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." - --- MAP posted-by: Kirk Bauer