Tuesday 5 March 2013

Business can help build a better, more diverse Downtown Eastside by Peter Ladner


Peter Ladner is a friend of CBG and former City of Vancouver Councillor. Notably, Peter is co-Founder of Business in Vancouver Media Group and Vice-chair of Natural Step Canada, a non-profit organization dedicated to true sustainability in businesses and municipalities.

You rarely hear DTES advocates protesting drug dealers and pimps coming into the area


How ironic that the same week TEDTalks announced it’s moving to Vancouver because this is such a diverse, vibrant, turned-on city, we have yet another flare-up in the Downtown Eastside (DTES).

It draws attention to our world-class failure to resolve the crippling poverty mental health and drug abuse issues in that neighbourhood. Easy on the self-congratulation, Vancouver.


Media attention has focused on the new Pidgin Restaurant, serving high-end patrons who gaze out over the crazy dysfunction that defines community at Pigeon Park across Carrall Street. Or at least they did until the windows were frosted over to protect them from flashlights shone in their eyes by the Downtown Eastside Not for Developers Coalition. That group’s goal is to “protect” the DTES as a government-financed “social justice zone” where only the very poor and the agencies that support them are welcome. No developers!


Many of the cutting edges of gentrification in the DTES have always struck me as bizarre. An influx of SFU and film students – healthy, active, low-income, community-minded – fits with a gradual transition of the neighbourhood. But the uber-high-end bars, condos, restaurants and design stores? Why here? They serve only to needle the bleeding gap between lower income people and the well-to-do.

Equally I have never understood the complete disdain of the self-appointed spokespeople for the DTES for anyone who isn’t in social housing, as though no lower-income people appreciate the benefits of a mixed community.

Read the rest at Business In Vancouver.
Published 
Tue Mar 5, 2013 12:01am PST


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