Pubdate: Mon, 29 Jan 2001
Source: Vancouver Courier (CN BC)
Copyright: 2001 Vancouver Courier
Contact:  1574 W. 6th Ave, Vancouver BC V6J 1R2
Fax: (604) 731-1474
Website: http://www.vancourier.com/
Author: Barry Link

NOT ON OUR STREET

On a frosty Friday night, the chant of a dozen homeowners on Prince 
Albert Street is civil but clear: "No more drugs! No more drugs!" The 
round Styrofoam signs they carry marching back and forth between 26th 
and 27th avenues are equally direct: No Drugs, No Crime and No 
Litter. Their chanting, and the waving of the signs, intensifies as 
they pause by one of two homes on the block they suspect of housing 
drug dealing, prostitution or both.

The residents mean what they say. They don't want the illegal drug 
trade and commercial street sex in their neighbourhood. Yet for all 
their defiance, they're in a good mood, chatting freely, smiling and 
laughing in the intervals between chants. The event is less a protest 
march than a friendly gathering of friends and neighbours.

It's a stark contrast to six months ago, when the quiet neighbourhood 
of tidy middle and working class homes, centred roughly on Fraser 
Street between 25th and 29th avenues, looked to be on a downward 
slide. Street prostitution was on the rise, with noisy and sometimes 
belligerent clients prowling the streets. Drug dealers had set up 
shop in rental suites and garbage piled up in back lanes. Businesses 
were fleeing the area and commercial property was defaced by graffiti 
and vandalism.

Today, the worst problems have begun to disappear, thanks to hard 
work by residents who organized protests and civilian patrols, met 
with merchants and lobbied police for increased enforcement in the 
area. Street prostitution has been pushed out, drug dealing has been 
reduced and much of the graffiti wiped clean. The residents have 
organized informally under the name Block Out, and the more 
optimistic among them believe their battered section of Fraser is due 
for an economic and social revival.

The undeniable success of Block Out underscores the dilemmas facing 
many East Side neighbourhoods. Through no fault of their own, Fraser 
Street residents have blundered into messy and pressing social, legal 
and moral issues that remain unresolved. By responding to the 
undesirable activity, they've succeeded merely in moving it to 
another part of the city. But in the process, they've rediscovered 
the rarest of commodities among urbanites: community spirit and 
neighbourliness.

The problem facing the Fraser Street neighbourhood last year was 
simple. Although the street lacked the political cachet of Commercial 
Drive or the new-found hipness of Main Street, long-time residents 
say the area had traditionally been quiet and friendly, with only the 
occasional break-in disturbing the peace of hardworking homeowners. 
But farther north, a persistent campaign by homeowners and Vancouver 
police in the past several years had put pressure on prostitutes and 
drug dealers in Strathcona. Tired of the hassle of arrests and 
protests, many of the prostitutes moved on. According to Const. Gerry 
Burke, a community police officer with the Cedar Cottage 
Neighbourhood Safety Office, roughly a dozen prostitutes followed the 
path of least resistance and moved along Fraser as far as 29th 
Avenue, finding rental accommodation where they could and working 
openly on the street. Most are drug addicts, says Burke, and drug 
dealers followed their major customers.

Six-year resident Sharole Tylor first noticed the growing presence of 
prostitution and drug-dealing when some of the homes near the house 
she shares with her husband and young son became rental properties. 
The landlord of at least one let the place deteriorate, and soon a 
drug dealer moved in. From her front door, Tylor watched customers 
and suppliers become regular visitors as his business grew. "The guy 
in the TransAm with the gold chain was a dead giveaway."

The problem, she says, is that the newcomers didn't care about the 
effect of their activities on the neighbourhood. Break-ins increased 
up and down the street. Garbage piled up in the alleys and the 
climate became intimidating.

"One day, the guy with the gold chain and the guy in the home were 
having fisticuffs right in the middle of the street," she says.

Tylor, who grew up in the quiet, West Side area of Dunbar, began 
investigating around the neighbourhood and discovered a bawdy house 
had been set up above a second-hand store on Fraser Street nearby.

Police and city hall offered little in the way of concrete response. 
Tylor discovered her stretch of Fraser is in a no-man's land between 
various civic and police jurisdictions. The one office that gave her 
advice and told her who to contact at city hall was the Cedar Cottage 
Neighbourhood Safety Office. But she was still acting on her own.

Then in August of last year, a flyer arrived at Tylor's house 
announcing a community meeting at a nearby Baptist church to discuss 
the growing crime problem in the neighbourhood. Tylor attended and 
was amazed. So many people showed up that she could barely squeeze 
into the meeting room. "That was the first time I realized that 
anyone noticed that there was a problem besides me," she says.

Key among those who had noticed were the meeting's organizers, Cathy 
Loukas and Emma Hunter. The two had moved into the neighbourhood two 
and half years ago, completely unaware that their new home was in the 
path of oncoming social problems. One night, returning to the 
neighbourhood, Loukas saw a stranger, a woman, on the corner. "I 
remember coming home and thinking, hmmm, that doesn't look like 
someone I know, and what are they standing on the street corner for 
at 1 a.m.?" Loukas and Hunter walked around the area and discovered 
prostitution and drug dealing were more common than they realized. 
Calls to police were met with apologetic explanations of limited 
manpower and the fact that prostitution wasn't illegal. The activity 
escalated, and soon it was common to see several women working on 
Fraser at night. The noise created by customers also increased.

Loukas and Hunter weren't satisfied working alone. Last July, they 
sat down at their computer and churned out handouts inviting their 
neighbours to a barbecue to discuss the problem. Nearly 40 people 
showed up, anxious and wanting a solution.

"We thought, wow, we've started something here, and we better do 
something about it," says Loukas.

A second meeting at the church attracted 70 people. By the fourth 
meeting, 200 people were attending. Encouraged by long-time resident 
Tom Little, who became the group's media liaison, Tylor joined and an 
informal group dubbed Block Out was born. The structure was kept 
simple and informal with subcommittees to handle specific problems, a 
core group of organizers and monthly general meetings. A separate 
watchdog group formed to tackle problems around Kingsway.

"I thought maybe this was a group I could do my little bit through," 
says Tylor. "As one person, you can't really accomplish a whole lot."

Realization that there's strength in numbers became key to the 
group's success. It was a lot easier to carry a sign along Fraser 
Street demanding that criminals leave the area when 60 people joined 
in, as happened in August during one of Block Out's first major 
actions. Assisted by Burke and his office, the group also pressured 
Vancouver police for increased patrols. A sting operation by police 
in the fall resulted in a slew of arrests and warnings to prostitutes 
and dealers. The word was out that Block Out wanted the neighbourhood 
cleaned up. By winter, prostitution was down, drug dealing was in 
retreat and many properties looked cleaner.

>From the beginning, Fraser Street residents knew if they succeeded in
pushing out prostitutes and dealers, the illicit activity would only 
move to another part of the city. After all that's how the problem 
came to their area, and that's exactly what happened after similar 
campaigns in the West End, Mount Pleasant, Strathcona, Burnaby and 
Surrey-not to mention other Canadian cities, says SFU criminologist 
John Lowman, who specializes in researching prostitution.

"We have detailed records of the geography of Vancouver's 
prostitution strolls from 1960 to 1999 and one thing is clear: 
vigilante action displaces street prostitution; it does not suppress 
it," he says. "The displacement usually occurs not because of the 
vigilantism as such, but because police step in. Using a variety of 
techniques, including telling women that they will not be prosecuted 
if they work in the recognized strolls, they restore order. If the 
police end the practice of tolerating prostitution in certain areas, 
vigilante action may not achieve anything."

Worse, Lowman says Vancouver police have adopted a strategy of 
allowing informal red light strolls in industrial areas where the 
potential for violence, including murder, against prostitutes has 
risen dangerously.

Raven Bowen, project coordinator for the Mount Pleasant-based 
Prostitution Alternatives Counselling Education, admits residents 
have the right to safe neighbourhoods. But she shares Lowman's 
analysis that community action displaces prostitution as opposed to 
making it disappear. She says poverty and histories of personal abuse 
are the impetus for much of the activity that bothers the residents, 
and she wonders how much real compassion the activist residents have 
for women who work the streets. In March, PACE is renovating six 
housing suites near Fraser and Broadway for young women getting out 
of prostitution, and hopes to secure volunteers assistance from the 
community. "That's when we'll know [if] we're getting community 
support," says Bowen.

Both Bowen and Lowman also argue that if the residents want a 
long-term solution to the problem of prostitution, they should lobby 
the federal government to change laws governing the trade. Bowen says 
this means changing federal laws to allow the creation of safe areas 
in the city for prostitutes to sell sex to men.

But is it fair to saddle a group of ordinary East Side residents with 
the responsibility for a long-term solution to a perennial and 
immensely messy social question like street prostitution?

Tim Everett, who coordinates civilian street patrols for the Dickens 
Community Crime Watch, doesn't think so. Centred along Kingsway near 
the frequently vandalized Charles Dickens elementary school, the 
Dickens group formed in October when, as Everett says, Kingsway 
suddenly became a "war zone."

After receiving training from Const. Gerry Burke and the Cedar 
Cottage Neighbourhood Safety Office, the residents organized daily 
and nightly patrols, reporting suspicious activity to police. As with 
the Fraser group, they've watched prostitution and drug dealing 
decline through the winter. "If these people come into our 
neighbourhood, you can bet we'll write down their licence plate 
numbers and pass them on to police," Everett says. "We've asserted 
the fact that there are residents in the area, and we want to be 
here."

The loose group of volunteers has a diverse range of opinions on 
crime and prostitution. Some, moved by the working women they see on 
nearby streets, have formed a sub-committee to look at far-reaching 
solutions. But finding solutions and convincing governments to 
implement them is not easy for volunteers busy with jobs and families.

"We're not a professional lobby group," says Everett. "We don't have 
anyone on a payroll. We just want to make our neighbourhood safe."

Late last year, councillors Lynne Kennedy and Gordon Price met with 
Fraser and Dickens organizers and were sympathetic. Price, who helped 
organize some of the city's earliest anti-prostitution campaigns in 
the West End in the early 1980s, says residents have the right to 
establish minimum standards of behaviour for their neighbourhoods. 
"Prostitution and drugs seek out weak communities," he says.

But Kennedy says council will never consider safe areas, or red light 
districts, for prostitutes because she says it's a federal government 
issue beyond the city's legal jurisdiction. She also questions the 
morality of the city effectively condoning a trade she considers 
harmful to women.

"We have no power to do that," says Kennedy. "Why would we spend our 
energy on something like that? We'd rather take a positive role."

A positive role for Kennedy means the city's ongoing support for its 
"john schools." Run by the John Howard Society, the schools educate 
men caught soliciting prostitutes about the social consequences both 
for women selling sex and the neighbourhoods in which sex is sold. 
Kennedy says 180 men have gone through the program in the past two 
years, and the city also hopes to sponsor a program to help 
prostitutes quit the trade. But even Kennedy admits the schools will 
never banish prostitution for good.

Const. Gerry Burke finds pushing prostitutes from one street to the 
next ultimately frustrating, and suggests police or the courts be 
given wider powers to channel prostitutes that turn tricks for drug 
money into better detox programs. But Burke isn't holding his breath. 
"They'll still be dealing with this problem when I retire," he says.

For the Dickens and Block Out volunteers, that could mean many more 
years of marches and street patrols. Residents even wonder whether 
the decline in numbers of prostitutes is more due to cold and rainy 
winter weather than their efforts.

Yet Everett, Loukas, Tylor and their fellow activists have no plans 
to leave the neighborhoods they love. In fact, they've widened their 
agenda to include reviving the sagging economic fortunes of their 
commercial districts, peppered with retail vacancies. Members of 
Block Out have met with merchants and encouraged them to take pride 
in the area and the storefronts. Along with the Dickens residents, 
they're also researching the idea of city-sponsored business 
improvement associations to support and attract more enterprises.

Loukas echoes a common view that Fraser has a chance to become like 
Main Street, now undergoing a small-scale urban renaissance. She says 
she's also discovered what a rich resource her previously unknown 
neighbours were. In the fall, anonymous neighbours dropped off boxes 
of vegetables and fruits on Loukas and Hunter's doorstep to thank 
them for getting the ball rolling. It's made them even more 
determined to fight for their neighbourhood.

"It's been fantastic getting to know my neighbours," says Loukas. 
"You can leave your house and know people are looking out for it.

"I think that the relationship I have in this area is something not 
many people have in a big city. It would be horrible to lose."
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MAP posted-by: Kirk Bauer