For the last two months there has been a dirty, dangerous tent slum along East Hastings St. for roughly six blocks.
Tents so crammed together that passersby cannot even safely navigate.
Needles and human excrement.
Mouths agape Japanese ESL and German tourists alike walk past one of the world’s dirtiest and most disease ridden areas.
‘What is going on here?!”,
Nobody knows, most of all the mayor.
City Hall has done virtually nothing to find housing or make the slum more livable.
For two weeks they didn’t even pick up the trash.
Last week wanting to show that he is doing something the mayor claimed that the city is making ‘good progress’ on the tent slum. In fact, sadly there is zero discernible improvement.
The mayor went on to say he wanted to be ‘compassionate’ to ‘our neighbors’.
What he didn’t say from his news conference way across town was that several days before a completely naked man was shot dead in the area by the Vancouver Police.
The man had taken off his clothing after being bear sprayed.
He was begging for help when the Vancouver Police arrived.
Instead, he was shot dead with a bean bag gun.
The police explanation said an individual was acting ‘erratically’.
Sadly, shootings, stabbings and fires are all too common in Vancouver’s tent slum.
The reason the slum keeps growing?
There is little interest in poor people.
And even less interest in helping poor people.
This is, however, an incredibly unwise way to think.
Find decent housing for every one of the more than three hundred people in Vancouver’s tent slum and we all benefit.
The city will be safer, more livable. Visitors won’t be scared back to their own, safe countries.
Vancouver has fallen from the best place to live in the world to slum central.
Let’s get smart, shall we?
City Hall has been doing a great job handing out permits for investment condos that mostly sit vacant.
How about going BIG on social housing?
And please! No more slums, okay?