The Battle of Main and Hastings

Vancouverites thought they elected a mayor who would take control. Instead, the police seem more entrenched than ever

by Reed Eurchuk

The battle of Baghdad took a few days. The battle of the Downtown Eastside is now into three weeks, and there is no end in sight. Chief Constable Jamie Graham has committed to an initial 3 month assault, but expects at least 6 months are needed.

There are many parallels between the Pentagon's relationship to power down south and the Vancouver Police Department's relationship to municipal power. The Pentagon is the permanent government of the USA. Elected officials come and go, but the military potentates, policies and budgets go on and on. Similarly, mayors and municipal political parties come and go, but the city police in many ways dominate city politics.

Like the military budget in the US, the police budget dominates discretionary spending on the municipal level. In the US, retired military officials play important roles in the political system, running for office, running huge multinationals, and as lobbyists. In the last civic election three leading candidates, including two of the three leading mayoral candidates, previously worked for the police. Most importantly, the permanent governments of the police in Vancouver and military in the US set many important policies which effectively override democratic decision making.

Policing versus Democracy

The police crackdown has provided an example of how democracy and policing clash, and how police policies override political policies at times. With this in mind, the question of when this operation was planned is important. When was the current battle plan drawn up? COPE has been in power only 5 short months. Last fall, near the beginning of her campaign, NPA Mayoral candidate Jennifer Clarke said that "We're going to rebuild the Downtown Eastside. I am not going to be the mayor of a city with ghettos." And she said she would take the area "one block at a time." Clarke's Churchillian promise seems to have come to life with Graham's and Mayor Larry Campbell's little "experiment." According to Vancouver Sun reporter Frances Bula, the plan "began to sprout" in the fall of 2002. Is this another sign of the seamless continuity of the permanent government? The discontinuity in the elected government--the change from the NPA to COPE--is belied by the continuity in police decision making.

Pedestrian traffic in the area of Woodward's Department Store declined 60% between 1981 and 1991. This predates the closing of that sto

As the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users' Ann Livingston pointed out, the police policy flies in the face of the results of the recent civic election, which can be interpreted as a resounding affirmation of a harm reduction approach to the city's drug problem. She told the Sun that the police are saying, "We don't care what the people of Vancouver voted for."

The myth that the drug trade created a "hell" at Main and Hastings.

A recent Sun article set out the leading myth explaining the problems of the Downtown Eastside: "The open drug market moved to the corner of Main and Hastings in the mid-1990s, when the open drug scene generally expanded as crack cocaine, which required much more frequent buys, became popular and as police forced drug dealing out of the local bars." Devoid of any historical sense, this explanation could only satisfy a recent immigrant to Vancouver or an amnesiac.

In fact, there are many factors contributing to the rise of the open drug market in the Downtown Eastside. Primary among them are the Vancouver real estate market and its relation to recent Vancouver policing policy

Until the mid-1980s, the drug and sex trades were widely distributed throughout the downtown peninsula. Drugs could be bought as easily on South Granville and up Davie street as they could on the Downtown Eastside. Writing in the Carnegie Newsletter in the mid-1990s, Jeff Sommers reported that police began corralling the drug and prostitution street scene within the Downtown Eastside as early as 1983 when then BC Attorney General Brian Smith got an injunction stopping women from loitering on the street. Expo 86 increased the push to "clean up" Vancouver, as the city prettied itself up for the upcoming fair.

According to Sommers, by 1989 street kids were telling youth workers that police were directing them off the Granville Mall strip to Hastings Street. Next, with the Yaletown redevelopment in full swing, new upscale watering holes and danceterias began dotting Granville, previously the home of Hastings Street-type pubs, frequented by the patrons of the many cheap hotels which used to be in the area. As reported in the right-wing, BC Reports, housing activist John Shayler told a public meeting in July 1995 that "The pressure of the mega-projects . . . moved every drug dealer, pimp and fast-buck artist in the Hastings Street corridor."

The same article cites a Vancouver City report which found that pedestrian traffic in the area of Woodward's Department Store declined 60% between 1981 and 1991. This predates the closing of that store. Retailers on Hastings suffered as vast new shopping space opened both in the downtown area, and throughout the city.

Meanwhile, the Downtown Eastside itself shrunk as Gastown gentrified, thereby closing down more and more low rent rooms. Increasingly, the Downtown Eastside became the "last frontier" for development in the downtown peninsula. Developers salivated over the possible money to be made there.

As Neil Smith wrote in his book, The New Urban Frontier, it is largely "the depreciation and devaluation of capital invested in residential inner-city neighbourhoods," that "produces the objective economic conditions that make capital revaluation (gentrification) a rational market response."

And nowhere in the downtown was there such a disparity between the potential value of the land and actual value property owners received. A few years back, Francis Bula found one area on Hastings where property was going for $70 per square foot. Meanwhile, land less than a mile away went for $1,000 per square foot in the central downtown and $200 to $350 per square foot along Broadway. With such huge disparities of value on land located right in the downtown core, the stage was set for a re-evaluation of the police sanctioned quarantine area on the Downtown Eastside.

"The worst block in Vancouver"

If you only read one essay on the situation in the Downtown Eastside, read The worst block in Vancouver, by Jeff Sommers and Nick Blomley, one of four essays in a good book entitled Stan Douglas: Every Building On 100 West Hastings. "That which now characterizes the neighbourhood--the open drug market, the deepening poverty and desperation, the run-down streetscape--are products of the same forces which induced the proliferation of condo towers, art galleries, restaurants, cafes, night clubs, townhouses, heritage neighbourhoods, and inner city middle class consumers," write Sommers and Blomley.

And they go on, "The open drug market along Hastings Street appeared at precisely the same time that condos were being built in Gastown and in other parts of the downtown peninsula. The sex trade shifted to East Van at the same moment other inner city and downtown neighbourhoods were gentrifying" write Sommers and Blomley. The same forces which prompted the creation of the quarantine zone are now behind its "clean up."

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