four blocks of hell on earth

Welcome to hell: Enter at own risk

Amid reeking garbage and blood-sprayed doors, humans ravaged by addiction feed their habits

The Vancouver Sun

Friday, December 8, 2006

By Randy Shore

His hair is black and tangled under his ball cap. The moniker stitched into his jacket is Rusty, but I doubt that's his name. He picks at the ground with blackened fingernails near a knot of drug dealers, hoping to assemble enough crack cocaine to get a hit.

He looks up at me for a second with watery, desperate eyes. Our meeting is like an electric shock. A raw nerve. He turns back to the ground, scratching the concrete with his fingers.

A few strides away, the alley is teeming with people heating the ends of their crack pipes.

It is midday and the traffic of customers is continuous for the drug dealers. After a quick huddle on the sidewalk, the deal is done. The addicts hurry to the alley to find a doorway or a dumpster to use as cover -- from the wind mostly, no one cares if the police are watching -- for a few deep hits from the pipe and a few minutes of relief from a bone-gnawing craving.

As I walk up the alley, the faces that emerge from the smoke are ghostly white and emaciated, like skulls. Their stares are as vacant as the storefronts that line Hastings between Main and Carrall.

City workers in orange vests walk the alleys and streets of what the city calls Area A, often under the gaze of police officers. The four blocks bordering the intersection of East Hastings and Columbia Streets form the core of the Downtown Eastside, the epicentre of hell.

In fact, the locals here greet outsiders with a cheerful, "Welcome to hell."

A group of street cleaners passes, heading north on Columbia. The street and sidewalks behind them are tidy. Their shovels and bins are full of cigarette wrappers, chip bags and snack cake boxes. The street ahead of them is still strewn with trash. The snow beside the garbage can on the corner is black. The bin itself is empty but there is trash lying all around it.

The doorways of abandoned storefronts are sprayed with blood and littered with discarded syringes. Above the Radio Station Cafe are several storeys of apartments with window boxes mounted up the side of the building. The marigolds are doing their best, but it isn't enough. They look very lonely.

The boarded-up windows and doors are a magnet for graffiti. There are names and the usual assortment of bad language and even some drawings. I am impressed by the intricate rendering of two syringes crossed like the bones on a pirate flag. The messages, political and personal, are gibberish.

As if to light a candle rather than curse the darkness, the City of Vancouver has posted a letter-sized piece of paper in one doorway at 112 East Hastings St. with a bold red stamp reading "Legal Notice." The order requires the removal of graffiti, though there is none apparent. Every other building in the area is covered with scrawl, but not this one.

A man with long, nicotine-stained grey hair walks out the front door of the Regent Hotel and kicks at the discarded cups and newspapers on the sidewalk, then goes back inside. Outside The Only Sea Foods, a woman wails for a dollar from passersby. Her face is twisted with anguish, her sweatpants bloody from the knee down. In the doorway of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, a couple lies in a huge pile of cardboard, blankets and suitcases. The two look sick and both have a gravelly cough. The office is closed. A small crowd is gathered, watching them.

The United We Can bottle return depot is the most popular business in the area, with a lineup that reaches down the block. This is where the city's binners -- the people who fill bags and shopping carts with returnable empties -- come to get paid. A makeshift flea market springs up here in the afternoons. People are selling what they have from little squares of fabric. One man offers a snow-globe, a video game controller, a hacky sack and a novelty rubber hand. Another has channel changers, four of them, and plastic toys still wrapped in plastic.

The crowd is well-behaved, but the police swoop in about every half hour or so. On their third visit, one officer has a lengthy argument with one man and then another is arrested. The man is cuffed while five officers mill around. The crowd takes little notice.

The alley behind United We Can is humming with activity. As I enter the alley, a city worker with a wheeled trash bin passes by a large malodorous pile of garbage. Even though it is near freezing, the stench is powerful. A woman looks up at me as she inserts a needle into her ankle. Two men pass by with plates heaped high with potato salad, bread and lasagna. Pieces of bread are dropped everywhere, as are discarded socks and men's underwear.

Midway up the alley, a cube van unloads a dozen kegs of beer behind the Dodson Hotel and just beyond it are about a dozen people smoking crack. A police car pulls into the mouth of the alley, but nobody moves. The police car backs up and moves on. More crack is smoked.

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Our four blocks of hell

Even the trash collectors demand police protection. In a month, this Downtown Eastside area produced: 39 tonnes of abandoned rubbish - 8,300 discarded syringes - TV sets dropped from windows - Graffiti on every building

The Vancouver Sun

Friday, December 8, 2006

By Janet Steffenhagen

A four-block area of the Downtown Eastside is so filthy and hazardous that sanitation workers have asked for police protection when they go in on routine duties.

The small area around the intersection of East Hastings and Columbia was the subject of a four-week pilot project in late summer that found tonnes of refuse abandoned in its alleys and streets, every building tagged with graffiti, and thousands of hypodermic needles tossed away.

The project was aimed at determining what could be done to improve things, but the findings alone are a stunning documentation of just how bad things have become in the heart of the city's Skid Road.

The zone, which has more police officers assigned to it than anywhere else in Vancouver, is the scene of "some of the most profound and concentrated public disorder and street cleanliness problems in the city," says a report to be considered by a city council committee on Thursday.

The report says nearly one-half of all the garbage picked up in the city during the pilot project was found in the four-block zone. Clothing thrown out of the area's many single-room occupancy buildings became tangled on overhead lines and heavier items like television sets were dropped to the streets, endangering passersby. Human feces and urine polluted lanes, sex-trade detritus was littered in public areas, and buildings were opened up to vermin where scavengers took away fittings for their scrap value.

The project was called SWEEP (Solid Waste Engineering Enforcement Program.)

City staff admit in their report that "the area reverted to baseline conditions within three to four days post pilot."

Keeping the area clean requires street and lane flushing six nights a week, emptying public waste bins nightly, and hand cleaning of gutters and sidewalks every night as well as five days a week.

The project was sparked by complaints from sanitation staff and Vancouver police department employees that they no longer felt safe working in the area. The city hoped to find out what it would cost to keep its most ragged neighbourhood clean and whether the results would be worth it.

From August 14 to September 8, city staff and an independent work crew, accompanied by police and bylaw officers, began removing and cataloguing litter and garbage and then sweeping the streets and alleys of the four blocks bordering the intersection of East Hastings and Columbia streets.

They collected 39 tonnes of waste, including abandoned mattresses infested with bed bugs, household appliances, stolen shopping carts, remnants of donated food and its packaging, human feces, 8,300 intravenous syringes, condoms and broken glass.

Crews removed graffiti and issued 92 violation notices for illegal street vending, urinating in public and littering. They also tagged 41 commercial waste containers that were either unauthorized or breaching city rules.

The total cost of SWEEP was $60,000, but that was reduced to $45,000 when regular cleanup costs for the area were deducted. The bill for a full year of SWEEP was estimated at $200,000, with costs expected to fall in weeks following the initial cleanup.

The report calls the project a success. "Although it was not possible to determine a statistically accurate correlation between public disorder and street-cleaning demands, it was confirmed through observations that there is a direct relationship between poor social conditions and high cleaning requirements," it says.

But it is too costly to continue, the report concludes, and wouldn't be an equitable use of taxpayers' money.

"A more sustainable approach for dealing with chronic street cleanliness issues in the DTES would be to focus on the root conditions that contribute to the disproportionate street cleaning demands, such as homelessness, drug addiction and inadequate commercial container regulations."

It suggests city council consider a bylaw requiring commercial waste containers that are visible from streets and lanes be locked. Council rejected a similar proposal in 2005.

Tom Timm, the city's general manager of engineering services, says in the report he continues to believe that a bylaw requiring locked dumpsters would be an enforcement tool to deal with improperly maintained bins.

Ken Lyotier, executive director of United We Can bottle depot in the Downtown Eastside, opposes locked bins, because he says it won't address the bigger problems in the area and will hurt those who make a few extra dollars through recycling.

He said he understands citizens' concerns about conditions and behaviours on the streets. "However, it's naive to think that locking our dumpsters will address those issues."

He said the project changed the look of the streets but did little to change behaviour. "But to maintain that level of sweep and enforcement would be very, very expensive, frankly, and that's really where we need to get serious -- to look at, in fact, what it is going to cost us as a society to do what we've said we hope to do by integrating folks into our communities who have substantial barriers and disabilities."

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