Carnegie Community Action Project
401 Main Street, Vancouver, V6A 2T7
(604) 839-0379
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Dear Mayor & Council,
Why should we preserve the Downtown Eastside as a low-income community?
Reason #7: Contrary to some what some people think, mixing low-income people with higher income people does not, by itself, create a better situation for the low income people.
In 2006 the City’s Housing Centre Director, Cameron Gray, wrote that “revitalization” of the DTES “involves introducing middle-income households and workers who bring disposable incomes that support retail and a normalization of social behaviour and expectation.” This idea that middle-income people will provide an uplifting example to poor people is not based on real evidence.
Much of the research done on this is in the US where the benefit of mixing incomes is thought to be that the low income people get to use the better schools and parks that middle-income neighbourhoods have.
In BC, schools and parks aren’t funded by neighbourhood. Services for poor people are not better in richer neighbourhoods because they are almost all services that require money and are not appropriate to the needs of low-income people. Even community centres in middle-income areas in Vancouver charge fees that poor people don’t have.
DTES problems, like drug dealers congregating in several areas, people peeing on the streets, open drug use, and the general appearance of poverty cannot be counteracted by throwing richer people into the mix. To be solved, these problems require decent affordable housing, adequate income and probably the end of drug prohibition. Only in a place like the DTES, with its strong history of community activism, can the real solutions to problems like this take hold.
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2 Comments
June 18, 2009 at 7:05 am
The Carnegie and the front steps and surrounding area, has the highest concentration of crime and drug related sales purchase consumption than anywhere else in the country. I wish this was not so but any visitor to our city and many have been shocked by this beautiful landmark known mostly for it’s reputation, can’t understand why this activity is allowed to go on. Yes some would say we have a unique mix of culture death and some form of academia. But how can anybody with any common sense take this organization seriously when they cannot control the activities in front of the building they work in. Until this changes for the most part you have no right to say anything regarding policy on the homeless addicted impoverished and so on, who do you blame well surely not yourselves that would be to righteous
June 23, 2009 at 11:54 am
the question of how to address the crowd on the front steps of Carnegie comes up often in the committee meetings where the majority of the governance decisions of the centre are made. long story short, we have always come back to the fact that moving the crowd to another part of the neighbourhood is not the same as resolving the situation that puts the crowd there in the first place. of course it is a contentious issue that many people see differently, but the sidewalk is not part of Carnegie and so neither the association nor staff have any say over how the sidewalk is used.