'Dr. Peter' receives post-humous award

WestEnder
May 12, 2010

Last Saturday (May 8), Bob and Shirley Young accepted the UBC Medical Alumni Association’s distinguished Silver Anniversary Award on behalf of their son, Dr. Peter Jepson-Young, the namesake of the West End’s HIV/AIDS care facility, Dr. Peter Centre.

Known to most as “Dr. Peter,” Jepson-Young passed away in 1992, at age 35, after battling the AIDS virus for seven years. At the time, he was B.C.’s longest-surviving AIDS patient. The final years of his life were documented through The Dr. Peter Diaries, a weekly three-minute segment on CBC Television’s evening news that followed him through the struggle with his illness. The groundbreaking series put a human face to AIDS, which at the time was still widely misperceived as a mysterious virus that only afflicted the gay male community. The UBC Medical Alumni Association award coincides with the 20th anniversary of the series.

On the phone from her home in North Vancouver, Shirley Jepson-Young recalls the fear she felt when her son told her about the CBC series, which debuted in 1990. “When he told us that he was going to go on television, tell viewers that he was gay, that he had AIDS, and that he was [going] blind [because of the disease] — oh, we hit the roof,” she says. “We said, ‘You can’t do that. You live alone, you have a distinctive name, you might become the victim of a gay bashing. This is just too risky.’

“And he just said, ‘If it helps one person, it’s worth the risk.’’”

At the time, there was such negative stigma around AIDS that patients, even those in hospital, were practically quarantined. “You had to scrub up and [put on a] gown to go in [Peter’s] room; the food was left on trays with disposable plastic dishes outside the doors,” Shirley says of her son’s month-long stay at St. Paul’s Hospital in fall 1986. “At St. Paul’s, I would venture to say that 90 per cent of the patients with AIDS had no one visit them. Families really, really stepped aside. They were frightened — they were frightened of being infected, they were frightened of the stigma and what it would do to their loved one and to their family... It was like a modern-day leprosy in those days.”

Despite the odds, The Dr. Peter Diaries was a hit. Beginning as a one-off feature, it became a weekly series for two years as a result of viewer interest. It also led to Shirley and Bob receiving unexpectedly heartfelt support from friends and neighbours. “For 1990, that was really huge,” she says. She didn’t expect people to understand her son’s condition, and was surprised by the outpouring of sympathy, particularly from her peers. “When you think of our age group, it was really, really incredible.”

Now in their late seventies, Shirley and Bob’s acceptance of the award is the latest in a long line of distinctions that have honoured their late son’s life and work: the Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation was established prior to his death; in 1997, the Dr. Peter Centre began operating out of St. Paul’s Hospital; and, in 2001, the Centre established its permanent home on Comox Street, where it offers daytime health-care programs as well as an around-the-clock residence.

“Men will often say, ‘I was so homophobic before I saw your son on TV.’ Those are really important things to hear, 18 years after Peter’s passed away,” Shirley says. “I think we, as human beings, try to help someone who’s struggling. By sharing your own story, you’re making theirs a little easier. It really opens you to so much love.”

PHOTO: Dr. Peter Jepson-Young, seen here graduating from medical school in 1985, received a posthumous award from the UBC Medical Alumni Association for his work with those suffering from HIV/AIDS — a disease that eventually claimed his own life. Supplied by Peak Communications.

Council approves plans for city cycling

WestEnder
May 12, 2010

A new 10-year cycling plan was approved by Vancouver City Council last week (May 6), with councillors unanimously voting to spend $25 million over the next two years on bike infrastructure. According to a report authored by Jerry Dobrovolny, the City’s general manager of engineering services, the plan will advance cycling as a priority mode of transportation by better integrating cyclists into the city’s transport system.

Proposed cycling upgrades include the bike route from the Canada Line Bridge to Kent Avenue in South Vancouver; routes on Heather, Ontario, and Cambie streets; a bikeway along 45th Avenue; separated bike lanes in the downtown area; and a new bike route running through the West End to downtown along Comox and Helmcken streets.

City staff hope the coming improvements will encourage more people to travel by bicycle. Currently, about four per cent of Vancouver commuters use bikes.

“We talk about eight to 80 — attracting people from [ages] eight to 80 to ride bikes,” says Arno Schortinghuis of the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition (VACC). “The only way you’re going to do that is by having safe bike facilities, like protected lanes.”

While Schortinghuis supports council’s approval of the 10-year cycling plan, VACC Bike to Work program manager Erin O’Melinn points out that a strong public-awareness component is needed in order to get more commuters riding bikes. “A big part of getting people cycling for transportation in Vancouver is showing them how to ride safely, because that makes them feel more comfortable and confident on the road,” she says. “It also makes them more respectful road users, both as a cyclist and when they’re using it as a car driver or pedestrian.”

To celebrate the city’s already strong and diverse cycling community, VACC members will take part in the first-annual Velopalooza, a 10-day Vancouver cycling festival running June 4-13. Inspired by the annual Pedalpalooza festival in Portland, Oregon, Velopalooza will feature a series events and group ridess. Among them, organizer Ron Richings will lead a dedicated ride for cargo-toting cyclists, and a “gelato ride” will play out like a citywide pub crawl for those who can’t get enough of the Italian treat. “You can’t lose sight of that essential thing, that bikes are fun,” he says. “Our real focus is to get more people out riding bikes and using the facilities, but to do it by making the whole thing fun.

To kick off the Velopalooza festivities, Richings and festival organizers will hold a community bike wash (similar to a car wash) in Strathcona on Saturday, May 15, at Union Street Market (810 Union) and the Wilder Snail (799 Keefer), from 11am to 5pm.

COVER: Craft beer week

WestEnder
May 5, 2010

If Homer Simpson availed himself of India Pale Ales, Lambics, and organic Pilsners instead of the cans of Duff he regularly knocks back, he might be a different man. But his indiscriminate, unsophisticated choice of beverage has been fodder for countless classic gags on The Simpsons, a program that enjoyed its popular heyday in the 1990s— much like the popularity of mass-produced (or macro-brewed) beer. But nowadays, with hundreds of superior craft labels spouting up across North America, including several in B.C., the real-life equivalents of Duff are losing ground to artisan brews made with a rigorous attention to craft, flavour, and tradition once rarely seen outside the production of wine and spirits.

To celebrate the growth of craft brewing in Vancouver, local restaurateurs, bar owners, and brewers will host the inaugural Vancouver Craft Beer Week (VCBW), happening May 10-16. More than 25 breweries will participate in the festivities, which include pairing dinners, award ceremonies, and tasting events at restaurants and bars across the city.

The first of its kind in Canada, VCBW is modelled after similar events in the U.S., such as San Francisco Beer Week and Philly Beer Week, explains organizer Chris Bjerrisgaard. “Nobody’s done a full beer week in Canada,” he says over a pint of stout at the Whip Restaurant Gallery in Mount Pleasant. “Previous to this, it’s only been piecemeal events.”

The idea of launching VCBW sprung from casual discussions at “cask nights” at Yaletown Brew Pub and Dix Barbecue & Brewery, where Bjerrisgaard and other craft-beer enthusiasts would gather to sample the latest goods from local brewers and meet other members of the Vancouver chapter of Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), an international organization aimed at supporting craft-beer culture. “A lot of it, for us, is trying to reclaim some taps for the little guys,” Bjerrisgaard says. “You’ll go to a lot of places that only have [mainstream beers]. If you only drink macro-brew stuff, it’s the equivalent of saying that you love pizza but you only go to Pizza Hut.”

Getting more restaurateurs and bar owners on board by putting more craft brews on tap has been a relatively slow process that’s only gained real momentum in recent years, similar to the coming-of-age of Vancouver’s restaurant scene. “When I arrived in Vancouver eight years ago from Toronto, I didn’t have a lot of money, and there were a couple of really good restaurants in town — [but] they were friggin’ expensive. There were a lot of high-end places, but there weren’t a lot of great places just to go hang out and eat,” says Adam Henderson, owner of Raincity Brands, a local importer and distributor of craft beer. “But that’s changed... People were looking for it, and now they’ve done something about it. I’d say the same thing for beer.”

Henderson is helping put together VCBW’s ‘Upright Crawl’ with the Portland-based Upright Brewing, whose ales are French- and Belgian-influenced. As one of only three people in Canada with Cicerone certification — official recognition of beer expertise, as determined by a standardized test — Henderson’s knowledge of craft brewing rivals that of a wine sommelier. “It’s kind of like my preferred art form,” he says. “Some people like to express themselves through music or painting and they like to go to shows or museums. Well, I like beer. A lot of people don’t see it like that. [Factory-produced beer] is ‘Dogs Playing Poker’ — it’s not art at all. It’s pop music. It’s the Spice Girls. It’s crap.”

Vancouver’s James Walton attacks his craft with the passion of a chef and the chemical knowledge of a mad scientist. A home-brewer who worked by day in the pharmaceutical industry, Walton started Storm Brewing in the mid-’90s to help Vancouver catch up to the more sophisticated U.S. craft-beer scene. His signature ales are the centre of attention at cask nights at the Whip and at Dix, and they regularly appear on tap at local restaurants, including many participating in VCBW. Like Henderson, Walton has watched craft brewing in Vancouver evolve alongside our restaurant scene. “No one even knew what the hell to do with a Belgian endive 10 years ago,” he says. “But you get used to something like bitterness or sourness. People are starting to catch on.”

“One of the really cool things that we’ve noticed over the years is that the beers that garner the most excitement are the ones that are sometimes on the periphery,” says Matt Phillips, on the phone from his brewery in Victoria. While Phillips Beer is now a hugely popular and well-established presence in B.C.’s craft-beer lexicon, the brewery had decidedly humble beginnings. In 2001, Phillips set up shop in a modest warehouse to pursue his dream of being an independent brewer, after years of working in other B.C. breweries. Using several credit cards to sign the lease on the warehouse and purchase equipment, Phillips worked and lived alone for years in the warehouse, taking morning showers in local community centres due to a lack of facilities in his makeshift home. Two moves later, Phillips Beer — known for its India Pale Ale, Blue Buck beer, and Chocolate Porter — now occupies a space in downtown Victoria. Phillips’s VCBW beer dinner at Stella’s on Cambie is already sold out. “People are finding that B.C. brewers are unencumbered by tradition,” he says. “We don’t have to follow the rules, and I think that just ends up opening the flavour vault a little bit.”

Restaurateur Don Farion of the Incendio Group, which operates Incendio and Stella’s, has a long tradition of supporting craft brewers by putting their beers on tap. “The craft beer market in B.C., in the last six, seven, eight years, has really become mainstream,” he says. “Trending with the foodies, for sure.”

But trendiness wasn’t the first thing on Nigel Springthorpe’s mind when he took ownership of the Alibi Room in 2006. He describes the previous owners as “movie guys” intent on marketing the restaurant to an exclusive clientele. “They never meant it to be for everybody; they kind of deliberately set out for it to be excluding of people, and to be a certain feeling when you walk in the door,” he says. “That’s certainly the absolute opposite of what we’ve always thought it should be.”

These days, the Allibi Room is one of the most popular spots for craft beer in the city, attracting a motley and enthusiastic clientele from all walks of life. The bar boasts 25 rotating taps of local craft beers, plus three casks that Springthorpe sources from B.C. brewers. “We have to serve the beer with the same integrity as the brewer,” he says. “We’re only as good as what the local guys are doing.”

The Alibi Room kicks off VCBW with the sold-out Hoppapalooza, a celebration of hop-focused beer where Mayor Gregor Robertson will tap the inaugural cask.

The best part of it all? Good beer keeps you honest, Springthorpe says. “No matter what the branding is, no matter what the labelling, no matter what the hype is — all of those things don’t matter. At the end of the day, it’s all about what’s in the glass, what’s in the bottle, how it tastes. If it’s good but not great, it fades away really quickly. But the real, honest, just straight-up good beer — people keep coming back for it.”

PHOTO: Vancouver Craft Beer Week organizers at the Alibi Room. By Doug Shanks.

School under fire

WestEnder
May 5, 2010

Lisa Reimer has stood onstage before hundreds of people in her work as a children’s choir director, but the Vancouver schoolteacher’s life became public in a very different way last week.

Reimer’s coworkers at Little Flower Academy (LFA), an all-girls Catholic private school in Shaughnessy, learned Reimer is a lesbian when she requested parental leave for three weeks in April, at which time her female partner was due to deliver a baby. During the week before she planned to return to work, school officials contacted Reimer for a meeting. She says she was told to work from home until the end of the school year, a directive that effectively removed her from her teaching post. She had planned to return to work last Monday (Apr. 26).

Claiming she was dismissed from working at the school because of her sexual orientation and parents’ complaints about it, Reimer took the information to B.C.’s Pride Education Network (PEN) — an alliance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered educators — of which she is a member. The group issued a press release on the morning of April 28, and hastily called a press conference that afternoon. Reimer told reporters she felt like she’d been fired with pay. Students’ families, she said, were told she is on personal leave, which, in her view, is not true.

Later that day, LFA issued its own media statement, claiming Reimer had not been fired. “She remains in the services of LFA until June 30, and will continue to be paid accordingly,” wrote Celso Boscariol, chair of the board of directors for LFA. Of the meeting which led to Reimer’s dismissal from school property, Boscariol wrote, “A meeting took place between the school and the teacher to discuss projects consistent with the music theory curriculum. The school understood that her proposed role was acceptable and the matter was resolved.”

Reimer’s experience resonates with Roger Chin, an openly gay man who teaches at a Vancouver private school. “They [LFA administrators] probably thought they could get away with it because most gay employees just walk away, like I did at two teaching jobs and one physics job,” he says.

Chin, like Reimer, faced parental complaints at a private school where he was a teacher. The situation led to his teaching assignment being changed for the following year, and he eventually resigned. “It is more risky working in a private school as a gay teacher. You never know if criticism is hidden homophobia,” he says. “Some coworkers see me through gay stereotypes, and last month there was an incident of homophobia that the administration just bounced back to me to deal with alone. Most teachers here are tolerant but not necessarily inclusive or accepting enough to understand.”

Chin acknowledges that LFA is in a difficult position, in that staff need to respect employment laws but also respond to pressure from parents. “The response from [LFA] is probably the best response they can give,” he says. “In the private school system... there are no protections against the political pressure [or] bullying [from] parents.”

Moreover, Chin is worried about the message Reimer’s case sends to students at LFA. “The school’s actions seem counter to their mission statement...” he says. “Having grown up Catholic, I am still recovering from the homophobia spewed out by the Vatican and Catholic church. It looks like the abuse on gay students still continues.”

As yet, Reimer is unsure if she will take legal action. She plans to return to work with the Vancouver School Board in September, as she took the LFA position while on a two-year leave from Vancouver’s school district.

LGBT education advocate Glen Hansman, of the Vancouver Elementary Teachers Association, questions whether LFA’s actions fall in line with the BC Human Rights Code, which protects employees from harassment and discrimination based on sexual orientation. “[LFA] gets public funds, like any other independent school in the province... Our expectation would be that it, too, has to operate under the BC Human Rights Code,” he says. “There’s no excuse for someone who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans-identified being harassed in the workplace, let alone dismissed because they’re out.”

In the midst of widespread controversy over massive funding cuts to B.C.’s public-school system, Chin advises private-school administrators — who, like their public-school counterparts, receive provincial-government funds — to tread carefully. “I think private schools in general, and especially religious schools, will have to think carefully if they don’t want to be marginalized by the public system,” he warns. “There is great resentment building.”

PHOTO: Little Flower Academy. By Doug Shanks.

Rent-hike conflict

WestEnder
May 5, 2010

Landlords in B.C. usually exercise their right to subject tenants to an annual rent increase as allowed by the province’s Residential Tenancy Branch, which is currently set at a maximum of 3.2 per cent. However, after learning that several rental-management associations want to lobby to raise that annual increase, Martha Lewis, a member of Vancouver’s Tenant Resource Advisory Centre (TRAC), is concerned that renters could be dramatically impacted if their wish is fulfilled.

Lewis says members of the Victoria-based Rental Owners and Managers Association are interested in changing the current rent-increase formula — the cost of living plus two per cent — to factor in utility expenses and property taxes. That would place rental apartments on the same playing field as what are known as ‘manufactured home parks,’ or mobile homes.

“If the landlords are given a free hand like that, the government will have no control, no oversight, into what the landlords are doing,” Lewis told WE in a phone interview, going on to explain that recent interest in raising the annual allowable rent increase may be due to financial pressure from property-tax increases. “[Landlords of large properties] have these big increases in their property taxes because the value of their property went up in recent years, and they want to pass on the cost to the tenant, even though all the benefit goes to the landlords,” Lewis says. “Affordability is a big problem for tenants already.”

Lewis met with B.C. Housing Minister Rich Coleman last week to alert him to the potential implications of these changes. “We want the government to actually put some real thought into this... ahead of time,” Lewis says. Coleman told Lewis he couldn’t deny that landlords’ costs have gone up, but also acknowledged tenants are already facing problems with affordability.

“It’s kind of getting to be a really vicious circle,” says Marg Gordon, CEO of the BC Apartment Owners and Managers Association (BCOMA), who has been in touch with Lewis about TRAC’s concerns. “The problem that’s happening is the rent-control formula is not addressing the real needs of landlords insofar as operating expenses. It’s getting to the point where some landlords, who haven’t experienced vacancies in almost a decade, are now experiencing vacancy losses. That’s not a huge issue yet, but it’s certainly something to keep your eye on.”

Gordon is even more concerned about the potential impact of the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) on landlords. “Unfortunately for our sector, it’s an anomaly, in that there is no tax on rent — we have nothing to claim against,” she says. “The HST, if it’s supposed to be a consumer-inducer tax, it’s not working in our case. We’re asking for the ability to have input tax credits, so that we could, like any other business, claim the expense.”

Gordon acknowledges that landlords can’t transfer the HST onto tenants, nor do they want to. “That still doesn’t solve the problem we’re facing with the average age of buildings in Vancouver being 58 years old — aging and in need of major repairs,” she says. “Our fear is not only attracting new people into the landlord business, but it’s also that nobody’s building purpose-built rental buildings because you can’t make the numbers work.”

PHOTO: Martha Lewis of the Tenant Resource and Advisory Centre. By Doug Shanks.

Translink consults public on transit future

WestEnder
April 28, 2010

Those who regularly ride public transit along Broadway between Commercial Drive and UBC know all too well the crowded buses and road congestion that characterize the route. Talk of improving Broadway’s transit system has been on the table for years, yet it was just last week that TransLink embarked on its first public-consultation workshops about the future of Broadway transit. The April 22 session, at UBC’s Student Union Building, was the first of five such workshops; future workshops are scheduled for May 4 at St. James Community Square; May 5 at West Point Grey United Church; May 11 at the Hangar on Great Northern Way Campus; and May 13 at Vancouver Masonic Centre. Each one runs from 6 to 9pm.

TransLink is asking the public to examine a number of transit options. The first is light rail transit (LRT), a driver-operated, electrically-powered system, which would operate at street level, in a tunnel, or elevated above traffic. The system could move 6,000 to 10,000 people each hour in each direction. Secondly, rail rapid transit (RRT) would be completely separated from traffic, similar to the Canada Line or SkyTrain. Depending on the type of system used, RRT could move 10,000 to 25,000 people each hour in each direction. Bus rapid transit (BRT) is the third option under consideration, consisting of low-floor buses running on diesel, compressed natural gas, or electricity, moving 2,000 to 3,000 people per hour in each direction. A combination of LRT and RRT are also possibilities, as well as an extended LRT route that would run from Arbutus to Main Street and Science World.

“We’re asking the public not to choose one, but to tell us if there’s something we’ve left off,” said Mike Shiffer, TransLink’s vice president for planning, strategy, and technology, in an interview with WE at the UBC consultation session. “The whole idea behind this process is to really look at a range of alternatives and an in-depth range of evaluative criteria... and arrive at a locally preferred alternative.”

The impact of construction on Broadway will vary, Shiffer says, and will also depend on which transit option is chosen. “It’s really too early to tell how the construction process would take place, until we know what alternative is decided on,” he says. “One thing I can say, though, is that we’re very sensitive to the context in which the service will operate. The community context is very important.”

Business owners along West Broadway, in Kitsilano, are concerned about the potential impact of Canada Line-style construction in their neighbourhood. A public meeting is being planned by west-side residents and business owners for the evening of May 26 at St. James Community Square.

“Certainly, a month is not nearly long enough to consult with the public... I think a lot more education has to go on with the public before they [TransLink] start asking them to fill in surveys and voice their opinions,” says Donna Dobo, director of the West Broadway Business Association and owner of Just Imagine, a children’s costume shop on West Broadway. “The businesses favour a modern, European-style tram which would be at-grade [on street level],” she says. “They’re much faster than buses. It would be slightly slower than [RRT in] a tunnel, but maybe only seven or 10 minutes [more] on the whole length of the run.”

Others favour different options altogether. Eric Chris, a transit critic and chemical engineer with a background in environmental management, lives near UBC along the current 99 B-Line bus route. Instead of the LRT, RRT, or BRT options presented by TransLink, he is interested in the possibility of a SeaBus-style ferry service from False Creek to UBC, similar to that which he experienced at the University of Queensland in Australia, where he was a student.

Chris contends there’s “no way” TransLink could avoid a situation similar to construction of the Canada Line along Cambie Street, which crippled many local businesses and created daily traffic slow-downs. “You’re going to have exactly the same thing,” he says. “I don’t see how you can not rip up the road. Either that or you’re going to have to bore [a tunnel], and if you bore under Broadway, it’s going to take forever to get to UBC, and it’s going to cost a fortune.”

Chris, like Dobo, is critical of TransLink’s public-consultation process. They both feel as though key decisions have already been made without public input. “You ‘choose’ what [TransLink’s] telling you [they] want to do,” Chris says.

“I want to hear the facts getting out to the people who live in Vancouver, so that they’re making informed decisions and recommending what’s really good for the community,” Dobo says. “Not what they [TransLink] think is good.”

PHOTO: Cars or buses? By Doug Shanks.

Fewer cars, more feet, says visiting speaker

WestEnder
April 28, 2010

Vancouver and British Columbia are well positioned to become leaders in sustainable transportation, according to Dan Burden, an expert on pedestrian and cycling issues. As yet, he says, we’ve only scratched the surface. The 66-year-old resident of High Springs, Florida, visited Vancouver to give a lecture at SFU Harbour Centre on April 21, where he delineated decades of work devoted to planning walkable communities that encourage citizens to become less reliant on cars.

Burden and his wife will relocate at the end of this summer from their current home to Port Townsend, Washington, where Burden will start work on what he describes as his final project, the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute. The organization, which opened its doors in December 2009, aims to train the next generation of people who will build sustainable communities that are walkable as well as bike- and transit-friendly. To achieve this, the Institute will connect people from a variety of professional backgrounds — architecture, engineering, urban planning, and others — so they can better understand how their fields are integrated and, by extension, how they can work together more efficiently.

The Institute is strategically located in the Pacific Northwest, Burden says, because he considers the region a hot-spot for sustainable transportation. “There’s nothing that comes anywhere close to it,” he told WE in an interview last week. “A lot of projects got kickstarted here, and, therefore, give people confidence to do more things.”

Burden counts Vancouver’s recent Burrard Bridge bike-lane trial as one of the city’s great successes. He hopes it will motivate citizens to support other sustainable-transportation projects in the future.

Encouraging people to embrace change, Burden says, has been one of the most significant ongoing challenges of his work. “I find there’s a reluctance for people to support or endorse or get excited about change, simply because they are so used to one thing. They think anything that would be different has to have some problems that they don’t know [about], so they’d rather go for the certainty... That is why it’s so important to come up with projects that prove that new ideas work, and to start at whatever level a community can.”

A case in point is Burden’s current work in Vernon, where he was called in to consult with municipal staff on how to rebuild the city centre. Local retailers are concerned that a possible loss of parking spaces could jeopardize their businesses, but Burden is encouraging them to rethink the situation within the context of revitalizing Vernon’s pedestrian life.

Burden is optimistic for the urban future of Vernon and other cities in B.C., but the future of some North American cities, he believes, is grim. “Some of them are just not going to make it; those that don’t make it are not going to attract the new jobs,” he says. “The new job market is going to be based around place-making, where people want to live... The towns that just simply remain drab, ugly — sometimes frightfully so — they’re just not going to be attracting the new workforce.”

Burden echoed those sentiments during his well-attended SFU lecture. People used to flee the cities for their health, he told the audience. Now, people are returning to cities as a way of improving their health, since cities are planned around foot travel more than suburbs.

“This temporary hiccup that we’re in, which started somewhere around 1930, is nothing more than that: It’s a lack of a focus... to how everything works, because we invented a machine — the automobile — and made it affordable for everyone, so much so that we decided to design our city for our cars,” Burden told WE. “It’s just a matter of time before everybody gets it right again, and understands that you can’t design for anything to be sustainable or to work... until you go back to the human foot. It’s the right scale, it’s the right level of social integration, the right social equity.”

Urban agriculture moves into the mainstream

WestEnder
April 21, 2010

While urban agriculture may appear to be a relatively new trend in Vancouver, everybody knows that people have been growing their own food for centuries. One crucial development, however, is that the City of Vancouver is now providing more municipal-level infrastructure for people to grow their own food, dispose of food waste, and learn about food-security issues. The City marks this year’s Earth Day (Apr. 22) by making it the launch date for a new curbside compost pick-up program, which is initially restricted to homeowners but will expand in the future to include apartments and businesses.

On a somewhat related note, council approved a new policy earlier this month that allows Vancouver residents to keep backyard hens. While that issue spurred naysaying from some members of the media and the general public, it’s old hat for Michael Levenston, who penned the first article on the backyard-hen debate for City Farmer magazine in 1978. “It was [about] a woman in trouble for raising chickens in her backyard. A protest went to City Hall, and, of course, the woman lost her bid to keep them,” Levenston told WE in a phone interview from his Kitsilano office.

City council’s recent decision to approve backyard hens, Levenston says, marks an ideological shift that proves urban agriculture has moved from the fringes to the centre of mainstream thinking. “We [City Farmer] went from being the fringiest of the fringe to a group that speaks the same language as our educators, our leaders in universities, our leaders in politics,” he says. “In the end, it’s the same thing that our ancestors did: It’s growing food close to where we live, in backyards, to help feed ourselves.”

City Farmer magazine is now defunct, but in the mid-’90s Levenston launched the first blog on city farming, CityFarmer.org. He continues to write about urban agriculture at the website CityFarmer.info, as well as maintain the City Farmer demonstration garden at Maple and 6th. Designed to help educate the public on how to grow their own food, Levenston believes the garden has played a significant role in showing the benefits of urban agriculture. “It gives some strength and positive feeling to communities to know that there’s something we can do [for the environment],” he says. “You don’t have to feel defeated... There’s something you can do to improve things.”

There’s still room for improvement, though. According to Vancouver city councillor Andrea Reimer, the Greenest City Action Team (an initiative developed by Mayor Gregor Robertson in early 2009) has a goal of decreasing Vancouver’s food-related carbon footprint by 33 per cent over the next decade. By extension, the City is increasing its support for composting initiatives, community gardens, and farmers’ markets, matching already strong support from the public. “We have way more people who want to access community gardens than we have community gardens right now,” Reimer admits. “If anything, we’re lagging behind the public now, not ahead of them.”

A case in point is the recent growth of East Vancouver’s Fresh Roots (FreshRoots.ca), an urban-agriculture project that aims to convert six East Vancouver backyards into food-producing gardens by the end of the year. Those who have paid to participate in the project will get a share of the harvest. The initiative started a few years ago, when project co-founder Gray Oron started growing food for his housemates. “I’m an avid cook, so I like to have fresh, good food. And I don’t like the implications of our food system when it comes to the carbon footprint, the way it’s being produced, and the resources it uses and abuses,” he says.

After successfully growing enough produce to feed his 10 housemates, Oron embarked on a pilot project last year that included seven garden shares, and Fresh Roots grew from there.

“We’ve become a B.C. business: I’m beginning collaborations with different youth organizations, preparing various forms of youth curriculum and skills-training through urban agriculture,” says Fresh Roots co-founder Ilana Labow. She and Gray also have a team of volunteers and UBC interns working with them on the backyard gardens, and news of the project continues to spread. In fact, most of this year’s Fresh Roots participants learned of it through word of mouth. A major draw, Labow says, is affordability. “[A lot of] money goes into maintaining a green lawn, as opposed to putting that energy towards growing food and knocking down the food bill at the end of the week,” she says. “This is so much more affordable for folks — to have food growing in their backyard — than going and buying it.”

Responding to what he thinks is a dearth of locally produced food in Vancouver grocery stores, Labow’s friend, 22-year-old Martin Gunst, has embarked on a food-security enterprise of his own. Gunst will graduate from UBC next month and start working full-time as Grocer Gunst (GrocerGunst.com), a bicycle-delivery grocer specializing in produce grown at local farms. “Eating food that I know is grown sustainably and locally is important to me, and I find that when I go food shopping it’s pretty difficult to find food that meets those qualifications, with the exception of the farmers’ markets,” Gunst says. “So, I wanted to start a business that would make eating farmers’-market-type produce more accessible.

“I think the farmers’-market movement of the past 15 years has played an important role in increasing people’s interest in having a personal connection with their food. Farmers’ markets have increased people’s interest in putting a face on their food, and knowing that their food comes from a place that they can trust.”

PHOTO: Michael Levenston in the City Farmer demonstration garden. By Doug Shanks.

Walking to discover the city

WestEnder
April 21, 2010

In her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban-planning theorist and activist Jane Jacobs described what she called “the sidewalk ballet,” a term for the rich pedestrian life she felt was crucial to a city’s vibrancy. “Individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole,” she wrote. “The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

The American-born Jacobs, who relocated to Toronto in 1968, passed away at age 89 in 2006, but her influence on subsequent generations of people who work in fields associated with urban and community planning is widespread. In 2007, a legacy project honouring Jacobs’s life, called Jane’s Walk, was launched in Toronto and New York City. Described by its organizers as “a series of free neighbourhood walking tours that helps put people in touch with their environment and with each other,” Vancouver played host to its first Jane’s Walk in 2008, and the event has grown to include dozens of cities in the U.S. and Canada. More than 700 people participated in the second Vancouver edition of the event last year, and Think City, a local civic-issues group, hopes for an even stronger turnout when it hosts the city’s third Jane’s Walk, which take place at various locations on May 1 and 2.

“Jane’s Walk has really provided a vehicle for people to come out of their houses and talk to their neighbours and talk to the other people in their community,” says Jane’s Walk Vancouver chair Kim Fleming. “People want to have a reason to get out and walk around and to know the city.”

Think City’s wide-ranging roster of Jane’s Walk hosts each pick their own route and the theme of their walk, which covers topics including local history, public art, housing, and urban growth. While Think City has played a part in recruiting some of the walk hosts, others have volunteered. For the first time this year, walks will also be hosted in Surrey and on the UBC campus, as well as in the form of bike rides.

“Livability and sustainability are really at the heart of Jane’s Walk and Jane Jacobs’s work,” says Think City board member Kera McArthur. “Livable communities are walkable communities. We really want to promote that idea, that walking and sustainable transportation are absolutely inseparable from creating a livable, green city.”

Last year’s Burrard Bridge bike-lane trial helped catalyze interest in pedestrian-advocacy issues, says McArthur. “We’ve also noticed that with an aging population, there are more issues and concerns around pedestrians and walking. As we move towards a livable, sustainable city, people want to get out and walk and be part of their communities, and we’re seeing that emphasis.”

For more information on this year's Jane's Walk, visit JanesWalk.net and ThinkCity.ca.

PHOTO: Jane's Walk organizers in Gastown. By Doug Shanks.

West End residents unite over City zoning plans

WestEnder
April 14, 2010

West End residents presented city council with more than 2,000 petition signatures last week in support of developing a neighbourhood community plan. The petition was circulated in response to mounting concerns among local residents about West End rezoning applications that have been introduced under Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Short Term Incentives for Rental (STIR) program. The program, intended to speed up rental-housing development, allows for expedited permit processing. But the program has caused worry among many people living in the community, due to the allowances it makes for building height, density, and affordability. In response, they have launched neighbourhood campaigns and blogs, such as WestEndVision.ca, and circulated the petition, which urges the City to reconsider the applications. The petition, called “No Rezoning Without a Comprehensive Plan,” asks that the City maintain its six-storey maximum building height for the West End (in contrast to a proposed 22-storey apartment building at 1401 Comox Street), and engage in a consultation process with residents to protect neighbourhood livability and character.

The residents’ petition was delivered to Mayor Gregor Robertson and Vancouver City Council in advance of a nine-hour council meeting on April 8. The meeting was largely dominated by debate concerning COPE councillor Ellen Woodsworth’s motion to engage the West End community in an open discussion of its needs and provide a timeline for a community-planning process.

“I think that everybody is pretty well unanimous that they want some kind of comprehensive plan for the West End, that spot rezonings mean that individual developers are being lobbied by individual groups, rather than [there being] a comprehensive plan of what’s needed in the community,” Woodsworth said in an interview with WE. “Neighbourhoods are the strength of this city. You’ve got the heritage, you’ve got parks, you’ve got livability and sustainability. We can only maintain them if we engage the neighbourhood in a visioning process.”

Vision Vancouver councillor and West End resident Tim Stevenson has been working on West End housing issues since he was elected to council in 2005. He called parts of Woodsworth’s original motion redundant. City staff, he says, are already working on a community plan for the West End, but other neighbourhoods are ahead of it on the list.

Grandview-Woodlands will be the City’s next stop for developing a community plan, after it finishes with Mount Pleasant this fall. The process, Stevenson says, takes about two years. “All that’s going on in the West End is part of a very transparent, open process that the City has always engaged in,” he says. “This is not different except for the fact that we now have put into the mix rental housing.”

Rusty Ker, who has been participating in an ad-hoc group of fellow West End residents who share information about neighbourhood development, believes he speaks for many when he says the rezoning applications do not mean business as usual. “The big impact [on] the community is the apparent unwillingness of the planning department to listen to the concerns of the community [with regard to] the 1401 Comox development,” he says. “It is a five-fold increase in [floor-space ratio, the size of a building’s footprint in relation to the size of the lot it’s built on].”

Ker adds that a rezoning application for 1215 Bidwell Street, currently home to the nightclub Maxine’s Hideaway and a grocery store, is an increase of three times the allowable density under the City’s current zoning, “with minimal return to the West End community in the form of contributions that would allow improvements to area amenities such as the library, the aquatic centre, and other area amenities that the West Enders sorely need.”

Another West End resident, Randy Helten, is supportive of city council engaging in discussions about the community’s future, but he is critical of the way the city’s planning department is communicating to council. “People who understand the language of land-use planning are quite disappointed that the planning department was not portraying correct information to the council,” he says. “[West End planning issues are] the tip of the iceberg. It has to do not only with single-site rezoning, but the whole way that planning decisions are made in the city right now.”

Members of the public are invited to attend an open house about the 1401 Comox Street rezoning application on Tuesday, Apr. 20, at the Coast Plaza Hotel (1763 Comox), 4-7pm. A West End town hall meeting takes place later that week on Thursday, Apr. 22, also at the Coast Plaza, 7-8:30pm. Details will be posted at WestEndVision.ca

PHOTO by Doug Shanks.

Homelessness rises

WestEnder
April 14, 2010

Homelessness in Vancouver has risen 12 per cent over the last two years, according to the preliminary results of the City of Vancouver’s 2010 homeless count, released last week.

According to the City’s numbers, 1,762 people are homeless in Vancouver, which is 186 more than were tallied in the last count in 2008. As of this year’s count, 1,334 people are living in shelters, while 428 live on the street. When the City’s first homeless count took place in 2002, the City identified 670 homeless individuals. That number went up to 1,364 by 2005.

In a report to City of Vancouver staff and council, city manager Penny Ballem noted the effectiveness of shelters in reducing street homelessness. “While solving all homelessness is a large goal to attain, other cities are demonstrating real progress by targeting efforts on getting people off the street as the first step,” Ballem wrote. “Our review of best practice has shown that street homelessness is the most expensive and socially erosive part of the homelessness problem.”

For Ballem and Vancouver city councillors, the numbers from the latest homeless count provide evidence to support their interest in keeping the emergency shelters opened by Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT) operating past their scheduled April 30 closing date, when operational funding from the Province runs out. While, as yet, senior housing officials from the Province say no final decision has been made about the future of the shelters, city councillors like Kerry Jang have been clear in stating their belief that pitching in for operational funding is not the City’s mandate. “Operations is provincial responsibility,” he says, “and now they’re saying, ‘Oh, no, we want the city to pay for half....’ It boggles my mind that they would actually want to pass off their responsibilities onto a city that doesn’t have the money or capacity to actually operate shelters or interim housing. What we’re able to do, and have done, is provide the land and capital costs.”

The B.C. government has invested $7.25 million into three HEAT shelters and four winter shelters since 2008, in addition to an annual $17 million budget to operate 700 year-round emergency shelter beds. Provincial officials note they are also investing $172 million to build six of 14 City-owned sites for long-term social housing.

Meanwhile, opposition critic and Vancouver-West End MLA Spencer Chandra Herbert is worried about what will happen in the immediate future if the HEAT shelters close. “What do you do if the hundreds of people that have been staying inside are now going to be forced out onto the street?” he says. “What the province is doing here is saying [to] all those folks who have been assisted, ‘Go out and find somebody’s doorstep [or] some park or some back alley to sleep in,’ because without a shelter, there’s no other place to go. In fact, I’ve had people come into my office looking for shelter space so they can get off the street, but I have to tell them, ‘Well, all the shelters are full.’”

PHOTO: A new survey says homelessness in Vancouver has risen 12 per cent over the past two years. By Doug Shanks.

City mulls summer closure of Robson Street

WestEnder
April 14, 2010

Robson Street may soon hark back to the raucous party atmosphere it played host to during the Olympics, if City of Vancouver staff support a motion to close parts of the street to cars on weekends during summer.

COPE councillor David Cadman brought forward the motion in council April 6, asking City staff to report on the viability of the idea. The effect, Cadman says, would be similar to the traffic closures on Robson during the 2010 Winter Games in February: Pedestrians, not cars, would fill the street, creating a festive environment.

“When I looked at the difference between the way in which we celebrated the Olympics and what has sometimes happened on Granville Street, where essentially you have a bar culture and you have adults, it’s very different,” Cadman said in an interview with WE, adding he was particularly pleased to see families and people of all ages on Robson and Granville streets during the Olympics. “I think this just opens up the possibility of us really beginning to look at, and cooperate on, creating a new dynamic to our downtown core that is celebratory, that is pedestrian, and that brings people together.”

The Vancouver Public Space Network (VPSN), a non-partisan advocacy group, wrote a letter to the City in support of Cadman’s motion, with a few suggestions. The letter points out that the motion is not precise in identifying which parts of Robson would be closed. “Given that the pedestrian areas created along Robson were in some state of flux during the Games (in terms of number of blocks closed and degree of closure), some clarity is needed here,” VPSN members wrote in the letter. “We suggest that the space on Robson that is closed be restricted to an area east of Burrard and west of Granville — and ideally less than this.”

The VPSN recommends a closure of the area surrounding Robson Square, which is currently under renovations. “We are concerned about the lack of information presently available about the extent of the renovation work,” wrote the VPSN. The letter urges City staff to confirm the extent of the renovation taking place at Robson Square, and also encourages the Province to make that information available to the public. These and other communication strategies on the part of the City could make for a more successful street-closure process, they say.

Cadman is hopeful that City staff will consider implementing the Robson closures this summer instead of waiting until next year, even though he’s mindful of the project’s short timeline. “I know we’re a little behind the ball in terms of timing on this,” he admitted. “[But] one needed only to go down there during the Olympics to see that [Robson] had become an iconic place for celebration in Vancouver. I think it opened the eyes of a lot of people to what anyone who’s been to Europe knows: Walking [pedestrian-only] streets can be very dynamic, very interesting, and very good for business.”

COVER: Home win: the global street soccer movement is transforming Vancouver’s less fortunate

WestEnder
April 7, 2010

It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon in March. Inside the Carnegie Community Centre, a social hub of the Downtown Eastside located at Main and Hastings streets, people are engaged in their usual weekend activities: eating lunch, playing cards, and reading the newspaper, away from the noise outside.

But all is not quiet. Shouts and cheers can be heard from the small gymnasium on the second floor. A lively group, comprised mostly of men, greet each other enthusiastically, shedding their winter jackets to reveal matching black T-shirts and workout gear. They’re members of the Portland FC street-soccer team, meeting for their weekly Sunday practice under the direction of head coach Alan Bates, a resident physician in UBC’s psychiatry department. Bates, a longtime soccer player in his early thirties, is firm yet encouraging as he leads the group through warm-up activities and soccer drills, explaining to the team that today is different because I’m here.

“So, look busy!” jokes Don Chran, an energetic forward who has played with the team since its inception in 2008. Chran, formerly a resident of the New Fountain Shelter in Gastown, recently moved into social housing at Woodward’s — a significant improvement over his time on the street. One of the first users of the New Fountain when it opened its doors as part of Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Homeless Emergency Action Team, also in 2008, the shelter was where Chran found a sense of community in Vancouver. He became homeless shortly after arriving here from the U.S. and, he explains, “making some bad choices.”

“Everybody I know is basically a friend, or a friend of a friend, through that shelter,” Chran says.

When shelter staff began organizing a soccer team made up of New Fountain users in 2009, Chran was among the first to sign up. Encouraged by shelter workers such as Vancouver Park Board commissioner Sarah Blyth (who also helped secure sponsorships to get players running shoes and outfitting), he started attending practices regularly.

Portland FC’s biweekly practices — Thursday mornings at Andy Livingstone Park, and Sunday afternoons at the Carnegie — have played a transformative role in Chran’s and other players’ lives. They’ve made friends, improved their physical fitness, and become part of a supportive, empowering community. Many players have found housing and jobs, and have reduced or eliminated substance abuse, during their time on the team.

“A lot of times, if someone’s at a place like a shelter, they get babied so much, and all of a sudden they’re in an SRO, and they don’t have any support group or infrastructure,” Chran says. “You get someone a home, but after homelessness, then what?”

Even though Chran now lives on his own at Woodward’s, he feels connected to his friends from New Fountain through the soccer team. “I still see a lot of these people, and they can help me out, ask how you’re doing, make sure I’m still alive — stuff like that.”

★★★

Portland FC is part of a growing street-soccer movement in Vancouver, across Canada, and around the world. Its players, most of whom are homeless or at risk of homelessness, come together to play at parks and community centres. The aim is to empower and inspire players through community-building and athletics. National teams have been competing in a Homeless World Cup since 2003. This September, the Cup will take place in Rio de Janeiro, where teams from 64 countries are expected to participate.

Street soccer in Vancouver started only two years ago, with the Dreamcatchers soccer team, launched through Vancouver community programmer Sandy MacKeigan’s twice-weekly program at Oppenheimer Park. “Most of the folks that accessed that program were either living in the area, homeless, or street-involved,” MacKeigan says. The team went on to win a gold medal in 2008 at a national tournament in Calgary, marking Vancouver’s official debut in Canada’s street-soccer movement.

The Dreamcatchers evolved into what is currently known as the Eastside Suneagles. Other teams, such as Portland FC, sprung up around the Vancouver area. Now, with street-soccer teams in Burnaby, North Vancouver, and throughout the Downtown Eastside, MacKeigan and other organizers have been talking about building a Vancouver-wide street-soccer league. “[Right now] we’re running separately, we’re managed individually, we’re all struggling to continue playing,” she says. “Getting gyms [for practice] is really hard; we’re all looking for the same money.”

Coaches like Portland FC’s Bates, Blyth, and former Vision Vancouver campaigner Kurt Heinrich, volunteer their time for practices and seek out sponsorships. The ultimate goal, MacKeigan says, is to unify the city’s street-soccer teams in a league to support activities such as hosting the annual national tournament, which took place in Toronto last year.

Toronto’s street-soccer scene started six years ago under the direction of Paul Gregory, who now manages Street Soccer Canada, the sport’s national organizing body. A homeless-shelter worker and counsellor, Gregory would play pick-up outside the shelters where he worked. “All of a sudden, I’d have a dozen or more guys playing,” he recalls over the phone from his home outside Toronto. “It combined my love of soccer and the fact that I knew these guys needed to be connected in a way that wasn’t working currently in the shelter system. While we warehouse people and put them in these places, there’s no real next step, in a lot of cases. They’re not engaged or empowered in any way.”

Gregory formed a street-soccer team that summer, which represented Canada at the 2004 Homeless World Cup. “It was just an unbelievable celebration of talent and skill,” he says. “It was a bit of a life-changer for me, and for a lot of the guys that went.

“You’d never look at these guys the same way after you’ve seen them play,” Gregory continues. “We’ve had a number of heavy alcoholics and crack users over the years, and when they start playing, they get off it, at least a little bit. It’s a major use of [harm reduction] — you replace drug use [with soccer]. If it’s one night a week, that’s a success.”

For Gregory, street soccer has been a refreshing alternative to traditional approaches to dealing with homelessness. “Oh, someone needs a job,’” he says, by way of example. “Well, you know what? Maybe not. Maybe not right now. He needs something else, and the connection of soccer and sport is just something that goes deep into your core.”

★★★

Back in Vancouver, New Fountain Shelter staffer Zoran Barazanci has seen similar results with Portland FC. “We have over 70 per cent of [players] off drugs — for weeks now, and months, which is huge,” he says. “We bring some happiness and some relief from everyday problems. It’s good for us — the staff — and it’s good for them. We made a lot of friends like this.”

For Portland FC goalie Kevin King, playing on the team has helped him keep clean. “I’ve had my slips here and there, but it’s helped keep me grounded, and from going back to the life I used to live,” he says. “Getting back into athletics and keeping your body safe — I can’t be doing that, being involved with drugs, because then I would have no strength to be able to keep going.”

Elaine Smith, the only woman on the team, says it’s the people that keep her coming back. “These people here, I trust them; they’re looking out for everybody’s best interests,” she says. “They set aside race, class, gender. In a very transient area, it’s kind of nice to know that someone’s looking over you, and making sure that all’s well.”

For more information on street soccer in Vancouver, visit VancouverStreetSoccer.com. As part of efforts to raise money for the team to participate in the Homeless World Cup in Rio de Janeiro this fall, Portland FC is holding a fundraiser, feature live music and a silent auction, on Thursday, April 15, at the Rickshaw Theatre (254 E. Hastings). Tickets $25 from 778-997-3930.

PHOTO: Portland FC after practice at the Carnegie Community Centre. By Jackie Wong.

Budget negotiations will determine fate of homeless shelters

WestEnder
April 7, 2010

Seven Vancouver homeless shelters are slated to close April 30, but if the Province and the City are able to reach an agreement on funding, three of them will remain open.

The three shelters in question — located at 201 Central Street, near Main Street Station; 51-B West Cordova, in Gastown; and at First United Church, in the Downtown Eastside — have been heavily used since their doors opened in 2008 as part of Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT). The other four shelters, referred to as Winter Response neighbourhood-based shelters, are located on East Broadway, in Kitsilano, in the West End, and under the Granville Bridge.

While housing officials for the Province say they’re waiting on the City to offer to pay half the operating costs to keep the three shelters open, Vision Vancouver councillor Kerry Jang says the Province is shirking its responsibilities. “The province has to come up with those operating dollars,” he says. “That’s their job.”

As for the Province’s negotiations with the City, Jang says, “They’d never really spoken to us in detail. We [the City] don’t have the dollars because there has been no change in our budget.”

Provincial housing officials say the Province has provided more than $6.8 million in funding for HEAT shelters since December 2008. On top of that, they say, there are just over 600 year-round shelter beds in the city that receive annual provincial funding of almost $17 million.

At First United Church, Reverend Ric Matthews is still waiting for information on the future of the 250-person shelter he has run out of the church sanctuary since December 2008. “There’s been no formal conversation; we’ve been pretty reliant on what we can glean from Facebook pages of [provincial housing minister] Rich Coleman and the Globe and Mail and so on,” he says. “But during the Olympics, Gordon Campbell did very specifically shake my hand and say he wanted to reassure me that after the Olympics, their commitments to the issue of homelessness would not go away.”

While Matthews is sympathetic to the challenge of finding funds from both the City and the Province, the bottom line, he says, is that there is greater need for shelter for Vancouver’s homeless population than existing shelters are able to accommodate. “People have developed enough trust and comfort to be in [the shelters] that they don’t automatically, if there isn’t pressure, go back to being outside,” he says. “It’s not just because they’re cold that they’re coming in. It’s because they feel safe in here, and feel okay to be in here... At the end of the day, the problem with homelessness is not necessarily housing. It’s homes.”

Matthews describes the First United shelter’s users as being at the extreme end of society’s margins. “They’re folk who most deeply distrust society or have been hurt by it... These are folk who are least likely [to simply] just go back into some formal housing because we offer it to them,” he says.

Shelters like First United, Matthews says, serve as an intermediary home between living on the street and more structured housing. “This is the place where all their life possessions are, this is the place where their mail comes to, this is the place where they get their three meals a day, and this is the place where they sleep. Well, how do you define home other than that?”

Vancouver doctor wins prestigious award

WestEnder
March 31, 2010

Despite the federal government’s continued opposition to Insite, the Downtown Eastside facility that offers a medically supervised injection environment for drug users, one of its founding principal investigators has received a top honour from the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ) for his work.

The BMJ gave 36-year-old Dr. Evan Wood, a Vancouverite, its inaugural Junior Doctor of the Year award for his groundbreaking work related to HIV, public health, drug policy, and addiction. The physician and epidemiologist has been involved with the scientific evaluation of Insite, which is the only safe-injection facility in North America, since it opened in 2003. His work has focused on HIV treatment strategies and health-care issues facing the Downtown Eastside.

Dr. Wood authored more than 200 scientific publications before the age of 30, including articles in medical journals such as BMJ, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine. He is now the co-director of Vancouver’s Urban Health Research Initiative, part of the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, where he also works as a researcher. Dr. Wood has been widely noted in the international medical community for key research demonstrating Insite’s effectiveness in reducing overdose deaths, lowering HIV transmission rates, and increasing uptake into addiction treatment.

Despite these accomplishments, however, Dr. Wood’s work continues to meet barriers from the federal government.

“It’s just remarkable, the extent that the Conservatives have gone to try and cloud the science [of Insite’s strategies]... particularly when [Tony] Clement was the health minister, to try and shut the [Insite] program,” Dr. Wood told WE.

Despite a large body of research demonstrating Insite’s effectiveness, Clement announced in May 2008 that the federal government would oppose Insite’s move to appeal a court ruling that would allow it to stay open. In February 2010, the federal government served papers to Insite indicating it would try to overturn the B.C. Court of Appeals’ January 2010 ruling to keep the facility running.

Dr. Wood says the ongoing Insite controversy is just one example of scientists being stifled by government trying to muzzle their work. “I think researchers across research disciplines in Canada right now are feeling that their work is being done in a very hostile environment,” he says. Last month, for example, the Montreal Gazette reported on a leaked Environment Canada document that suggests new communications policies by the Harper government have severely limited media access to climate-change researchers. Scientists have claimed the intent of the policy is to prevent them from speaking to the press. Such tactics, Dr. Wood says, extend to other disciplines as well. “Whether it’s scientists feeling gagged and not being able to talk about climate-change research, or funding cuts being faced in various scientific disciplines, all of the controversy around stem-cell research and reproductive technologies, the closing of the National Science Advisor’s office — it goes on and on.

“The Conservatives are very interested in research if it serves their ideological agenda, but if it doesn’t fit their plan, then there’s something wrong with that science,” Dr. Wood continues. “We know that the war on drugs has failed and that we need alternatives, but you get politicians who capitalize on the gap between scientific evidence and understanding among the public, to the detriment of our communities and vulnerable populations.”

PHOTO: Dr. Evan Wood. By Martin Dee, UBC.

Voting for change

WestEnder
March 31, 2010

Many political critics have long expressed concern that no limit is imposed on the amount of outside financial contributions a local election campaign is legally entitled to accept, arguing that it grants an unfair advantage to candidates who are able to attract wealthy donors.

With another municipal election coming next year, the work of the province’s Local Government Elections Task Force (LGETF) is timely for Vancouver. If all goes as planned, a new set of rules will be in place by then, marking significant changes to the way people vote and are elected in the city.

Vancouver City Council submitted a list of recommendations for electoral reform to the LGETF last week, as part of a province-wide review of local electoral processes. The deadline for submissions is April 15, and the task force will give recommendations to the province and the Union of British Columbia Municipalities by May 30.

Council’s submission includes recommendations to ban union and corporate donations; limit the annual contributions given by an individual; and limit the amount of money spent annually by elector organizations, campaign organizers, and individuals seeking elected office. It is also recommends that all donations and expenses for candidates, elected officials, and elector organizations be disclosed every six months. As well, council recommends that the municipal term of office be extended from three to four years (matching the provincial system), and that the province give local governments the authority to “use any method of elections they wish to use.” That means the City of Vancouver could employ voting systems other than the at-large system it currently uses, in which candidates are elected by all of Vancouver’s voters rather than by voters within a specific district.

“The thing that we really like here is that the City is taking a public stand on electoral choice, system choice,” says Neil Monckton, chair of Think City, a local civic-issues group. “One of the key issues in democratic reform is the type of voting system you have, and Vancouver’s putting it back on the table.”

What happens next is in the hands of the provincial government, which must make legislative changes to the Vancouver Charter if city council’s recommendations are to become policy. “There may be more options than a binary ‘yes/no’ here,” Jim DeLaHunt reminded council at a March 25 meeting. As the spokesperson for the non-partisan organization Fair Voting BC, DeLaHunt is, as yet, more interested in the broader implications of electoral reform than picking at details. “We’re trying to make elections fair, accountable, and transparent, and it’s a long-term project,” he says. “We will take what we can get done with this task force and move forward either way.”

Community unites to 'vision' a better West End

WestEnder
March 17, 2010

A group of West End residents gathered in front of the Beach Towers apartment building at Harwood and Cardero streets Sunday afternoon (March 14) to voice their opposition to a rezoning and development application for the site that will soon be submitted to the City of Vancouver. The proposed rezoning for Beach Towers — which consists of four towers clustered along Beach Avenue between Cardero and Bidwell — is the most recent in a series of rezoning applications that has drawn criticism from neighbourhood residents.

A rezoning application for a 21-storey tower at 1215 Bidwell, as well as an application for a 22-storey tower at 1401 Comox Street (currently the site of St. John’s United Church), have raised neighbourhood concerns about a perceived lack of public consultation. They are part of the City’s Short Term Incentives for Rental (STIR) program, a two-and-a-half-year initiative approved by city council in June 2009 that provides incentives for developers to build new market rental housing. Incentives include parking requirement reductions and expedited permit processing.

“What’s happening in the West End is that there’s been a number of rezoning applications because of the STIR program,” says West End Residents Association (WERA) director Christine Ackermann. “[But] the projects themselves aren’t really addressing the number-one concern of westenders, which is affordability.”

WERA is calling for a review of the STIR program to ensure that affordability remains a priority, says Ackermann. She and other WERA members are seeking a meeting with Mayor Gregor Robertson to share their views. “We’re asking for a component of affordability, and [for that affordability to] be measured by income,” she says. “The median income of a [West End resident] is $38,000 a year. Certainly, that person cannot afford the rents that are going to be set for those buildings they’re proposing to put up.”

A comprehensive public-consultation process on the future of the West End is also of concern to residents. WERA hosted a “Community Visioning session” on January 31 as part of efforts to fill the perceived lack of public consultation on the part of the City. A report, compiled with the help of planner Dara Parker, a planner independently contracted by WERA who does not work for the City of Vancouver, outlines neighbourhood priorities identified by residents at the meeting. “In the absence of a formal City process for which residents have long advocated, WERA hosted the Community Visioning forum as a proactive step towards creating a local area plan for the West End,” the report reads. It highlights affordability as the number-one concern raised by residents at the meeting, alongside the preservation of the natural environment, walkability, diversity, community character, safety, and local amenities.

“One of the strongest outcomes from our forum is that the community wants to push for a local neighbourhood plan, and we don’t have one in the West End,” says Parker. “I’m not sure that the City knows exactly where it’s going without that piece.”

Parker acknowledges that there hasn’t been development in the West End in 15 years, so virtually any changes might feel dramatic to some residents. “Realistically, in planning any community, there’s going to be decision-making trade-offs that have to be evaluated,” she says. “It’s virtually impossible to get everything you want, or to have everyone be happy all of the time. I saw some acceptance of that within the... forum.”

Parker hopes the plan that could come out of the report will help residents move toward a more collaborative approach to community engagement, and away from good guy/bad guy or citizen-versus-developer-style dichotomies. “My impression is that the City of Vancouver’s effort is a genuine one to create more housing opportunities, diversify housing typologies for people,” Parker says. “Yet I understand that very legitimate fear that this new rental housing will be unaffordable for many residents who want to live and stay in the community.”

West End resident Randy Helten refers to West End community plans from the 1980s as useful templates from which a contemporary plan could be established. “I think the most important thing was the very process used to create the [1980s] plan; it was a transparent, comprehensive, well-thought-out official process,” he says. “The 46,000 current and future residents of the West End deserve nothing less today. Why was it possible then but not possible today?”

WERA’s Community Visioning report will be posted at WERA.bc.ca. More information on Helten’s and other resident’s initiatives can be viewed at WestEndVision.ca.

City marks Earth Day with new composting program

WestEnder
March 17, 2010

Fruit and vegetable scraps discarded in the kitchen make up a large part of the garbage produced by many Vancouver households. This is especially true of apartments, where outdoor composting isn’t commonly accessible. As part of new efforts to make composting easier — and, thus, more widespread — the City of Vancouver will launch a biweekly curbside compost collection program on Earth Day (April 22).

The first phase of the three-phase program will allow homeowners to add fruit and vegetable scraps to their yard trimmings, to be picked up twice a month. The initiative eventually aims to integrate composting programs for apartment residents and the business community, both of which currently use private waste-disposal companies.

“At this point, it’s too early to tell when something will happen [with multi-family residential buildings and the business community],” Chris Underwood, general manager of engineering services, told city council March 4. “At the earliest, I would expect it to be six to 12 months.”

Council unanimously supported Underwood’s recommendation to approve the first phase of the compost-collection program, which will cost an estimated $230,000 to start. Communications strategies for the program make up a significant portion of those funds. “The major initiative involves a fundamental change in people’s behaviour and how their waste is collected,” reads Underwood’s report on the program, which was presented to council earlier this month. “This program is similar to the Burrard Street cycling lane project in that strong communications can help defuse potential apprehension caused by lack of understanding.”

For longtime sustainability advocate and Zero Waste Vancouver coordinator Helen Spiegelman, the City’s communications strategy will do much to determine the program’s success or failure. “The way this program fails is when people don’t understand the why and the what and the how,” she told council March 4. “We have to start giving people the sense that we are shooting for cutting our waste in half, and getting every scrap of organics out of our landfill. So, the communications [have] to be holistic.”

The environmental gains from a successful residential composting program could be dramatic. City staff estimate that food waste (fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy, bread, and food-soiled paper) from single-family residences in Vancouver is approximately 15,700 tonnes per year. Given these measures, composting food scraps alongside yard trimmings could raise the waste-diversion rate for single-family homes by more than half.

“This is a moment I’ve been waiting for for a long time,” Spiegelman said. “It will be the most transformative recycling initiative in the city.”

Council divided on anti-racism coalition

WestEnder
March 10, 2010

"I don’t see race, but I do see people who don’t look Canadian,” U.S. satirist Stephen Colbert told Ujjal Dosanjh during an Olympics-oriented local taping of The Colbert Report last month. Always the devil’s advocate, Colbert, whose character is that of an American right-wing talk-show host, was trying to ruffle Dosanjh’s feathers. But the former NDP MLA and B.C. Premier, and current federal Liberal MP for Vancouver South, took it all in stride. As Canada’s first Indo-Canadian provincial leader, Dosanjh has no doubt traded ethnic barbs in far more serious settings.

Even though Dosanjh later told media that the Colbert interview —which included remarks about his Indian caste membership — was funny, it’s not easy for everyone to shrug off such comments as jokes.

Many members of Vancouver’s various ethnic communities were incensed by the lack of diversity showcased during the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Games. With that in mind, COPE councillor Ellen Woodsworth brought forward a motion last week (March 4) calling for the City of Vancouver to join Canada’s Coalition of Municipalities Against Racism and Discrimination (CMARD). The Coalition is part of the International Coalition of Cities Against Racism Initiative, organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In Canada, 27 municipalities are part of CMARD, including Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax.

Supporters of Woodsworth’s motion pointed out that Vancouver is the only major Canadian city that isn’t part of CMARD. But the Vision Vancouver majority on council voted to refer the motion to the City’s Multicultural Advisory Committee, thereby putting a hold on approving the motion until they collect more information.

“We would be absolutely negligent, absolutely disrespectful, by not taking the views of the Multicultural Advisory Committee into consideration,” Vision councillor Kerry Jang told council. “Racism is a tough issue... What is the root for cause of discrimination? For me, in my experience, it’s being passed over; it’s not being included in the discussion. It’s being passed over and having other people tell me what’s right.”

Woodsworth pointed out that city council — not advisory committees — has the final say on which organizations it chooses to join. “A committee cannot direct council; it’s council’s responsibility to make policy,” she told WE after the meeting adjourned. “I’m very concerned that this reduces any multicultural work or anti-racism work until it goes to a committee that only meets every four months. I think every department in [the City of Vancouver], and every level of City, including council, needs to be taking active, strong statements dealing with policy, and measurable plans to address racism and multiculturalism in this city.”

A number of anti-racism advocates who spoke in favour of Woodsworth’s motion left the meeting disappointed. “It’s time to support this coalition. March 21 [the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination] is coming up, and just in the aftermath of what happened at the Olympics, I think it’s important that Vancouver take a stand,” says Lindsay Marsh, coordinator of the national Safe Harbour Program, part of the Multicultural Society and Service Agencies of B.C.

“With this issue, there is no budgetary requirement. We can express our support, essentially, for free, but it costs taxpayers nothing,” says Edmond Wong, a Vancouver scientist and entrepreneur who spoke in support of the motion. “If there was any politicking going on, it’s not the right issue to choose to play politics with.”

While the Vision majority voted against the motion, Woodsworth, fellow COPE councillor David Cadman, and lone NPA councillor Suzanne Anton voted to approve it. “I don’t think that the average Vancouverite really cares what party it comes from,” says Wong. “When it comes to something so straightforward as simply giving Vancouver’s support to a coalition that is against racism and discrimination, I think there’s no question about whether it’s right or wrong. Our inaction is a statement in itself, and it’s a very negative and a very serious statement."

Arts community's struggles continue

WestEnder
March 10, 2010

While his industry has been crippled by provincial-government cuts to arts funding, Keith Higgins isn’t short of work these days, even though he’s not getting paid for all the hours he does work. The Vancouver-based visual artist and activist, known for organizing his community to speak out against arts-funding cuts, was hired last month to resurrect the Helen Pitt Gallery from dire financial straits. That’s no easy feat, considering the 35-year-old artist-run gallery lost its Railtown space in October 2009 because staff could no longer afford the lease. The Helen Pitt was among a number of arts organizations to be notified in August 2009 that its gaming grants (diverted from provincial gambling revenues) were facing deep cuts.

“The largest budget item they had was the lease; space is expensive in Vancouver,” says Higgins. “We couldn’t get a lease, couldn’t pay salaries to staff. You need to take drastic steps to find money from somewhere else. What makes that more difficult is that everybody is doing the same thing.”

Members of the arts community hoped the new provincial budget, announced on March 2, would restore arts funding to 2008-2009 levels of $63 million. The $46.1 million that was allocated for 2010-2011 isn’t enough, they say. Despite this year’s addition of a new 2010 Sports and Arts Legacy, which gives $10 million to the arts each year for the next three years, as well as the Royal B.C. Museum, appearing as a never-before-seen $12 million item in the arts budget, critics, including Higgins, say the budget isn’t as generous as it seems.

“As I understand it, [the Sports and Arts Legacy] is going to be money for internships and so on for young and emerging artists. What they haven’t said is how they expect organizations to have the capacity to actually train these people if we’re closing our doors,” Higgins says. “We have, compared to 2008-2009, a 50-per-cent cut to the BC Arts Council. Compared to 2008-2009, [there is] about 40 per cent less going to the arts through gaming [provincial gambling revenues].”

While B.C. Finance Minister Colin Hansen emphasized in his March 2 budget speech that the 2010 Sports and Arts Legacy would “increase participation in the arts for all British Columbians,” the overall loss of funding will mean less opportunities for British Columbians to take part in the arts. Locally, for example, the Vancouver-based Carousel Theatre has cancelled its touring plans for 2010. “It’s really the only professional children’s theatre company in the province,” says Vancouver arts publicist Rebecca Coleman, a patron of Carousel Theatre. “My son was introduced to theatre for the first time by Carousel Theatre... It’s great if you’re living in Vancouver — they’re still producing a full season this year — but they’re not going on tour.”

Other theatre companies have been talking about scaling back to accommodate the funding losses, Coleman adds. “I’m hearing people say that instead of doing larger-scale productions, they’re looking for smaller productions that only have two or three actors in them,” she says. “For me, I really feel like for the government to invest in the arts, it’s that: an investment. When they invest money in the arts, it creates jobs.”

In Victoria, the independent Intrepid Theatre company is bracing for losses of at least $25,000 in operating funds from the BC Arts Council in its next round of grant applications. “This year, I can expect to lose $35,000 of [gaming grants] and $26,000 in [provincial] bingo-affiliation money,” says general manager Ian Case. “But the long-term damage is going to be very hard to tell.”

PHOTO: Vancouver visual artist Keith Higgins. By Doug Shanks.

Vancouver as model (and warning) for urban future

WestEnder
March 3, 2010

Vancouver’s so-called “world-class city” status was vigorously debated by media while the international spotlight shone here for the 2010 Winter Olympics, but author Matt Hern has been contemplating the argument for much longer. While travelling the globe over a period of three years, Hern wrote about Vancouver from the vantage point of various world metropolises. He returned home to launch his resultant book, Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future, last month.

The 41-year-old Hern, who is also an urban studies lecturer and the director of the Purple Thistle Centre, a youth-run arts and activism centre in East Vancouver, challenges the notion of British Columbia as the “Best Place on Earth” in his book, which explores the possibility of a sustainable, urban-focused future. Vancouver serves as both the inspiration of this vision and a sober warning.

“I’ve never encountered a city as smug and self-congratulatory about itself as Vancouver,” says Hern in a Commercial Drive coffee shop that has served as an ad-hoc office for his work. “I like Vancouver — I’ve lived here for 20 years now — but, really? This is the best we can do? This is the province with the lowest minimum wage in Canada. Once again, British Columbia leads Canada in the rates of child poverty.”

Given the immense — and increasing — divide between the haves and have-nots in the city, Hern is interested in how Vancouver can evolve to meet the needs of all its citizens. “We’re going to have seven billion people on the Earth [by 2011, according to a United Nations projection]. Is there any possibility of an ecological future?” he asks. “It has to be an urban future.”

One prominent problem with Vancouver, Hern says, is that its poorest citizens are no longer able to afford to live in the city and benefit from the social capital of an urban environment. “Poor people now are forced farther and farther into the suburbs,” he says. “Young, single mothers, young families with working-class incomes — they’re not living in those downtown apartments. They’re buying houses in Surrey, they’re buying houses in [Port Coquitlam] that are under-served, if served at all, by public transit. You get these families living an hour away from where they work, in these hellish suburbs, with only simulacra of community.”

Suburban sprawl, Hern says, is what must be avoided to ensure a sustainable future. “The project of what a good city might look like has to be a re-invigoration of the idea of democracy and citizenship,” he says. “If we are going to live compactly, we are going to live densely... [But] a city of glass, a city of skyscrapers, is not really my idea of a healthy city, nor is it necessarily required for density.”

As the founder of the popular Car-Free Day festivals in Vancouver, Hern is passionate about the possibility of sustainable transportation methods that don’t require car ownership. While the Car-Free events will expand to six neighbourhoods in Vancouver this year, Hern says it’s a small gain compared to the rest of the world. “I think we’re cautious,” he says. “We have such a choreographed public space, people tend to defer to planners and to authority. So, the idea that we could just do it — do stuff — rubs Vancouverites the wrong way.”

In two weeks, sustainable-transportation enthusiasts from around the world will gather in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the first-ever international conference on Ciclovías [citywide, protected bike paths] and car-free Sundays. The symposium is organized by sustainable-transportation guru Gil Penalosa, a former parks and recreation commissioner for the City of Bogata, Colombia, and current director of 8-80 Cities, a Toronto-based advocacy group for sustainable transportation. “This is about seeing the city in a different way,” Penalosa says. “It’s not just a recreational point of view; it’s sort of an exercise in social integration.”

The beauty of social integration that Penalosa sees on the streets during a successful car-free day is one key for what Hern sees as a sustainable future. “In many ways, the best thing that could happen [to Vancouver after the Olympics],” he says, “would be a collapse of our attempt to become a world-class, global city, and to force the city — economically — to re-imagine itself as a sustainable city, as a city that genuinely cared about all its residents, as a city that could [think] about economic thriving as something other than just straight gains for the very wealthy.”

PHOTO: Vancouver author, activist, and urbanist Matt Hern. By Doug Shanks.