When I was a child growing up in hockey-mad rural Ontario, it was a part of our winter ritual to board a bus in the dark of a frosty January morning and spend the day riding to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to spend the weekend watching my younger brother play minor league hockey and to attend a Penguins game. We did not go alone. Two bus loads of people from our village of 1200 made this annual pilgrimage. It was a raucous bus ride, fueled by junk food, excitement and alcohol - a disgusting combination when experienced in the back of a Greyhound bus.
Six weeks later folk from Pittsburgh would made the journey north and we would watch more minor league hockey. We couldn't provide the same kind of access to the Toronto Maple Leafs but we were able to provide an experience of rural life that I think was like traveling to a far off foreign land without having to deal with language challenges.
While the hockey was not particularly memorable, the experience of going to Pittsburgh profoundly shaped me because it was in Pittsburgh that I had my first encounter with poverty and with the fear surrounding those who live in poverty. We stayed year after year with a working class white family whose racism toward African Americans was seen as normal. They drove through the city with a length of metal pipe embedded in a rubber hose under the front seat of their station wagon and they had a German Shepherd who would bark menacingly when certain slurs were uttered.
What I remember most about the people we stayed with was their fear, their fear of certain people, their fear of certain parts of the city. It was as though the people who lived in those parts of the city did not share the same hopes and dreams that they had for their lives. That somehow those people were "other," a subspecies of human that one did one's best to stay as far away from as possible.
David Sibley describes the way cities are divided up by class distinctions as a "landscape of exclusion" in which "power is expressed in the monopolization of space and the relegation of weaker groups in society to less desirable environments." (David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West). Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian Walsh write: "The dominant worldview views the poor as dirty, defiled, contaminated, and thus a threat to the ordered and habitual world of the middle and upper-classes....Within such a geography of exclusion, the poor, like our garbage, must go away - to another place....We should not miss the self-understood morality of such an ideology. Insofar as morality is a matter of making life safe and orderly, anything that will be a threat to safety and a force of disorder must be either eradicated or at least kept at a distance. Within this kind of habitus of exclusion, establishing boundaries that keeps the homeless out of our neighborhoods....is not seen to be a moral failure, but a moral success! Protecting one's family and community from contamination is a virtuous act."
While Bouma-Prediger and Walsh are talking most specifically about NIMBYism in middle class neighborhoods, their comments about " a geography of exclusion" reflect in a broad way the reality of the City of Vancouver and at a more local level the struggles of the Downtown Eastside and First United Church these past four years.
For anyone standing outside the Downtown Eastside and looking in, this neighbourhood is a source of much bewilderment and exasperation. How is it possible to have such a visible pocket of poverty in what is otherwise thought to be a "world-class city"? I say that, of course, sarcastically because I don't think that there is a city anywhere in which there are not grinding levels of poverty present. Perhaps what is most shocking to people is the concentration of poverty in such a small geographic area. Add to that the presence of a major east-west street running through the middle of the neighbourhood and the poverty is hard to ignore.
The visible nature of some Downtown Eastside activities and the media focus on homelessness can give one a distorted picture of this community. I have had conversations with people who have not realized that not everyone in the DTES is homeless or addicted or mentally ill. They have been surprised when I have talked about seniors and families and about people with physical disabilities who are also among the residents of this diverse and talented place. If it is true that people working in the arts make on average less than $20,000 a year then this neighbourhood also has more than its share of musicians, artists, performers and writers.
What all of these people have in common is that they are low-income. They are poor. And all of them are trying to maintain a place/a home to live in a city in which the phrase "affordable housing" begs the question, affordable for whom? Many, especially those who struggle with health issues or addictions are often only an income assistance cheque away from homelessness. Those who live in some of the SRO (single resident occupancy) hotels are often inadequately housed living in conditions that are third-world. A significant number have fallen out of the housing game and no longer have the ability to remain housed without a high level of support, a level of support which is not there for many people. And through it all, the process of gentrification marches forward unchecked changing the neighbourhood at an incredible rate. Gentrification is couched in the language of the market. The language, however, disguises this "geography of exclusion" which would seek to "clean up" the neighbourhood and eliminate those who are poor.
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