Pubdate: Thu, 26 Apr 2012
Source: National Post (Canada)
Copyright: 2012 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU
Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286
Author: Mike Comrie

'KIDS ON THE STREET'

A father of two explains what it's like to raise young children just
around the corner from the worst neighbourhood in Canada

I'm at Carrall and Hastings in the heart of Vancouver's grim Downtown
Eastside. I'm walking home from Gastown with my two young boys, aged
six and three. As we approach, a rough looking woman makes a clumsy
attempt to hide her crack pipe.

"Kids on the street," she yells up and down the block, "Kids on the
street!"

A few of the other dodgy characters try to hide their drugs, too, or
shuffle a few steps into the alley until we pass. I smile and thank
her. She smiles back, dirty and toothless and old before her time, but
it's clear that she's happy to see the children, and she tells me my
kids are cute. My boys, as usual, fail to notice most of this: the
drugs, the mental illness, the human wreckage all around them. This is
probably for the best, growing up, as they are, next to the worst
neighbourhood in Canada.

For the past six years, our family has lived just around the corner
from the worst stretch of Vancouver's notorious East Hastings Street.
Curiously, we chose to move here while my wife was expecting, about
nine years ago. We had found a condo that we could actually afford, so
we purchased a unit pre-construction, gambling that the neighbourhood
would improve significantly by the time our building was completed. It
didn't. We moved in anyway, hopeful that change was just around the
corner. It wasn't.

Housing prices being what they are in Vancouver, I expect that more
families will consider taking a chance on "improving" neighbourhoods,
as we did. And they will find, as we did, that addicts don't make the
best neighbours.

While every user's personal story is surely tragic, it remains a fact
that addiction does terrible things to people. Junkies steal; they
prostitute themselves; they leave needles and feces in the streets.
The Downtown Eastside may be home to my city's least fortunate, but it
is also home to my city's least sanitary, least responsible and least
polite. Anybody who thinks drugs are glamorous should spend some time
around here.

If it is true that a parent will always find something to worry about,
then the nice thing about our neighbourhood is that one never has to
look very far. Take intravenous drugs, for example. I regularly see
carelessly discarded needles: in the alley behind our building, on the
way to school, just outside the entrance to the local daycare centres.
I have found rigs abandoned in playgrounds. One morning, at our local
bus stop, there were literally dozens of unwrapped and apparently
unused syringes left piled in a heap, like a particularly hazardous
game of pick-up sticks.

At a community meeting I attended when we first moved into the area, a
police officer warned against ever attempting to confront a street
person: Their lives are hard and therefore most carry a hidden weapon
of some kind, even if it's just a sharp piece of metal they found in
an alley. Shortly thereafter, as if to illustrate, I watched a rather
large woman discourage a would-be aggressor by somehow producing a
full-sized baseball bat from the inside of her sweatpants. More to the
point, about three years ago, some psycho put a three metre piece of
rebar through another man's head. This took place in broad daylight,
just across from the local McDonald's, where my kids get their Happy
Meals.

Luckily, we skipped the McNuggets that day, although we haven't always
been able to avoid the ugly side of the neighbourhood. On one
occasion, I was walking to Gastown with my eldest and we found
ourselves behind a pair of skid row toughs. One of these charmers
glanced back over his shoulder and saw that he was being followed by a
small child. He then coaxed an unfortunate pigeon into a small alcove,
cornered the poor bird and proceeded to stomp it to death. My boy? He
was looking the other way, completely oblivious.

On another occasion, in Shanghai Alley with both of my children, we
passed a drunk, sprawled across the pavement, penis hanging out, lying
in a large and expanding pool of his own urine. I was wondering how I
could explain this to the kids, until I realized that neither of them
had actually seen it.

Another morning, on our way to daycare, a man wandered out from behind
the Chinatown gate and was immediately struck by a bus. Again,
somehow, both boys missed it. They don't, however, miss everything
and, living where we do, they have surely seen more than their share
of open drug use and untreated mental illness. Luckily, children are
naive: they tend to assume that their parents are in control and that
everything is as it should be, and they even can't begin to imagine
what a hooker is or why that group of people might want to huddle
around that little glass pipe.

Our boys may be largely blind to our district's shortcomings, but it
is not so easy for mom and dad. When we first moved in, as if to
emphasize the sheer crappiness of our new neighbourhood, the only
child care we could find was located in upscale Coal Harbour. Each
morning, my boys and I would commute from Pigeon Park to Stanley Park,
from the country's poorest postal code to one of its wealthiest. We'd
catch the bus in front of Kitty's Beauty Studio on Pender at Carrall.
At most any time of day there would be an assortment of unsavoury
characters holding court. Consequently, my kids and I would often wait
for the bus some distance from the actual stop. This occurred
frequently enough that one of the regular bus drivers offered to start
picking us up half way down the block. This worked well, for in truth,
the bus shelter was best avoided even when it wasn't occupied. Filthy
items of clothing were left behind with surprising regularity, and it
was often used as! a toilet.

Understandably, children were rare in these parts when we first moved
in, and many of the long-time area residents were clearly surprised -
and delighted - to see ours. So much so, in fact, that my wife and I
had to quickly learn how to politely decline enthusiastic gifts of
"recycled" stuffed animals offered by dumpster divers and how to take
it in stride when alarmingly filthy individuals, clearly intoxicated
and probably insane, wanted to exchange baby talk with our little ones.

So why did we stay here? I suppose it helped that, as middle-class
parents moving into a decidedly un-middleclass neighbourhood, our
hopes were not high in the first place. Furthermore, we were
encouraged by the fact that families had been raising children in
nearby Chinatown and Strathcona, without obvious ill effect, for a
very long time. But mainly, we were able to ride out the rough patches
because we always knew that our time here was optional: either the
area would improve or we would leave. Many will never have that choice.

Recently, parts of the neighbourhood have improved, and significantly.
A couple of years back, the completion of several residential towers
quite rapidly turned our formerly desolate block into an up and coming
district, complete with overpriced French bulldogs. There are now
coffee shops and grocery stores and dry cleaners and pizza places
where, not long ago, there was nothing. For years, we were the only
fools braving the local playground, dodging the winos and crack heads,
checking beneath the monkey bars for needles and broken glass. Today,
there are always kids around, there's a beautiful new daycare just
across the street and funding has just been announced for an
elementary school. Heck, these days, even the walk to Gastown isn't
quite as scary.

It took a while, but we bet on gentrification, and - knock on wood -
it's happening. Of course, when a toddler is taken hostage at a
daycare, as happened about a year ago just a few blocks away, you do
have reservations.

And, to be sure, if anything serious had ever happened to a family
member - or if my kids paid more attention to their surroundings - I
might be telling a completely different story. But, with hindsight,
this was a good move for us: We own an affordable home in downtown
Vancouver, and I don't think we could have pulled that off if we
hadn't been willing to take a chance on a dodgy neighbourhood. So, if
any parents out there are considering a similar choice, it can be
done, but you will need to stay alert, avoid the clearly problematic
individuals and situations, and hope that your kids won't be exposed
to anything too extreme. And good luck, because the next wave of real
estate refugees will be moving even closer to ground zero.
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D