Vancouver's DTES funding approach is a "band-aid on a broken leg"

Hastings Street encampment in the Downtown Eastside. (Kenneth Chan/Daily Hive)

Written for Daily Hive by Matthew Norris, who is running for Vancouver City Council as a OneCity Vancouver candidate. He is also a member of Lac La Ronge First Nation.

Every Vancouverite deserves to feel safe and be safe in our city. But throwing more money at our failed approach isn’t the answer. Here’s why.

Our city is stuck in a tragic pattern, like an endless loop that we can’t seem to find a way out of.

Fires in social housing buildings have left people homeless — compounding a housing crisis that has led to tent cities in our parks and on our streets. The single-room-occupancy buildings that remain are unsafe, leaving their residents vulnerable, particularly to extreme heat.

The poisoned drug crisis continues to claim victims daily.

And just this past week, an Indigenous man named Chris Amyotte, visiting Vancouver, died after he was shot by police.

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People deserve to feel safe. And they deserve a municipal government that will make sure that they are safe: safe in their homes and in the streets, safe from poisoned drugs, and safe from institutionalized discrimination and racism.

The status quo — where we invest more and more money in a failed approach that has not made us safer — is unsustainable.

My fellow OneCity candidates and I believe that the way out is to shift course and tackle the underlying challenges that give rise to community safety issues. In turn, we can create a safer, more just, inclusive and affordable place to live.

Getting To the Root of The Problem

The incidents I list above are all connected. And we can trace them all to our knee-jerk approach to community safety, which reacts to issues instead of resolving them.

For decades, our social housing policies have worked to contain poverty in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) — out of sight and out of mind. This has concentrated hardship and despair, and when things have boiled over, we’ve responded with force.

This is a deeply unfair situation.

It’s deeply unfair to our unhoused neighbours, who have been failed by society and have been forced to seek supports in the DTES, where they may feel — or be — unsafe. Unhoused people deserve freedom and choice, and we’ve denied it to them.

And it’s deeply unfair to residents of the neighbourhoods surrounding the DTES — neighbourhoods like Chinatown, Strathcona, and even Yaletown — who disproportionately bear the burden of dealing with the effects of concentrated poverty and hardship.

It’s not just unfair. It simply doesn’t work.

For many people, increasing public spending on law enforcement feels like a common-sense fix: Boots on the ground! Throw the book at them! But this only keeps us locked in a profoundly broken system. It’s led to excessive force, systemic racism, and negligence regarding Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

And, as we’ve seen this month, it sometimes results in unacceptable and unjust loss of life.

Our present approach puts a band-aid on a broken leg. It will not make us safe.

A Proactive, Evidence-Informed Approach

But what if, instead of reacting, we choose to be proactive? What if, instead of spending ever more money on reactionary policies, we work with impacted communities to identify the problems they face, and invest in services that address the causes of those problems, so they don’t even occur in the first place?

This means moving away from our present approach of expanded roles for police and instead investing in the services that strengthen our communities — those that address structural poverty, end homelessness, and that treat addiction like the health and social condition that it is, providing distinctions-based, culturally relevant safe supply and mental health supports.

For some of these things, federal and provincial partnership is needed. But the city can also act on its own.

First: We can collectively admit that containing poverty in the DTES has failed and allow safe, affordable, and dignified supportive and social housing everywhere in the city.

Our present approach has led us to the homelessness crisis we are faced with today. People have been forced to live in tents because it is the safest and most dignified option available to them.

This is a totally unacceptable and unsustainable situation. The solution is to build more housing of all types, everywhere. As my fellow OneCity candidates said in a recent op-ed, if we are to say “no” to tents in parks and streets – we must also say “yes, supportive housing in my neighbourhood.”

Second: We can invest in community-led safety approaches. These can include neighbourhood street safety organizations such as safe walks—applicable in many places of the city, not just the Downtown Eastside. We can also invest in Indigenous-led community safety and justice initiatives.

Third: We can demand transparency and accountability in policing through independent processes that effectively respond to the needs and concerns of our city’s most vulnerable people.

Vancouverites deserve a city that is truly safe and just, and deserve civic leaders who are more committed to solving problems than to stoking outrage and division. October 15 is Election Day. If voters send OneCity candidates to Council, we’ll work to build that city for everyone.

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