The life and death of a Vancouver epithet

by Reed Eurchuk

Words have a history and a use. If you've ever walked west along Hastings Street beginning at about the 800 block East Hastings, you would not be surprised that Vancouver is the birthplace of a cranky term, "poverty pimp" with a complicated history and usage. From the 800 block of East Hastings, the various church, Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), government, social housing, and drug related social services get thicker and thicker. This is the home of the poverty industry, one of the largest employers in the area.

Recently, in the Vancouver Courier, David Carrigg quoted a member or the Anti-Poverty Committee (APC), Debbie Krull, who said, "COPE did well out of the Woodward's squat and so did the poverty pimps."

Who are the poverty pimps? Krull defined them as "the groups down here that administer the government money." In a different article, the same reporter quoted a local resident at one of the current tent camps as saying, "The APC, with their nice homes, pull the strings and the homeless are left in the dark." The idea of each-that there are organizations profiting (some financially others politically) out of the suffering of the poor is identical. In one, an APC member calls others "poverty pimps," in the other a person implies that the APC are the same.

"Poverty pimp" is a home-grown Vancouver epithet. About seven years ago local activist Thia Walter began using it in the Downtown Eastside. She was part of a group trying to radicalize a local NGO. It infuriated many at that time. It still does.

In a phone conversation, Thia Walter claimed credit for coining the phrase, and told me that the idea came to her that some people working in local organizations were like "pimps because they were using the poverty industry to live fairly comfortably off the poor."

The political inconsistencies of some "advocates" of the poor in the Downtown Eastside are legion. During a provincial election following brutal welfare cuts initiated by the NDP government, two local anti-poverty organizations sponsored a demonstration against . . . the Liberals! A local support service for drug addicts adamantly opposed ex-Mayor Philip Owen's mild reform proposals. A group mandated to help aboriginal people spoke against various proposals meant to control the spread of AIDs, a disease which has spread especially viciously within the native community.

"Poverty pimp" is a home-grown Vancouver epithet. About seven years ago local activist Thia Walter began using it in the Downtown Eastside. She was part of a group trying to radicalize a local NGO. It infuriated many at that time. It still does.

Like the lens of a camera which puts into sharp relief forms which from a distance are hard to see, the term "poverty-pimp," polarizes a situation bringing into focus the politics, or lack of politics, powering some local social service agencies. Agencies whose main function is to manage the poor do not question the inequalities which define our society.

On the other hand, the term simplifies a complex situation. For example, three of the most radical groups active on the municipal scene-Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users [VANDU], Housing Action Committee, and PIVOT Legal Society-use space at the Life Skills Centre on Cordova, run by the Portland Hotel Society, a group which administers government money in the Downtown Eastside. Three leading activists with APC now work on the "Long Haul" newspaper, put out by End Legislated Poverty, another group which has a long history of receiving government funding.

Now all anti-poverty groups, regardless of their politics, are liable to be branded with the term. VANDU activist Ann Livingston told me a story of an angry ex-VANDU member who shadowed her throughout the Downtown Eastside, following ten feet behind her yelling, "Poverty Pimp!" at her every few steps. And the APC, a democratic organization run by volunteers and comprised of low-wage workers, people on income assistance, and students are implicitly being branded with the same epithet. The term has been inflated to the point of uselessness. What's next? People without tents will accuse those with plush tents of gentrifying the park?

Livingston told me that the problem originates when groups have faint ties to their supposed constituencies. The answer, stated Livingston, is to insist on democratic organizations where the group "represented" has control over the organization. That control needs to be built into the organization structurally. Control has to originate in the membership, not the leadership, or worse, the paid employees, of the organization.

Born in the Downtown Eastside at a time of deepening poverty and an epidemic of drug overdose deaths, "poverty pimp" put the political role of social service organizations into hard focus. At the same time, the term incorporates a crass simplification of a fluid situation, and spurns potential allies. In today's political atmosphere, the poor need all the allies they can get.

****