Downtown Eastside

The poorest postal code of Canada is in downtown Vancouver. Unemployed aboriginals, drunks, drug addicts, prostitutes.

During the Vancouver games, they demonstrated for weeks in a "tent city" they set up downtown, asking for the right to free homes. They built this in an area that had been bought by a property developer, for they fear gentrification of the DTES, which they see as their own.

Theirs is an odd quest supported by strange arguments. I wonder why spending the day shooting up heroin should give you the right to a free home 20 minutes from the beach, when other people have to work decades for it. If lots of free housing downtown isn't the answer, isn't gentrification precisely the way out for the city in general, and perhaps even for the poor residents of DTES? Sure, they will have to relocate, but is it better to keep living in the cesspool of Vancouver? And it will remain the cesspool of Vancouver as long as they are there.

I am not against helping them. Insite provide addicts with clean needles and other drug-taking gear, and they can shoot up inside without risking being arrested. If they must shoot up, they can do it there and at least stop spreading HIV. It's a great idea. For those who are truly mentally ill, hospitals must be built. Those who are unemployed could be given jobs building trails, cleaning up forests. Something hard or unpleasant enough, so it's not seen as a reward for others who are also genuinely unemployed but find their own jobs, and easy enough so that anyone can do it. Those who can work but won't work, well, those can be kicked out of town. No one has the right to be a parasite and be rewarded for it.