Downtown Eastside
The Downtown Eastside is a neighbourhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. One of the city's oldest neighbourhoods, the DTES is the site of a complex set of social issues, including disproportionately high levels of drug use, homelessness, poverty, crime, mental illness and sex work.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, the DTES was Vancouver's political, cultural and retail centre. Over several decades, the city centre gradually shifted westwards, and the DTES became a poor neighbourhood, although relatively stable. In the 1980s, the area began a rapid decline due to several factors, including an influx of hard drugs, policies that pushed sex work and drug-related activity out of nearby areas, and the cessation of federal funding for social housing. By 1997, an epidemic of HIV infection and drug overdoses in the DTES led to the declaration of a public health emergency. As of 2018, critical issues include opioid overdoses, especially those involving the drug fentanyl; decrepit and squalid housing; a shortage of low-cost rental housing; and mental illness, which often co-occurs with addiction.
The population of the DTES is estimated to be around 7,000 people. Compared to the city, the neighbourhood is home to a significant Indigenous population, which reflects the ongoing impacts of colonial displacement and systemic inequities that have shaped the area’s demographics. Additionally, historical factors such as de-institutionalization, housing shortages, and limited access to mental health care have contributed to the concentration of poverty and substance use in the community. Residents experience Canada's highest rate of death from encounters with police, and there is mutual mistrust between police and many residents experiencing homelessness.
Since Vancouver's real-estate boom began in the early 21st century, the area has been increasingly experiencing gentrification. Some see gentrification as a force for revitalization, while others believe it has led to higher displacement and homelessness. Numerous efforts have been made to improve the DTES at an estimated cost of over $1.4 billion as of 2009. Services in the greater DTES area are estimated to cost $360 million per year. Commentators from across the political spectrum have said that little progress has been made in resolving the issues of the neighbourhood as a whole, although there are individual success stories. Proposals for addressing the issues of the area include increasing investment in social housing, increasing capacity for treating people with addictions and mental illness, making services more evenly distributed across the city and region instead of concentrated in the DTES, and improving coordination of services. However, little agreement exists between the municipal, provincial and federal governments regarding long-term plans for the area.
Geography
The term "Downtown Eastside" is most often used to refer to an area 10 to 50 blocks in size, a few blocks east of the city's Downtown central business district. The neighbourhood is centred around the intersection of Main Street and Hastings Street, where residents have gathered for over a hundred years to connect. This intersection is also the home of the Carnegie Community Centre. The area around Hastings and Main is where the neighbourhood's social issues are most visible, described in the Vancouver Sun in 2006 as "four blocks of hell."Some indications of the borders of the DTES, which shift and are poorly defined, are as follows:
- A 2016 analysis of crime in the DTES by The Georgia Straight focused on an area that consisted of a six-block length of Hastings and Cordova Streets, between Cambie Street and Jackson Avenue.
- The City of Vancouver describes a "Community-based Development Area", where places important to low-income residents are concentrated. This area includes Hastings Street from Abbott Street to Heatley Avenue, and the blocks surrounding Oppenheimer Park.
- By some definitions, the DTES extends along Main Street to beyond Terminal Avenue, and the DTES also includes a strip of land adjacent to Vancouver's port.
Strathcona in the 1890s included the entire DTES. By 1994 Strathcona's northern boundary was generally considered to be the alley between East Pender and East Hastings streets, though some place it at Railway Street, including DTES east of Gore Avenue.
History
The DTES forms part of the traditional territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam First Nations. European settlement of the area began in the mid-19th century, and most early buildings were destroyed in the Great Vancouver Fire of 1886. Residents rebuilt their town at the edge of Burrard Inlet, between Cambie and Carrall streets, a townsite that now forms Gastown and part of the DTES. At the turn of the century, the DTES was the heart of the city, containing city hall, the courthouse, banks, the main shopping district, and the Carnegie Library. Travellers connecting between Pacific steamships and the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway used its hundreds of hotels and rooming houses. Large Japanese and Chinese immigrant communities settled in Japantown, which lies within the DTES, and in nearby Chinatown, respectively.During the Depression, hundreds of men arrived in Vancouver searching for work. Most of them later returned to their hometowns, except workers who had been injured or those who were sick or elderly. These men remained in the DTES area – at the time known as Skid Road – which became a non-judgemental, affordable place to live as the main downtown area of Vancouver began to shift westward. Among them, drinking was a common pastime. In addition to being a central cultural and entertainment district, Hastings Street was also a centre for beer parlours and brothels.
In 1942, the neighbourhood lost its entire ethnic Japanese population, estimated at 8,000 to 10,000, due to the Canadian government's internment of these people. After the war, most did not return to the once-thriving Japantown community.
In the 1950s, the city centre continued its shift westward after the interurban rail line closed; its main depot was at Carrall and Hastings. Theatres and shops moved towards Granville and Robson streets. As tourist traffic declined, the neighbourhood's hotels became run-down and were gradually converted to single room occupancy housing, a use which persists to this day. By 1965, the area was known for prostitution and for having a relatively high proportion of poor, single men, many of whom were alcoholics, disabled, or pensioners.
1980s
In the early 1980s, the DTES was an edgy but still relatively calm place to live. The neighbourhood began a marked shift before Expo 86, when an estimated 800 to 1,000 tenants were evicted from DTES residential hotels to make room for tourists. With the increased tourist traffic of Expo 86, dealers introduced an influx of high-purity cocaine and heroin. In efforts to clean up other areas of the city, police cracked down on the cocaine market and street prostitution, but these activities resurfaced in the DTES. Within the DTES, police officers gave up on arresting the huge numbers of individual drug users, and chose to focus their efforts on dealers instead.Meanwhile, the provincial government adopted a policy of de-institutionalization of the mentally ill, leading to the mass discharge of Riverview Hospital's patients, with the promise that they would be integrated into the community. Between 1985 and 1999, the number of patient-days of care provided by B.C. psychiatric hospitals declined by nearly 65%. Many of the de-institutionalized mentally ill moved to the DTES, attracted by the accepting culture and low-cost housing, but they floundered without adequate treatment and support and soon became addicted to the neighbourhood's readily available drugs.
Between 1980 and 2002, more than 60 women went missing from the DTES, most of them sex workers. A large number are missing and murdered Indigenous women. Robert Pickton, who had a farm east of the city where he held "raves", was charged with the murders of 26 of these women and convicted on six counts in 2007. He claimed to have murdered 49 women. As of 2009, an estimated 39 women were still missing from the Downtown Eastside.
1990s to present
In the 1990s, the situation in the DTES deteriorated further on several fronts. Woodward's, an anchor store in the 100-block of West Hastings street, closed in 1993 with devastating effect on the formerly bustling retail district. Meanwhile, a crisis in housing and homelessness was emerging.Between 1970 and the late 1990s, the supply of low-income housing shrank in both the DTES and in other parts of the city, partly because of the conversion of buildings into more expensive condominiums or hotels. In 1993, the federal government stopped funding social housing, and the rate of building social housing in B.C. dropped by two-thirds despite rising demand for it. By 1995, reports had begun to emerge of homeless people sleeping in parks, alleyways, and abandoned buildings. Cuts to the provincial welfare program in 2002 caused further hardship for the poor and homeless. Citywide, homeless people climbed from 630 in 2002 to 1,300 in 2005.
Without a viable retail economy, a drug economy proliferated, with an accompanying increase in crime, while police presence decreased. Crack cocaine arrived in Vancouver in 1995, and crystal methamphetamine started to appear in the DTES in 2003. In 1997 the local health authority declared a public health emergency in the DTES: Rates of HIV infection, spread by needle-sharing amongst drug users, were worse than anywhere in the world outside Sub-Saharan Africa, and more than 1000 people had died of drug overdoses. Efforts to reduce drug-related deaths in the DTES included the opening of a needle exchange in 1989, the opening of North America's first legal safe injection site in 2003, and treatment with anti-retroviral drugs for HIV. A shift among users from injected cocaine to crack cocaine use may have also slowed the spread of disease. Rates of HIV infection dropped from 8.1 cases per 100 person-years in 1997 to 0.37 cases per 100 person-years by 2011.
In the 21st century, considerable investment was made in DTES services and infrastructure, including the Woodward's Building redevelopment and the acquisition of 23 SRO hotels by the provincial government for conversion to social housing. In 2009, The Globe and Mail estimated that governments and the private sector had spent more than $1.4 billion since 2000 on projects aimed at resolving the area's many problems.
Opinions vary on whether the area has improved: A 2014 article in the National Post said, "For all the money and attention here, there is little success at either getting the area's shattered populace back on their feet or cleaning up the neighbourhood into something resembling a healthy community." Former NDP premier Mike Harcourt described the current reality of the neighbourhood as "100-per-cent failure." Also in 2014, B.C. housing minister Rich Coleman claimed "I'll go down for a walk in the Downtown Eastside, night time or day time, and it's dramatically different than it was. It's incredibly better than it was five, six years ago."