Pubdate: Sat, 08 Feb 2003
Source: Victoria Times-Colonist (CN BC)
Copyright: 2003 Times Colonist
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/victoria/timescolonist/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/481
Author: Jody Paterson, Darren Stone

THE STREETS OF HARD KNOCKS

Meet Jeff, one of about a dozen addicted people living on downtown streets. 
He's 25 and has HIV. He's also just out of jail and prohibited by the 
courts from being in the core, but he's here anyway because it's got all 
the services he needs.

Over there, that's Yakob. He's the odd duck in the funny hat, the one with 
"Jesus the Light" written on the back of his jacket. Downtown police Sgt. 
Darren Laur says there are about eight people like Yakob living on the 
streets, some of them drug addicts as well.

That neatly dressed one pushing the shopping cart full of stuff? He's one 
of a dozen or so who Laur describes as "homeless by default." Some of them 
moved out here from other provinces hoping for work and didn't find it. Or 
they did, but haven't quite saved enough money for a damage deposit. 
They're generally not addicted to anything beyond the occasional beer.

"I don't have a hard-luck story," said one such man, lined up for a free 
hotdog outside City Hall last week. "I'm just unemployed."

Then there are the kids like Alex Moreau, the 17-year-old who drifted into 
town seven months ago from Montreal and now panhandles on Douglas Street. 
He's got a loving family back home in Quebec, and calls his mom at least 
once a month. Laur thinks of kids like Moreau as "urban nomads," and 
figures there are probably 25 of them living on the streets now.

Sixty all told, then, and maybe another 40 or so drug dealers, sex-trade 
workers and hangers-on thrown into the mix during working hours. A small 
number in a region of more than 300,000, but living large enough to drive 
downtown merchants and Victoria city councillors mad.

Some of the addicts leave their syringes lying around. Some inject where 
people can see them. Others sleep in store-owners' doorways, or plop 
themselves and their dogs nearby and spend the day begging. A few commit 
crimes every day, either breaking into cars or selling drugs to support 
their own habits.

It's no Downtown Eastside -- anyone who has been to Vancouver's desperate 
drug ghetto always emphasizes that point. But Victoria's social problems 
are definitely showing. And the one thing that all sides of the issue agree 
on is that it's time to act.

Social agencies say the streets are meaner than ever: more people sleeping 
on the streets, more working in the sex trade, more using drugs. The needle 
exchange handed out a record 60,000 syringes in December, almost twice as 
many as in past months.

The agencies blame cuts to income assistance, and caution that things can 
only get worse next year when anyone on welfare for two years or more is 
cut off. Much of the street community falls into that category.

Downtown merchants are alarmed, too, and not only about street issues. Some 
play down the core's social problems but say they're increasingly worried 
about the growing number of boarded-up store fronts at key properties on 
Yates, Government and Johnson. Others, however, believe that's the result 
of the street scene, which they say is driving customers away.

"We need to be able to say to the tourists who are coming in here, 'Look, 
our streets are clean. Nobody's going to try to sell you drugs or sex. You 
aren't going to have to explain to your five-year-old what a needle is,' " 
says Denyce Burrows, a florist in the downtown for 20 years.

"You really have to nip these things in the bud. And this is way beyond the 
bud stage."

The city has a new plan. It's working with the regional health authority to 
put more outreach workers on the street and build a sobering centre, which 
was lost two years ago with the closure of Gateway due to funding cuts.

Police will also boost their presence downtown and target drug dealers, not 
only downtown but in any neighbourhood the displaced dealers move to. 
Victoria police Chief Paul Battershill says that kind of one-two punch has 
been proven in other cities to at least reduce the visibility of 
trafficking, if not the actual incidence.

But the events that put people on the streets and drug dealers on the 
corner are complex. And figuring out how to set them right is not quick, 
simple or certain, as has been demonstrated by various failed attempts in 
the past to curb the street scene.

The creation in the 1970s of the Red Zone, initially limited to Bastion 
Square, was one of the earliest measures. The quiet square was the hot spot 
for trafficking back in those days (which speaks to another problem for 
anyone trying to get a handle on the vice trade -- it moves) and the 
law-makers thought they could fix the problem by banning chronic offenders 
from the area.

The zone has since expanded to a one-square-kilometre section of downtown, 
bounded by Chatham, Cook, Belleville and Wharf/Store. Traffickers are 
routinely "red-zoned" when sentenced, and risk going back to jail if caught 
in the prohibited area. But the sale of sex and drugs in the Red Zone has 
carried on regardless, maintained by a steady stream of new suppliers.

Throughout the last two decades, there have been any number of police task 
forces, citizens' coalitions, business associations and merchants' groups 
examining the problems of the downtown. The most recent was the Downtown 
Crunch in 1998, which, among other things, established a code of etiquette 
for panhandlers. Unfortunately, polite panhandling hasn't been enough.

With each waxing and waning of interest, various shelters and treatment 
centres and drop-ins have opened and closed and opened again. In time they 
began to be seen as part of the problem in their own right as storeowners 
lamented the concentration of social services downtown. Still, the kids 
kept coming downtown with their bongo drums and dogs, and the drugs kept 
flowing.

Compounding the problem is the fact that any win for the downtown always 
comes at the expense of some other neighbourhood. Squeeze the drug trade 
out of Holiday Court or from the corner of Pandora and Douglas, and it 
relocates to Speed Avenue, and then Fernwood. Squeeze the sex trade out of 
lower Government Street, and it moves to the Gorge industrial zone, or 
Hillside and Quadra.

Why so little progress? The conflict could turn out to be the nature of the 
city, says AIDS Vancouver Island executive director Miki Hansen.

"You can go back to the cities where they were first opening methadone 
clinics in the 1970s because there were problems -- Prince George, 
Kamloops, Victoria, Vancouver -- and those communities are still struggling 
with these kinds of issues," says Hansen.

Hansen wonders whether Victorians are really worrying about the fundamental 
issues at the root of drug addiction, prostitution and poverty, or are just 
sick of having to acknowledge their existence.

The storm over the Johnson Street Parkade last month underscores that 
point. The parkade's former security guard, who retired in the summer, used 
to let people inject inside as long as they cleaned up their mess and moved 
on quickly, recalls one injection-drug user.

The guard who replaced the retiree didn't have the same tolerance. Tensions 
culminated in a fight between the new guard and a young female drug addict. 
She brandished a dirty needle when he yelled at her about being in the 
parkade, and he hit her in the head with a flashlight hard enough to cause 
a brain hemorrhage.

And suddenly, everybody was talking about the problem downtown.

"The big question is how a society handles folks who don't fit in," says 
Hansen. "Are we compassionate and try to help them remain part of the 
community? Or do we get mad and lock them up?"

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and there are few 
places where that's more evident than on the streets.

There's a direct correlation, for instance, between the province's decision 
to phase out Riverview psychiatric hospital in the 1980s and the number of 
mentally ill people now living on B.C. streets. Abandoned to the fates, 
they ended up homeless -- and from there, often drug-addicted.

There's also a direct link between the foster system and the people who end 
up on the street. Not all foster kids fall to the streets and not all kids 
on the street grew up in foster homes, but even the most cursory of surveys 
downtown turns up a disproportionate number of former foster children with 
no family support. They, too, often end up drug-addicted.

Over in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside, there's a direct 
connection between a political decision to back off on policing in the area 
a few years ago and the subsequent boom in the open drug market. The 
displacement of hundreds of low-income earners in the "cleanup" of 
Vancouver for Expo 86 was directly linked to a surge in the homeless 
population. The crackdown on prostitution around Granville Street was 
directly responsible for a new prostitution stroll around Mount Pleasant.

Victoria's current problems are a little of all of those things, 
intensified by some of the best winter weather in Canada. The mild winters 
make living on the streets possible, and even draw young panhandlers from 
elsewhere in the country.

"My mom says I'm her missionary," says panhandler Benoit Hallis, a Montreal 
transplant who likes to considers himself a de-facto street outreach 
worker. He used to be an addict, but that was seven years ago; now, he's 
just a young man who likes living on Victoria's streets.

Panhandlers are an ongoing annoyance for merchants downtown, as are the 
young graffiti "artists" who deface buildings and leave owners to foot the 
bill for the mandatory cleanup.

"I have compassion," downtown building owner Gerald Hartwig said at a 
chamber of commerce meeting last week on problems downtown. "I would be 
more than happy to help the homeless, but we're at the point where the 
other 99 per cent need help. This problem is not going to be addressed by 
tolerance, but by respect."

But Battershill says there's little that can be done about loitering and 
begging on public property.

And now that the B.C. Supreme Court has ruled that begging is a legitimate 
form of expression under the Charter of Rights, shopkeepers may have little 
choice but to give up on police intervention and adopt a practice that's 
already working well for some of their peers: Asking panhandlers to move 
along when it starts to affect business.

Addiction is another matter.

If you live, work or play in the downtown with any kind of regularity, you 
worry about stumbling across discarded syringes, somebody injecting, or 
finding your car broken into. There may be just 12 hard-core addicts living 
on downtown streets, but some of them inject 25 or more times a day and 
have to raise several hundred dollars for their drugs.

And regardless of where you live in the region, you'll also have to worry 
about your own children's access to drugs. Any child can easily buy a wide 
range of drugs at several well-known corners downtown.

"Santa, please give me a baseball bat so I can take care of the 
crystal-meth dealer," muttered one panhandler tired of seeing teenagers 
lured onto the amphetamine.

If you're an addict yourself, you'll be worrying about diseases ranging 
from hepatitis-C (outreach workers say an addict typically contracts the 
virus within six months of starting to inject) to life-threatening 
abscesses caused by contaminated drugs and poor injection habits. You'll be 
at risk of contracting AIDS, going to jail, dying of an overdose, or just 
plain collapsing from lack of good food and sufficient sleep.

The city is pondering a safe-injection site, which would at least get rid 
of some of the discarded syringes and public drug use while also improving 
addicts' access to health services. But such a facility is meant to go hand 
in hand with treatment -- something that's in scarce supply in Victoria or 
anywhere on Vancouver Island.

There's a detox facility in Victoria to serve the Island and 10 rehab beds 
for longer stays, and a constant waiting list for both. The lack of 
services is even more critical for youth. Funding has been cut to the point 
that the handful of detox beds set aside for them are available for just 17 
days a month.

Compare that to Switzerland, about the same size as Vancouver Island and 
with a similar drug-dependent population. The country has 5,000 detox beds 
and 1,300 residential treatment beds. B.C. all told has no more than 100 of 
each.

It's like the system is always finding new ways to complicate the problem, 
says Dave Stewart, of the Upper Room shelter and soup kitchen.

Guys like him and Rev. Al Tysick, of the Open Door, used to be able to put 
in the word and get people into treatment, says Stewart. But now there's a 
requirement that they be referred by a doctor.

That would be fine if addicts would go to a doctor, he says. But fearful of 
being judged -- or caught in the common dilemma of not being able to afford 
the identification they need to qualify for a Care card -- they won't. The 
profoundly ill young woman who was hit in the head in the Johnson Street 
Parkade desperately needs detox, says Stewart, but he can't convince her to 
see a doctor.

There are answers to the problems downtown, or at least some strategies to 
mitigate the worst of them, says MaryKay MacVicar. But the acting 
co-ordinator of street outreach at AIDS Vancouver Island says it's going to 
take time and effort, and nobody wants to hear that.

"It seems to me that there was a time there when we went into social 
problems with a long-term view, with an eye to fixing the underlying 
cause," says MacVicar. "These days, everything just seems to be going into 
crisis mode."

Police have borne much of the criticism for the situation in the downtown. 
Merchants can't understand why panhandlers aren't being arrested, or why 
police can't simply haul away all the drug dealers.

But the persistence of addiction and trafficking worldwide, even while 
increasing enforcement has been directed at the problem in the past two 
decades, speaks to more complex factors at work. Chief among them is that 
addiction and homelessness are typically all tangled up in how people feel 
about themselves, and that's not an easy thing to fix.

Not that anyone seems to be trying that hard, notes Victoria police Sgt. 
Darren Laur, who oversees the downtown beat. "We can only do so much," says 
Laur. "As long as we have addicts, we'll have traffickers. As long as we 
have no care for these people, we'll have problems downtown.

"We can put them into jail, but I'll tell you what will happen to them. 
They'll come out 40 or 50 pounds heavier and all cleaned up, and then in no 
time they'll be back to their old ways because there's nothing out here for 
them."

Even if there was, not everyone will choose to be helped.

More shelters, while a very good first step, will not automatically end all 
homelessness. Yakob has lived on the streets of various Canadian cities for 
almost 30 years, and likes it that way. Several people living on the 
streets say they'd rather sleep outside than share a room in a shelter with 
strangers.

Recovering addicts have a particularly difficult time staying in any 
shelter where drug use is quietly condoned. (On the other side of that 
issue, addicts would be out on the streets if shelters got too stringent.)

"Right now, I'm choosing to be homeless," says Little Red Riding Hood, a 
prostitute who works on the fringes of the downtown. "I found that my drug 
addiction was leading to too many people around me, and that led me to a 
lot of noise. And that led me to problems with police."

Finding work would help people off the streets as well. But it's no 
guarantee. The rental market is tight even for the middle-class, notes 
former Victoria mayor David Turner. Substance-abuse problems are also a 
poor fit with steady work and happy landlords, and just saving up for the 
damage deposit can be a major stumbling block when people are starting from 
the point of zero income.

"The only place I could afford was one of those apartments where the drugs 
are everywhere, and I just couldn't live in that," says Frank, who admits 
to being weary of living on the streets at age 50. "For me to get a 
one-bedroom, I'm going to need $600 a month. How am I going to get that?"

And even dozens of additional treatment beds and the daily arrest of drug 
traffickers wouldn't be enough to eliminate addiction, says sex-trade 
outreach worker Melissa Macaulay, clean for 18 months now.

"There's so much to recovery," she says. "It's not just about getting off 
the drugs and you're cured, or I would have been fine years ago. Addicted 
people on the streets have usually grown up so used to abuse that they 
think it's normal to keep on hurting themselves."

As for panhandling, that just may end up being Victoria's permanent 
trademark. Short of telling panhandlers to be nice and confiscating their 
packs every once in a while, police say they're unable to do much more than 
that. Begging is a constitutional right, and the current trend toward 
window signs threatening prosecution hasn't held up in court.

Besides, who wouldn't pick Victoria?

"You can't beat the weather," says Benoit Hallis, the panhandler from 
Quebec. "It's minus-35 in Montreal right now."

Who They Are:

There are a million stories in the big city, as the saying goes. So here 
are a few, a handful of thumbnail sketches of people living and working on 
Victoria's streets. Some names have been changed:

Randy -- He moved here from Galiano Island in November thinking he had 
found a job. But he says he worked for two weeks doing masonry and then his 
boss stiffed him for his paycheque. He has high hopes of being off the 
street within the next week, as soon as he can find more work.

Janine -- She's a drug addict from Edmonton who has been living on and off 
the streets of Victoria and Vancouver for the past 13 years. She's homeless 
now; her landlord threw her out two weeks ago for making too much noise. 
That's a problem, as she's under house arrest for trafficking and is 
supposed to remain at home every night from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

She hopes to move to Courtenay soon. Her friend has cancer, and they've got 
plans to start growing medicinal marijuana.

Jeff -- Fresh out of jail on a trafficking conviction, he's a 25-year-old 
heroin addict from Alberta. His dad has been in the penitentiary for as 
long as Jeff can remember, and his mother is a drug addict. When Jeff told 
her six months ago that he was HIV-positive, she cried.

He and his girlfriend get by on $185 a month in income assistance and 
whatever else they can come up with. They mostly sleep in her car. His 
biggest beef is the litter his fellow addicts leave behind after they inject.

Aaron -- Age 41, he has a taste for cocaine and alcohol but says his 
addiction is "under control." He has been living on and off the streets for 
a year now. It's not great, but it's better than dealing with the "slum 
landlords" at the places he has been able to afford.

He gets regular work as a construction labourer, but herniated a disc in 
his back several months ago and hasn't worked since.

"I understand now how people end up homeless," he says. "A lot of people 
look down on addicts and the homeless, but I don't any more."

Wayne -- He grew up in Nanaimo and moved to Vancouver at age 19, relocating 
to Victoria six years ago after "growing up and deciding it was time to 
come home."

He isn't homeless or unemployed, but he spends much of his spare time on 
downtown streets. On this particular night, he was lined up outside City 
Hall for a free hotdog from Christian outreach worker Cliff Doerksen.

He has sympathy for police and city business leaders trying to grapple with 
the problems of the downtown: "You don't want the city to be gross and 
disgusting for tourists."

Susan -- She moved to B.C. from Alberta with her parents when she was 
small, and lived on the streets and in the shelters of Victoria and 
Vancouver from ages 13 to 17. "Abusive family," she explains.

She's 20 now and has recently found a place to live, but still comes 
downtown every night to sell drugs. She's doing well on the methadone 
program and no longer uses heroin.

Yakob -- He's a 55-year-old schizophrenic from Manitoba, and by his own 
estimation has lived on one Canadian street or another since the early 
1970s. He settled in Victoria three years ago.

He has no income and won't stay in the shelters. He survives by eating 
garbage and grabbing sleep "wherever I am -- I

couldn't care less what happens to my body."

When he was living on the streets in Manitoba and Ontario, police would 
arrest him two or three times a year and put him in jail or a mental 
hospital. He's grateful that no one has arrested him since his arrival in 
Victoria.

William -- Age 19 and Victoria-born, he's a panhandler who says anyone 
going hungry in the city "must be stupid." By his tally there are 53 
different street agencies that give out food regularly, and he sometimes 
worries that all that free food is cutting into the panhandling donations.

"One of the reasons people won't give you money is because they know 
there's so much free food here," he says.

He's got a long, long criminal record for crimes including break-ins, 
assault, trafficking and carrying concealed weapons. That and a lack of 
clean clothes are going to make it tough to find work, he figures, which 
will in turn make it tough to get off the streets.

Craig -- He's got a place to live, but has spent the past 13 years hanging 
around downtown. On this day, he's seated outside Blenz coffee shop at the 
corner of Johnson and Douglas. "This is my community," he says.

He doesn't deal drugs, nor does he like it that the police often suspect 
that he does. Just because he hangs around on the corner doesn't mean he's 
up to anything bad, he says.

"The police say to me: 'We see you downtown all the time.' Yeah? Well, I 
see them downtown all the time, too."
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens