Story by Jackie Wong
Photos by John Donne

It’s just past noon on a rainy Friday in November, and the southwest corner of Main and Hastings is buzzing with activity. People gather in motley groups around the crowded front steps of the Carnegie Community Centre. They’re talking, smoking, hanging out with friends. A few young men in puffy parkas snap to attention when they see a new-model Ford F-150 pickup truck roll around the corner—likely a dealer checking on his charges.

This is the portrait of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) often seen on the evening news, but for the thousands of people who call the neighbourhood home, it’s hardly as simple as that. Away from the noise and crowds on the street, a group of local residents gather inside the Carnegie to discuss how outsiders are talking about and treating their neighbourhood.

They’re people of all ages and from all walks of life, but they share a common neighbourhood and a concern that the crowds and drug scene outside have, for some, come to singularly characterize the area. Furthermore, it’s become too easy a breeding ground for negative stereotypes about the DTES—stereotypes that they, as residents, want to turn around.

In summer 2009, the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) started its fourth stage of an extensive planning process that aims to involve low-income DTES residents in decision-making processes about their community. The initiative took the form of a community mapping project consisting of 23 mapping sessions with about 200 participants, who were asked to draw places in the DTES that held special meaning to them on a blank map.

The results, according to CCAP organizers Wendy Pedersen and Jean Swanson, suggest that healthy neighbourhoods don’t necessarily need to mix rich and poor residents.

“Gentrification is not creating a social mix but what the academics call ‘social tectonics,’” they write in “Our Voices & Our Words”, their September 2009 report on the mapping project. “The two groups exist in the same space and don’t mix, or when they do mix, the mixing is conflictual.”

Information from “Our Voices & Our Words” will be used as part of a resident-driven visioning document on the DTES that CCAP plans to present to Vancouver city council in November 2010.

“We’re tired of the slanderous epithets in the media about the Downtown Eastside,” says Pedersen. “This project is an attempt to break those stereotypes... this is the next neighbourhood to develop in the city of Vancouver, and we have to prevent it because low-income people have a right to the city.”

Pedersen points out that every other North American neighbourhood’s inner-city has wiped out their low-income communities as land has become more valuable. “I don’t know how they’re going to do [that] in this neighbourhood,” she says. “These maps present how 70 per cent of the population in the Downtown Eastside see their neighbourhood... I challenge anybody else in the city of Vancouver to make a map of their neighbourhood that’s as cohesive as our neighbourhood in terms of how many meaningful places are crammed into such a small geography.”

Mapping project participants highlighted the Carnegie Community Centre, Crab Park, Oppenheimer Park, the Four Sisters Housing Co-op and Sunrise market as the top five “meaningful places” in the DTES community.

For Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) vice-president Hugh Lampkin, taking part in the mapping project drove home the strong sense of belonging he feels in the DTES. “I’ve lived a lot of places in Canada. And this community by far has the best sense of community than anywhere else I’ve had,” he says. “I think a lot of people who are naysayers are the ones who have a real negative view of the people down here. I challenge them to come down here and meet the people... If you take the time out to bash us, you can take the time to come down here and actually see the place for yourself, and see what it actually is. There is a deep community here, and there are a lot of good people down here.”

Many mapping project participants suggested that negative stereotyping about the DTES is rooted in how the neighbourhood is discussed by mainstream media. “One of the things that really infuriates me about mainstream media is they try to portray the homelessness here as a lifestyle choice,” says Don MacDonald, who lives in a single-room occupancy hotel on East Hastings Street.

“There’s a huge shortage of housing. The homeless did not create that. That was created by the government.”

Having residents lend their voices to a discussion that is often overwhelmed by outsiders is one of CCAP’s chief objectives as an organization dedicated to keeping the DTES a community that is friendly to its low-income residents.

“I think the most important thing is that people here represent themselves and create visual representations of their lives,” says Gena Thompson, who lives in the Lore Krill Housing Co-op. “When I see hipsters around the neighbourhood with their sneaky cameras, cell phone shots, I’m just like, ‘Argh!’ But then you see local people, and they’re taking pictures of their own lives, of times when they’re comfortable and happy, it’s a thing of beauty.”

“We have to speak up,” adds Sam Snobelen, who lives at the Pendera-DERA Housing Society. “We have to have our own media, and we have to try to write letters to the corporate media to counter all these negative stereotypes.”

More information on CCAP’s mapping and visioning project can be found at CCAPVancouver.wordpress.com.