and embedded in neighborly networks of support and assistance. The community of low-income residents who currently call the DTES home should not be displaced from their neighborhood and relocated somewhere else for the sake of condo development. This is their home, and they should be able to live here. Poverty is not grounds for displacement.

Condo construction in the DTES must be halted until a community vision is formulated, planned and implemented. Like putting up a tent in a windstorm, rooting and securing housing for low-income people in a community experiencing the hurricane of condo development and massive gentrification is impossible. Residents need time to determine their own community vision and they need support for the implementation of that vision, before the green light is
given to condo developers. What is at stake is the existence of a vibrant, amazing community of people.

The cessation of condo development for the sake of this community can begin here and now, with the rejection of a development permit to Concord Pacific for the 58 West Hastings site.

We believe there is an opening at City Hall to support our position. On Thursday, May 1 at the Planning and Environment counil meeting, Cameron Gray, Director of the City's Housing Centre said the surge of condos in the DTES is “like a hurricane and is going twice as fast as predicted…[and] we need to address the rapidity of change in order to stay on track with the Downtown Eastside Housing Plan." He also said that a strong mechanism to control condo development “could signal to the Province that no market housing will be built and landowners/developers may be off to Victoria to get more housing here.” And he said: “its time to do a community visioning because groups are more united and able to do it and because of the rapidity of change.” At the same meeting, Councilor Anton of the NPA stated “we have the horrendous challenge of 4000 more units” in terms of securing replacement housing in the area and that “as long as the SRO’s are in private hands, they are in jeopardy.” Councilor Anton said she was “very encouraged by the [visioning] work in the DTES.”

Please write your letters by Friday, May 17 to:

Alison.higginson@vancouver.ca
The Chair, Development Permit Board
c/o Alison Higginson, Project Facilitator,
Development Services
453 West 12th Avenue
Vancouver BC
V5Y 1V4
Please bcc your email letter to: wpedersen@look.ca or send us a quick note to let us know that you wrote a letter.

To sign up to speak at the hearing on Monday June 23, call:

Lorna Harvey
Assistant to the Development Permit Board
Development Services
604. 873-7469

Sincerely,

Carnegie Community Action Project [CCAP

Condo towers on the march in Downtown Eastside

TREVOR BODDY
tboddy@globeandmail.com
The Globe and Mail
Friday, May 2, 2008

Accompanying a hundred or so housing protesters marching through the grimmest blocks of East Hastings last week, I found myself thinking of the 1964 movie Cheyenne Autumn. It was director John Ford's last Western, a grand epic of the homeless and destitute Cheyenne as they sought a place, and way, to live after being displaced by white settlements in the 1870s, a cruel tragedy that went unnoticed in polite salons back east.

This is Cheyenne Autumn for affordable housing on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. In all my years of writing about the cities of the world, I have never seen a neighbourhood so stressed, facing so huge a range of external forces and difficult internal choices as the Downtown Eastside right now.

The rate of change here is cinematic, with every week a hoarding springing up to announce a new private housing project, while down most blocks, we are reminded that our provincial government has bought 650 "single resident occupancy" (SRO) hotel rooms for renewal as housing for the poorest of the poor.

Government press releases for this welcome initiative do not mention that this figure represents barely 15 per cent of the welfare-level accommodation in the neighbourhood, according to Wendy Pederson, one of the organizers of last week's march (which was triggered by a new Concord Pacific plan to build nearly 200 condo units at 58 West Hastings).

Ms. Pedersen says 250 SRO rooms closed permanently last year, and 900 more have been priced out of reach, because the area is now attracting students, seniors and so-called cultural creatives, without low-cost housing options elsewhere in the city.

Thus it is not only condo purchasers but also low-income Vancouverites who are now competing with the homeless for housing in this single, 20-block area. The bottom line, according to the Carnegie Centre Community Action Project, is that 1,300 out of 2,900 rooms in the Downtown Eastside will soon be "inaccessible to people on welfare."

The April 22 protesters convened at the premises of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, where boxes of bananas were being given out to hungry addicts, streetwalkers, unemployed teenagers and indigent seniors. Watching the demonstrators brought home to me another reminder of Cheyenne Autumn: how the ratio of aboriginal and Métis people among Downtown Eastside residents increases yearly.

The concentration of poverty in the Downtown Eastside is the result of more than a century of established public policy. For example, from 1900 through 1975, it was virtually the only area of the city where bar, tavern and beer parlour licences were issued. Injured and laid-off workers from the natural resources industry were parked there to drink away their lives, thanks to multiple bylaws passed by multiple city councils.

Vancouverites now have the temerity to feign surprise about "problems getting out of hand down there," and prescribe condos-as-cure. There is nothing like the Downtown Eastside anywhere else on this continent for a simple reason: it is an artificial slum - the direct result of failed public policy united with a long-standing civic tradition of hiding our problems, rather than confronting them.

Rage about all this was in the air during the April 22 march, amid fear from residents and activists that their concerns about the Concord Pacific development plan would not be heard.

Area planner Rick Michaels and Vancouver director of planning Brent Toderian offered soothing words, but Mr. Toderian says he is nonetheless "inclined to support" the Concord Pacific application when it returns to the Development Permit Board in several weeks.

Mr. Toderian offered his assurances on responsible Downtown Eastside development in a recent interview. "We do not practice 'form follows finance' in my department," he told me.

The Concord Pacific project is mid-rise, and sympathetic to the late 19th-century heritage district context.

But a few blocks away on Pender Street, developer Rob Macdonald is pushing for the first high-rise condo tower in the Downtown Eastside, 90 or perhaps 120 metres high, according to some media reports.

Mr. Toderian says that, in his view, "the door is still open" for condo tower applications in the heart of Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside. I think this a huge mistake, and our chief planner concedes that this openness has created a rush of developers and real estate agents expecting permission for the tower format to march eastward.

It is City Council, not planners, who will determine the fate of towers amid the city's largest concentration of heritage buildings.

According to Mr. Toderian, "If developers have paid too much for land here, that's their problem."

And his, especially in an election year.

Like the Cheyenne in the John Ford movie, a line in the sand has been set by community and heritage advocates. Stay tuned.

New Housing Reports

Several new housing reports are now available on the sidebar under the heading Housing, as well as below:

United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing,
Miloon Kothari
Mission to Canada
9– 22 October 2007

Disappearing Homes: The Loss of Affordable Housing in the DTES
(Carnegie community Action Project, April 2008)

Homelessness and Affordable Low Income Housing Backgrounder
(Downtown Eastside Community Land Use Principles Project, September 2007)

The State of Non-Market Housing in the Downtown Eastside
(Downtown Eastside Community Land Use Principles Project, September 2007)

A neighbourhood speaks - and hears its own voice

THE DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE: HOPE IN SHADOWS

TIMOTHY TAYLOR
ttaylor@globeandmail.com
April 21, 2008

VANCOUVER -- 'I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them," photographer Diane Arbus once wrote. It's a comment that came repeatedly to mind reading Hope in Shadows, a collection of photographs taken and stories told by residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

The book, which comes out next month, grew from a popular program run over the past five years by the Pivot Legal Society, a non-profit legal advocacy organization based in the neighbourhood. Since 2003, Pivot has been handing out cameras to residents and assembling pictures in a calendar. If you live or work in the downtown area, Gastown or Yaletown in particular, you've likely bought one of these from a street vendor at some point.

The book, edited by Vancouver poets Brad Cran and Gillian Jerome, takes the idea of the calendar a step further by building in the stories behind the images, as told by the people who took them. The result is likely to overturn a few "skid road" misconceptions, which reduce the citizens of the neighbourhood to mere emblems of its well-publicized problems: poverty, homelessness, prostitution, drug abuse and so on.

Read the rest here

DEVELOPMENT TSUNAMI COULD SQUEEZE MORE INTO HOMELESSNESS

The situation is ominous in the Downtown Eastside. Real estate development is destroying the community, and will continue to generate homelessness and death. We need to get the word out to political and civic leaders, and to citizens in general: freeze the development of market housing in the DE; increase construction of non-market housing for those living in inadequate housing and those who are currently homeless!

Silence is not an option.

CARNEGIE ACTION ASKS FOR URGENT MEETING WITH VANCOUVER CITY COUNCILLORS

Read more on the Save Low Income Housing Coalition website.

Groups worry civil liberties will be trampled during Games

Assurance Sought: Homeless could be swept off the streets, like past Olympics
John Bermingham, The Province
Published: Sunday, March 30, 2008

Vancouver's Olympic watchdog groups say they're not being consulted about how security plans for the 2010 Olympics will impact civil liberties.

And they're afraid that without a rights-friendly plan in place, the poor and homeless will simply be swept from the streets when the Games arrive.

"The first concern I have is how little I have heard about the plans," said David Eby of the Pivot Legal Society. "There were supposed to be consultations with the Downtown Eastside and the downtown core. It is going to have some adverse impacts on people."

Eby claims that civil liberties are already being encroached upon. He points to Mayor Sam Sullivan's ongoing efforts to expand the role of private-security patrols by downtown "ambassadors."

Eby believes it's still possible city police will "sweep" the streets of poor and homeless people prior to the Games, despite the City of Vancouver's promise not to do so.

Am Johal, speaking for the Impact on Communities Coalition, says Los Angeles, Atlanta and Athens all cleaned their city streets of poor people prior to their Games.

Jason Gratl, B.C. Civil Liberties Association president, said it's critical that "citizens and visitors to Vancouver enjoy the rights of free expression, mobility and a more general right to be left alone by the state."

"Our concern is to ensure that those rights are minimally restricted by the legitimate security concerns," said Gratl.

Others are less worried.

Retired provincial court judge Jerry Paradis, who chairs the 2010 Civil Liberties Roundtable, said "[Authorities] are very receptive and are willing to work along with us. I think they are very alert to civil-liberties issues and that they will help us out by running things by us."

Cpl. Gusharn Bernier of the RCMP's Integrated Security Unit said there are no plans to remove homeless people from city streets during the Games, and that the security plan respects the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Link to article

Church groups want slumlord laws enforced

Randy Shore, Vancouver Sun
Published: Tuesday, April 01, 2008
VANCOUVER - A coalition of church groups is calling on city council to improve the lives of the poor and homeless by enforcing bylaws against slum landlords and halting implementation of the mayor's EcoDensity plan in the Downtown Eastside.

Mayor Sam Sullivan, bowing to public pressure from a group of church leaders, announced last week that churches will no longer be forced seek permits from the city for providing food and shelter to the homeless.

The group, Faith Communities Called to Solidarity With The Poor, hopes to capitalize on that success by putting forth its own agenda for change.

ITS FOUR SUGGESTIONS TO COUNCIL, RELEASED AT A NEWS CONFERENCE MONDAY, ARE TO:

- Enforce bylaws to ensure buildings are not dilapidated.

- Stop approving market housing and EcoDensity developments in the Downtown Eastside.

- Halt the conversion of single-occupancy rooms in the downtown into hostels and student housing.

- Immediately direct funds to build 3,200 units of social housing on city-owned land.

Link to article

DTES - Stations of the Cross

Every year since 1986, on God's Friday, we have carried the cross through the streets of the DTES in memory of the way of our Saviour. In the same way this Friday we will gather:

First United Church
320 East Hastings
11:00 am - about 1:00 pm
Friday, March 21

Leaving from First United, and ending at the War Memorial in Victory Square, we will stop at stations along the way, to remember the horrors and comfort, joys and brokenheartedness we have experienced as a community in the DTES since Easter past. We do this as a community, together, remembering that we go on in hope of the acceptable year of our Lord in the year to come. This time every year allows us to grieve, and celebrate, to bond together again in one body.

Please come join us.

New City Data on Housing

Reprinted from David Eby's blog:

Recent data released by the City of Vancouver indicates that market housing growth is far outpacing affordable housing in the DTES. The numbers provide a helpful measure of the change taking place in the neighbourhood, and social housing building overall in Vancouver. Why these numbers aren't more widely available is beyond me.

First, two charts show social housing developments in and outside the DTES, including anticipated timelines. These graphs show approximately 1,557 units over the next 3 to 4 years, suggesting between 400 and 500 new units per year, and well short of the 2,400 units quoted by Coleman in this recent press release and well short of Mayor Sam's absurd claim of more than 3,000 units.

The next graph shows SRO buildings purchased by the province recently, with unit numbers. Anticipated opening dates for buildings not currently in operation are not shown; however, I understand from BC Housing that the renovations will have started on all projects by the Fall.

Of these hotels, all were open and operating except for the Pender, Marr and Rainier hotels, although some were operating at less than full capacity.

Finally, the City is keeping tabs on market housing development in the DTES. This chart shows that 1,597 units have been constructed, are under construction, or are in the final stages of approval for the neighbourhood. This chart does not list the rumoured nine towers that many people in the neighbourhood have heard are under consideration at the City currently.

Finally, the City produced a helpful chart to enable a better understanding of housing trends in the neighbourhood. I apologize for not producing a better version, but this is what I have.

The purple bar reflects non-market housing. The red/burgundy bar shows market housing. The yellowish bar shows SRO/lodging house/residential hotel housing.

A trendline for market housing in the DTES would look like a stock market run in the '80s. A trendline for SRO/lodging house/residential hotel housing would look like a stock market run in the '90s. A trendline for non-market housing would look like a panicked provincial government worried about looking uncaring during the 2010 Olympics, but not really giving much of a crap after that.

Naive experiment or exploitation of the homeless?

Program sends well-meaning mentors into Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

MARSHA LEDERMAN
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
March 5, 2008 at 4:14 AM EST

VANCOUVER — What to make of a "documentary" that sends four established Vancouverites onto the streets and pairs them up with homeless people, giving them 10 months to mentor their less-fortunate partners and turn their lives around?

Is it a reality television rip-off, naive in its intent and discomfiting in its use of desperate lives to create good television?

Or is it a serious attempt to showcase a growing crisis and bring it to a national, mainstream audience?

The piece of television in question, Devil Plays Hardball, will air on The Passionate Eye on CBC Newsworld Sunday night (and be screened at a forum in Vancouver tonight).

Read the rest here

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside offers lessons for others: report

Canwest News Service
Thursday, February 21, 2008

VANCOUVER -- With its grimy streets and often abject displays of poverty, misery and drug abuse, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is a magnet for negative coverage.

But a new report from a Calgary-based think-tank takes an unusually rosy view of the area.

In Lessons from Hastings and Main, the third report in the Canada West Foundation's core challenges initiative, writer Lisa Allford looks at what other Western cities can learn from some of the many programs providing support on the ground in the Downtown Eastside.

What Allford discovered while examining programs as complex as a drug trial offering free heroin and as simple as a non-profit bottle depot, is that good street level programs have at least one thing in common.

"What I learned talking to the few people I did - and they were just a microcosm of the hundreds and hundreds of people working in that neighbourhood - is that what they had is a real respect for the people they work with," she said Wednesday.

"In terms of what makes a worthy program, that's step one."

One such initiative Allford profiled is Sheway, an outreach program for new moms and moms to be in the neighbourhood.

Another program is the United We Can bottle and can depot on Hastings Street. United We Can, started with a small government loan, provides a way for the homeless and drug addicted to earn some legitimate money by bringing in recyclables they can trade for cash.

In the introduction to her report, Allford references "a perfect storm of failed policies" that have contributed to the misery in the Downtown Eastside, Canada's most notorious neighbourhood. And many of those who speak in the report are concerned not just with what programs get funded, but also how.

Link to article
Link to Letters from Hastings and Main: Signs of Hope in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside report

Vancouver's gritty close-up

Working with students from UBC's Graduate School of Journalism, former CBS anchor Dan Rather takes an unflinching look at the drug-riddled Downtown Eastside for his newsmagazine show

MARSHA LEDERMAN
February 19, 2008
The Globe and Mail

VANCOUVER -- When Dan Rather arrived in Vancouver last fall to do a story about the notoriously troubled Downtown Eastside, he was armed with piles of research provided by journalism students at the University of British Columbia.

"This was not a case where the school lent its name to it and we did most of the work," Rather said during an interview last week from New York. "[The students] did a lot of the work."

The result of that collaboration, A Safe Place to Shoot Up, profiles the not-so-photogenic side of Vancouver with visuals you won't see in any tourism brochure or Olympic marketing campaign. Rather greets viewers at the show's opening, "Good evening from beautiful Vancouver, Canada," but the initial shots of scenic English Bay, the North Shore mountains and sandy beaches quickly give way to scenes from the streets and alleyways of the Downtown Eastside, where syringes litter sidewalks, sex workers await customers and drug addicts shoot up in broad daylight.

Rather calls it "a city of contrasts" in his report, describing "a landscape studded with snow-capped mountains and multimillion-dollar condos cradling a downtown that's home to one of the worst urban blights in North America." He cites stunning statistics from the United Nations: One in three residents of the Downtown Eastside is HIV-positive, and the rate of hepatitis C infection is 70 per cent.

Read the rest here

Dan Rather doc on Downtown Eastside to air Tues.

Glenn Bohn, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, February 15, 2008

VANCOUVER -- A Safe Place to Shoot Up is the title of a Downtown Eastside documentary airing this Tuesday on Dan Rather Reports, a cable-TV news show hosted by one of the world's most respected television journalists.

Rather, the former anchor of CBS News, notes that the 7,000 drug injection users in Vancouver's poorest neighbourhood have a hepatitis C infection rate that's comparable to Botswana's.

He highlights the city's harm-reduction initiatives and takes his viewers into InSite, the nurse-supervised clinic near Main and Hastings where addicts are encouraged to inject illegal drugs without sharing needles, to slow the spread of deadly diseases like HIV/AIDS.

Rather, who visited the city in November and worked on the documentary with students from the University of B.C.'s graduate school of journalism, calls Vancouver "a city of contrast."

The city has "a landscape studded with snow-capped mountains, multimillion-dollar condos, cradling a downtown that's home to one of the worst urban blights in North America," the well-travelled Texan declares in the program.

Read the rest here

The Women's Memorial March

The Women's Memorial March

Thursday, Feb 14th

12:00 at the Carnegie Community Centre Theatre for opening ceremonies
1:00 for the march to 16 different sites in the neighborhood
3:00 conclusion at the Japanese Cultural Centre

An event in remembrance of the women who have disappeared or been killed in our community, of solidarity with their friends and family, and of resistance to the ongoing perpetration of violence against women.

The Poverty Olympics

On the move with the Poverty Olympics.

Downtown Eastside residents bring homelessness to opera stage

Last Updated: Tuesday, February 5, 2008 | 3:24 PM ET
CBC News

A gritty rock opera about homelessness in Vancouver's troubled Downtown Eastside neighbourhood has been drawing standing ovations in one of the city's tonier communities.

Written and performed by Downtown Eastside residents, Condemned tells the story of a group of people who find themselves homeless after they are kicked out of a hotel. The opera's creators have actually lived through the trials presented in the production.

"It brings to the forefront what it is that's actually going on," Bharbara Gudmundson, one of the opera's performers, told CBC News.

"People know what's going on, but they don't see it, they don't feel the trauma. They see the little bits and pieces when the violence happens."

The show is especially relevant because of all the different forces that are transforming the community at large, said producer Mel Lehan.

"The Olympics are bringing demolition, development speculation and people are being forced out onto the street," he said.

Having played to receptive audiences at the Downtown Eastside's Carnegie Centre and the Firehall Theatre in past years, several sold-out shows at St. James Hall in posh Kitsilano drew standing ovations this week.

The performances also included post-show discussions between the audience and cast members.

"The Downtown Eastside does seem like an island," said one audience member. "[It] doesn't seem connected to the rest of the city in lots of ways."

Another said the show offered "a real value to learn about what people sometimes go through on the tough side of town."

Lehan said he hopes the opera's recent successes will encourage more communities to host the show and open up to the artistic production from the streets.

Link to article

Poverty Olympics carries the torch for social issues

ELIANNA LEV
The Canadian Press
February 4, 2008
VANCOUVER -- Poverty-line high jump, long-jumping over a bedbug-infested mattress and welfare hurdles won't be official sports at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver and Whistler, B.C.

But yesterday, the categories took centre stage at the first Poverty Olympics.

The "games" were staged by several anti-poverty groups in Vancouver's troubled Downtown Eastside and drew a standing-room crowd to a neighbourhood community centre.

Part community theatre, part social activism, organizers say they were meant to raise awareness of the hardship, challenges and substandard living conditions many residents in the area deal with regularly while governments fund the Winter Olympics.

Like in the real Olympics, a fake torch was brought in to light a towering larger one, which was marked with the words "End Poverty." They also had their own version of mascots - Itchy the Bedbug, Chewy the Rat and Creepy the Cockroach.

During the poverty-line high jump, characters like Rachelle Singlemom and Disabled Joe tried to jump over a high-jump bar marked with the words "Poverty Line." Each attempt failed as the bar was raised about three metres off the ground.

Posters hung on the wall painted with the Olympic rings with handcuffs instead of circles, with the slogan "Poverty: It's Not a Game."

"[The Olympics] have a $6-billion budget," said Master of Ceremonies Bob Sarti, who was dressed as a giant rat. "All we know is that this is our Olympics, with a $6 budget."

Resident Laurel Dykstra brought her twin six-year-old girls to the event, which was a mix of many community members and a swarm of media.

"I think this is a hilarious and excellent representation of what this Olympic extravaganza is going to mean for the people who live here [in the Downtown Eastside]," she said. "It's a whole lot of money spent on things that aren't going to be relevant for our lives."

Last week, Vancouver Olympic Games Organizing Committee promised not to leave behind social housing as part of the Games.

Committee head John Furlong said it has committed $66.5-million toward social housing in Vancouver, Whistler and for natives. He promised the commitments would be reached even if other Games partners weren't able to meet promised goals.

VANOC committed $30-million toward building the athletes village along Vancouver's False Creek on the condition 250 units of social housing remain after the Games.

Another $30-million will be used in Whistler so workers can find affordable housing after the Olympics.

VANOC has also committed $6.5-million toward native housing.

Link to article

HIV rate soars among Vancouver's native drug users

ANDRÉ PICARD
Globe and Mail
PUBLIC HEALTH REPORTER
February 1, 2008
Startling new research reveals that aboriginal drug users living in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside are contracting HIV-AIDS at twice the rate of non-aboriginal users.

Over the four-year study, 18.5 per cent of aboriginal men and women who injected such drugs as cocaine and heroin became HIV-positive, compared with 9.5 per cent of non-aboriginal intravenous drug users.

"This is a tragedy," Evan Wood, a research scientist at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, said in an interview. "Many people in the aboriginal community are reaching out for care and the care isn't there."

Dr. Wood, the lead author of the research, said the higher rates of infection among natives are not due to biological factors but rather to patterns of social networking: The fact that aboriginal people interact principally with other aboriginals heightens their exposure and speeds the spread of HIV-AIDS.

Rad the rest here.