I have lived in Gastown, close to the Downtown Eastside (DTES), for fourteen years. During that time I have had no direct involvement in any charities or other efforts to address the issues in the neighbourhood. I continue to read short articles in the media about the troubles, but feel increasingly dissatisfied that there is apparently no bigger-picture, ongoing summary or statistics on what has actually been going on.

A few things happened recently that raised questions for me.

• I was asked to join a local association of “concerned citizens” and quickly realized that it was essentially a group of NIMBYs who immediately attacked me for daring to suggest that the problems of homelessness, addiction, and crime were beyond the scope of some kind of “clean-up” that the municipal government or local police could perform in short order.
• Increasing encroachment of the problems into my neighbourhood (I live on Water Street), including CRAB Park.
• Especially, an inability on my part to discuss to any level of detail, or debate with neighbours, or explain to visitors and friends from outside the downtown core, or outside BC or Canada, what is actually going on here.

I often think about the “four pillars” strategy which was much-discussed during the 2002 municipal election — the film FIX: The Story of an Addicted City was central to that campaign. The city still has a page dedicated to this approach which claims that harm reduction, prevention, treatment, and enforcement has been implemented successfully in cities such as Geneva, Zurich, Frankfurt, and Sydney to reduce street consumption of drugs, overdose deaths, and infection rates for HIV and hepatitis.

I don’t know whether the page has been updated these past 20 years. I am curious to know what the numbers have been on these issues over time. Anecdotally, it seems to me that public drug consumption and overdose deaths have increased significantly, but I can’t easily find any hard statistics on this, or really any discussion of HIV and hepatitis infection rates.

If these numbers have increased, then what has happened in the intervening years? I can think of several possibilities:

• The Four Pillars approach has not worked;
• The Four Pillars approach has worked and the situation would be even worse if it had not been implemented (i.e., the opioid crisis was not anticipated);
• The Four Pillars approach has not been properly or completely implemented.

Other questions come to mind, such as: how many of the troubled DTES residents have addiction issues? How many have mental health issues? How many have both? Is the population increasing? If so, from where, geographically or socially? How much money are we spending on these services, and, more subjectively, is it being spent effectively? Who is “in charge” of all of this? How do the municipal, provincial, and federal governments work together — or not? What housing is available to those at, say, CRAB Park and if any is, why do people not take it — unsafe conditions? I could go on.

I wish there was some sort of online “dashboard” that could be maintained and updated with broader info on progress, statistics, and links to relevant groups and studies — and what people like me could do to really help.