The Heatley Block

I recieved a phone call from the Vancouver Public Library that the Carnegie Library was never moving and neither is the children’s library in the school. The fate of the Heatley Block is still in question.

The Heatley block is located at the corner of Heatley and Hastings Street.  It was recently purchased by the City of Vancouver and is operated by Atira Property Management.    Rogan Sinclair along with his partner Kim, are the site managers for the Heatley Block.  They have recently moved in with their kids Christmas and Mickey this past year.  The previous building they were in was located at 29 west Hastings street next to Army and Navy, not super kid friendly, but they managed.  I met Christmas and Mickey at Strathcona Community Centre where i have worked on and off for about 12 years.  They were all very happy about this move to the Heatley Block. Close to the school, way more space for them as a family, quieter, and places to play outside, 2 parks just down the street.   They are adaptable kids, they’ll figure it out if their new home gets torn down.  They already are.  They have been going around with petitions, Mickey told me they have  3 pages filled up already.   Their parents are bound by who they work for to not respond, but their kids aren’t.  I feel really proud of them that they feel empowered enough to respond, and i want to support them how i can.  I guess that’s why i’m writing about them, a small way of helping.   They are 2 very good reasons amongst many as to why the Heatley Block should stay put.

The proposal goes something like this:  Tear down the Heatley block as well as the adjacent building belonging to Pivot Legal Society(who will sell their building to the city for this project)  and build an 8 storey tower containing 200 square foot boxes of housing and a brand new library on Hastings Street, with some new retail space.  This part of the plan is still a little fuzzy for me, maybe hard to believe, but the Children’s library at the School would be closed and moved to Hastings Street as well as the Carnegie Library.  There has been an alternate proposal by a residents group to move the proposed new library in to the oldest part of Strathcona Elementary School, also slated for demolition.

So why is any of this wrong, new library, new affordable housing, all good right?  No actually, its all supposed to sound good, just like South East False Creek,which has seen all but 20 percent of its affordable housing squeezed out, and the future of that is still debatable. The high costs of construction can be trumped out to add a few more floors on, make the project half market or more and why not throw a Starbucks downstairs, not out of the realm of possibility, their is much history to draw upon.  So why  should it stay put?  Carnegie Library for starters is one of the most used libraries in the City.  The Children’s library at the School is also well used and very convenient and safe for the kids, that don’t have to walk out to a highway to get their books.  For all of the new residents who are too freaked out to go to Carnegie for their books, they could go to the oldest part of the School that could house a full collection with an expanded children’s section.  There are also a number of viable local businesses at street level, including the most recent tenant Spartacus Books, which has been in and around the neighbourhood for over 30 years.

We don’t seem to get the concept of heritage and why it is actually important.  Our idea of heritage is gutting the interior, keeping the facade and popping a tower in the middle.  Not heritage.  Heritage is about people and memory and story and the feel of places that have had thousands of people run through them. People who have witnessed decades of changes.

Home is different than housing. This concept has been forgotten In the flurry of guilt and shame around the issue of homelessness and poverty in our city, “lets just house as many people as we can, 200 square feet, better than nothing”.  Tell that to the Sinclair’s, who after a very long time in housing, just found home.

http://www.petitiononline.com/heatley/petition.html

Our house, is a very, very, very fine house

Headed off this morning with more than a touch of guilt, knowing i wouldn’t be able to get back in time for the memorial i was supposed to go to this afternoon.  A memorial for a woman named Saille that i worked with briefly on the arts council who was an artist and an activist.  I thought of her a lot today, and my mom, who is in the hospital.  I thought of how grateful i am to be able bodied, to be alive. We headed out this morning, Murray and I, as we have on many occasions to explore the lakes, rivers, side roads, mountains, and thrift shops of this beautiful province. I think of these drives as if we were going in to a house of worship, the big church, the grand cathedral, and Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen, along with Sharon and Murray are loudly singing the hymns.   We were heading to Chehalis lake, which according to Murray is one of the most beautiful lakes he has ever seen.  We drive up and find out that the road is washed out and closed. We drive down towards an area where there are more lakes up a very rough road.  We stop at Weaver Lake and quickly leave.  The place is jammed, Shaggy is blasting from the stereo of this huge black truck, there are lots of kids screaming and a mom sprawled out on a rubber dingy, tuning out, relaxing amidst the home away from home created at the lake.

Next stop, Grace Lake.  A little swampy to get in to , but quiet, beautiful and great swimming. Put our suits on the log and swam around in the great natural tub for about an hour.  Dragonflies zooming over my face while i was floating on my back, buzzing around my head while i was swimming, i couldn’t stop laughing, i felt like they were playing with me.   We got out and headed back down the dusty road and stopped at Chehalis River. The water is crystal clear, freezing cold and full of beautiful rocks and families in scuba gear floating along with the current. Quick dip in the river, hard to stand near water and not go in, no matter how cold. We get out, get in the car and find a good road to drive down, one that takes us to another beautiful place.  This time, the Limbert Mountain Farm, the Bouchard’s are the fourth generation on this 100yr old farm.  They sell herbs, have a tea room, gift shop and offer cooking classes, a bit like my dream place.  We decide to stay and splurge on lunch.  We sit outside overlooking the field and the apple trees, we could be almost anywhere, Tuscany, Agassiz?  We head off and stop again, this time for a cow and her new baby calf, just finding its legs, wobbling up, searching for its balance and getting a reassuring lick on the bum from his mom, umbilical cord still dangling from its belly.  The mother cow stares at us, hard. I look in to her eyes to try and reassure her that harming either of them is the last thing on our minds, futile i guess, since this is our historic relationship. We move on, since this is the only real way to reassure both of them that we are not there to harm them, and it was time to leave. We drive further ahead, contemplating another lake, me still having pangs of guilt for not being at the memorial.  Murray spots a black bear standing up in a corn field, he sees us and runs, a streak of black running through the corn, he pops his head up again,  sees were still there, he runs, we leave for the next lake.

Thought i was done at this point.  There’s always a point in the day where i feel like if we left now, would it be perfect, was it enough? We keep going, as we almost always do, even when it seems like its time to go.  I let Murray take me down these roads, to these lakes, because mostly i trust his intuition and i need to trust mine that i can let someone take me somewhere and i will be fine, no need to rush back, i can just keep looking, taking it all in, this beautiful and complex world i get to live in.  Lake of the Woods is in Hope (named after a huge lake that straddles the Manitoba-Ontario border) . I thought it would be a lake in the woods, its more like Lake off the Highway in the Woods.  Great swimming though, easy to walk in to, perfect temperature.  We swim towards these large rocks on the other side of the lake.  I’m struggling for air, asthma. I stop and find my footing on some rocks at the half-way point, get some air, and we swim on to our destination.  We climb on to the large rocks, and minnows are swimming all around me, i’m laughing, because like the dragonflies, they seem more curious than frightened by me. I have this thought that they might swim in to my bottoms, and i’m not sure what i would do, or could do.  We swim  back to shore, struggling for air again, and remembering the actor Gael Garcia Bernal in The Motorcycle Diaries.  Playing Che Guevara, plagued with debilitating asthma, he swims across the water one night to the leper colony, he is breathless on his arrival, but he makes it. I wonder sometimes if i could cure myself with enough swimming.

We head towards home, but as always, many stops in between. A beautiful creek that Murray has made a mental note to come back to where we find a rock in the shape of a bicycle seat.  A yard sale we have to stop at to get 10cent books and talk to the family.  We see a sign along the highway that says Montreal Smoked Meat, we turn around and have dinner.  My last smoked meat sandwich was at Schwartz’s, so this sandwich had some pretty tough competition.  It was Dunn’s smoked meat still packed like a roll on the rye, very so so.  We head home, for real this time.  I am exhausted, i feel lake soft.  I am looking forward to getting in to bed.  I thought of this day as a way of honouring myself,  Saille, and now that i think about it, every one i know who couldn’t be there to have dragonflies buzzing around their head, floating under the blue sky and drinking lavender lemonade at a 100 year old farm, along with my friend, who takes every chance he has to explore and appreciate the natural world, our collective house, in a curious and respectful way.

Neighbours

I was feeling a bit cruddy today, cancelled my meeting this morning and got someone to come in to work for me this afternoon.  Combination of exhaustion and depression, always hard to know what comes first since one is a by-product of the other. Wrote a bit today, watched the last scene of The Wedding Singer on youtube and slept alot.  Headed out for a walk this evening to get something sweet, or at least that was what was in my head, milkshake at The Roundel. The Roundel was closed so i  walked around the block and back up to the grocery store on Penticton Street to get some berries, healthier choice.  I cross the street and wave to the old and very short Italian man with the amazing garden.  I comment on his garden as i always do when i see him. The conversation is longer this time, where am i from, he says i look Italian, i say Russian Jewish, he says that’s okay too.  We exchange names.  He is Aniello.  He invites me in for some of his wine. I say another time, he said now is the time, or something like that.  I hover around the front yard, hoping we were sitting outside.  I feel anxious, not wanting to fend off yet another old guy wanting to grope me, not a cliche, just years of negative experience.  I go in anyhow hoping for the best.  I have some white wine, ask him about his wife, she is playing bingo.  He offers  me food, i say no, he persists with chocolate chiffon cream cake, i give in. Then he offers me a sandwich, i say no again, he persists, prosciutto and cheese on a portuguese bun, i say just a little sandwich, he laughs and makes me the sandwich. It feels nice to have someone that could be my dad, or my grandfather, feed me.

We talk about gardens, Italy, bocce, his trophies, his grandaughters, and then he shows me his garden, the garden i have admired from afar for 2 years.  Walls of beans, tomatoes, 2 runs of figs, grapes, plum trees, a baby apricot, eggplants, asparagus, peppers, basil all walled by flowers, flowers everywhere.  He then shows me a tree that he seems to feel particularly happy about, bordering on affectionate, the leaf looks like a camellia, but its a lemon tree, and there are two of them.  I crack the leaf and i smell Italy, and i am filled with the memory of lying on a hammock under lemon trees in Ladsipoli a town just outside of Rome.  We walk over to the kiwis, and i am commenting on how beautiful the vine is, he explains to me that kiwis, like most species, require a male and a female to bear fruit.  The female is the curvy vine and the male is the straight vine.  He follows with  the example of him having short hair, me  having long hair, he laughs.  I ask him if i can bring some friends by and interview him for a project were doing with elders in the community on their gardens, he says of course, but that i should come by when his wife isn’t around.  I’m suspicious, so i ask why, he says she doesn’t like summer, she’s only interested in the flowers, and i think a bit shy.  He says i should warm her up when i walk past and i see her working out there, tell her how hard i think she works, and how beautiful her flowers are and would she mind if i took a photo some time.  This will work he says, she just needs a little encouragement and then she’ll be fine. We chat a bit longer, he helps me with my Italian, and i say goodbye.  I am glad that it stayed sweet, that it was just an older neighbour who was kind, generous and a bit lonely and wanted to spend some time with another neighbour who is also kind, generous and a bit lonely.

Who i am

There are times when i am ashamed of my pessimism, like its not me, not my true self.  I have met someone in the last year that brings out this feeling in me. This feeling that i’m not really a pessimist, that really i have just been badly hurt, used up, tired, and sometimes i mistake the pessimism for intelligence and critical thinking. Mostly its about my anger and feeling helpless in the face of all the violence i witness and experience in the world.  But in my heart i am still this girl, this girl who looks at situations and can see the lack of justice in them and has to believe things can change, it is who i am.

Great Beginnings- a proposal

There is a new fund that contains approximately 10 million dollars to clean up the Downtown Eastside in time for the Olympics.  10 million dollars to clean up the neighborhood for a game, well if your really serious, lets try this.  Keep the money in trust.  Do some genuine community organizing and start with gathering organizations with a little bit of resources that work directly with the community like the Neighborhood Helpers Project, Carnegie Community Action Project and the Downtown Eastside Neighborhood house to work in partnership with residents to ask every single person living in social housing, SRO’s and on the street, what they want to do. What are you good at? What do you dream of doing? How can we make this place safer, healthier, together? What are you willing to do to make it happen? What am i willing to do? Then we follow through, no more talks, no more process.   We listen. Then we respond and support each other in making this neighborhood a healthier, safer place for the people who live here, not for people who are coming to visit for two weeks, and not the condo dwellers who have capitalized on the neglect, but the people who have spent their lives in this community, the kids who have grown up in this neighborhood, the  Chinese clans and societies that continue to gather in their spaces on Hastings Street amidst the chaos.  Real change doesn’t happen if people don’t have a stake in the change, if the only people that are part of the discussion, are people who have been neighborhood mouth pieces for 20 years, City Staff, developers and others who are acting in the best interest of people who apparently can’t speak for themsleves.  If you respond to this, i don’t want to hear anything less than how can we get this started or a correction on the figures of the fund. I don’t want to hear that i’m passionate or naive.  I just want to hear that your serious, serious about real change, about really asking people what they want, rather than assuming.  I want to hear that buildings like the Heatley block won’t be demolished for a Library that should go in the oldest part of Strathcona School (which is slated to be demolished) because the kids in this neighborhood shouldn’t have to walk to a highway (Hastings street) to go to the library, and that we won’t destroy two more beautiful old buildings.  I don’t want to hear about zero displacement anymore, because clearly that’s not happening.  I want to hear, that Stamps and Maclean housing projects will remain affordable for the families that live there.  I want you to do what your paid to do, facilitate change and  listen.

Also, you might want to hang on to that 10 million, you might need it in 2011 for the New Beginnings fund.

People who need people

Title first, title after, this was a title after, it started out as “Change”, then”Money Pits” “Knowing” “Knowing the money pits in your neighborhood” and “Smoke and Mirrors”, but i kind of like this one, and ode to the evil Barbara Streisand. It is kind of flippant, a little sarcastic, but i think i’m feeling a little crazy right now, so maybe ignore the title.

Over the years i have been a part of many discussions on how to improve the Downtown Eastside. Almost all of them have been about optics, the other ones have been about symptoms. The conversation that has been missing is the one about people. What do people need, what do we all need? There have been thousands of projects and programs designed to mainstream the Downtown Eastside, make beautiful, more like the rest of Vancouver. There are Lighting projects being proposed, similar to one in Montreal where they lit up the old city, tourist draw. Phantom Galleries, a project that started in Phoenix where they let artists use abandoned storefronts until they get rented for legitimate use, artist as gentrification bait. A kazillion community art projects, a number of which i have been a part of to uplift and engage, lonely, depressed and creative people. On some level i guess its all fine, like all the free stuff. People need it, we need it, we who need to feel needed and need work.

I think of all the money that has gone towards money pit projects, projects that fed a few reasonably well and many others insufficiently. I think of how the money could have been better spent, instead of blowing it on lighting and abstract video projects, beautification projects, temporary gallery/studio spaces for artists, and more employment training programs, that never seem to pan out for the people in them. What if we asked every single person living in social housing, SRO’s, on the street, and in the community centres, every where actually, if we asked everyone what they wanted to do. What are you good at? What do you dream of doing? How can we make this place safer, healthier, together? What are you willing to do to make it happen? What am i willing to do? What about all this money that comes here, what should we do with it? Maybe we should give it back for a while, moratorium on community art projects, no one gets paid, because it confuses things, sets up power dynamics. “I know what’s best for you, because i’m getting paid to know what’s best for you, how could you know what’s best? look at your life, look at how you’ve fucked up, your not well, how could you know?”

I would argue that we all know. We all know what’s best for us. There are about a thousand internal blocks inside of all of us to obscure our intuition so we don’t know, but when we can get quiet enough inside to silence the inner critics, the old voices, the media, i think then we can know what’s best for us. Extreme mental and physical illness is a whole other category, people clearly need support and care, but even in these circumstances, people still need to feel like they have some power in their life, the ability to make some of their own decisions. It is humiliating otherwise. Humiliating to be treated like you are powerless, a failure as a human being. Sometimes i feel naive, like maybe i don’t understand that this is how it all works, “survival of the fittest”. It still surprises me though, it surprises me that we think that we are so different from each other, and that we don’t get that we all need very similar things. We need to be loved and to love others, we need laughter, and purpose. The list could be longer of course, i could add a safe secure place to sleep, but sleeping under the stars in the woods near a beautiful clean lake isn’t always safe and secure, but there are millions of people every year who are are quite happy to do it. Other than that i think most people would also want a safe, affordable, warm, friendly, supportive, fun, active, neighborhood to live in.

Maybe i am naive, but it shouldn’t be this hard to make it happen, but I spin again, i spin in my thoughts, i chase my tail. Change is never clear, because people aren’t truly controllable, we may act like automatons, but inside we are all very human, and there are so many of us, with our own ideas of how we should be, how the world should be, and each of us only willing and able to do so much. Our priorities, as they should be, are with ourselves, keeping our houses in order, literally and figuratively, but what if the whole world is our house?

Gardens

I was cleaning through the garden at the community centre, the garden that we want to make more useable for the kids. This garden is intended to be a place for them to explore and help grow things, look at bugs, a place to be quiet and write or draw if they feel moved to. Every time i go in there i pick up garbage. Today i picked up some crack in an empty pill bottle and a few condoms. The drugs are rare to find, so exposed anyway, the condoms and needles are fairly standard, along with all the candy wrappers that i’m sure the kids, as well as the night visitors leave on the ground without concern. It drives me nuts.

In 1997 when i worked at Oppenheimer Park i used to rake the sand in the children’s play area for needles after doing a round of the park to check for more needles. Oppenheimer Park predominantly serves and older crowd, but there are still a number of children who live across from the park and around the neighborhood, that come there with their parents or other family members. In the mornings when i would arrive for work in the summer, the park would be littered with the remains of the meals and drinking from the night before. Some days it would be more than i was willing to do, and i would head up to the area where alot of people were sitting, some waking up and i would have brooms, pick-up claws, and garbage bags and i would offer to make breakfast if they would clean up, more often than not, this worked.

My work in this neighborhood has had me working directly with drug users, dealers, sex trade workers, their kids, other people’s kids and other people’s aging, lonely parents, parents that either abandoned their kids or were abandoned by them. The work has also had me in more meetings than any human being should have to bare with the people who are trying to “fix” the problem; city planners, health care workers, cops, housing advocates, activists, politicians, community developers, developers, business people, architects, religious groups, artists, and concerned locals. I write this list, and it brings up every tired memory of conferences, meetings and workshops that inevitably ended up nowhere. The illusion of progress is process. Not alot has changed in the last decade, i was picking up needles and condoms 11 years ago so kids wouldn’t come in contact with them, and i’m doing it now. Sure, there is a drug users organization, there is a Safe injection site, and overdose deaths have gone down, but there are many things that have stayed exactly the same. In all of the passionate advocacy for this community from all ends of the spectrum, none of that has been enough to pull it out of the nightmare that goes on there everyday. It isn’t enough, because the people that are so passionately advocating, don’t believe it can end. There is much spoken of the safety net in the Downtown Eastside. If your homeless, and even if your not, you can get fed, clothed, showered, de-loused, acupuncture, and massage treatment, beauty nights, camping trips, yoga and dance classes, and more, all for free. Which is great and not great, i think Its the free part that is at the crux of why things haven’t changed, and why, despite incredible efforts, the Downtown Eastside will be, and is being gentrified.

What are we trying to save anyway? I use to ask myself this question when i was working at the corner of Main and Hastings, when i was trying to protect what was happening out there, things that i thought were good, and some things and people that i thought needed protecting. I had a bigger investment in people needing me, than i did in them not needing me, even though i talked about it that way. I would say that we were all working ourselves out of job someday, that we shouldn’t accept what was going on as a permanent condition. Are we trying to make sure that people are still getting knifed for 7 dollars, or that 10 year old kids are getting hep c from needle contact, or that people are smoking crack in front of the library, selling crack, heroine, everything in front of the library, is that what were trying to save, the right to leave your needle and a condom in a kid’s garden? I don’t think so. The free, charity based, liberal idea of care and development has translated as, people not caring, because they are not asked to, leaving their stuff around for other people to pick up, because apparently they are too sick, too out of it, or too damaged to care. Somehow accepting the situation has been seen as having more liberal politics. People have a right to smoke crack in public. The fixers, and i am among them, have behaved like one huge unboundaried family. I’ll just take care of you, i won’t ask you to be more, because honestly i don’t think you can be. The entire neighborhood is basically run on this premise, a neighborhood that has been glued together by crisis and trauma providing unstable and fertile ground for cowboy developers, who see the neighborhood as the final frontier for development in this city.

I think things could change, if the dynamics would change, if we were willing to hold each other able, if we didn’t see the neighborhood and its residents as a never-ending project and cause, if we recognize that this neighborhood like so many, is a creation of policy, nimbyism and neglect, and if were willing to start asking awkward questions of each other from a caring place. Instead of i am good and well and you are bad and sick, it would be, we are both human beings living in the same community. A conversation could go something like this ” Could you not leave your red condoms in the garden, I don’t want the condoms in the garden, because i don’t want any of the kids that are running through there during the day to come in contact with it or a needle and potentially catch something, and i don’ t think you do either, because your a part of this neighborhood, and you would care if some kid got sick because you left something behind that you could have picked up, and if you have some time would you like to help me weed?”