I make sure to tell them what I have learned about this ignored neighbourhood. I rhyme off the horrifying statistics and explain how the process of gentrification continues unabated.

They inevitably ask the million-dollar question, “If the area is that bad, and there are that many homeless people, what will happen during the Olympics?”

I tell them that no one knows, and that’s when the speculation usually begins.

The suggested solutions to VANOC’s “problem” range from likely to outlandish.

Some suggest that maybe they’ll give the homeless tickets to Victoria or put them all on a cruise ship adrift in the pacific until the games are over.

Others say that maybe they’ll just shoot them as Rudy Giuliani is often sarcastically accused of doing to New York’s homeless population.

Some ask if they’ll deploy overwhelming security, (further) criminalize poverty, and crackdown severely on panhandling and other activities that threaten to reveal this city’s dirty little secret to the world.

If you examine the track record of former Olympic hosts, this last option seems the most probable.

The Geneva based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) has written assessments of the impact of the Olympics on housing rights in the last six cities to host the games.

While every city violated civil liberties to ensure that the games ran smoothly, the assessment of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta provides the best description of the kinds of tactics that could be used in Vancouver.

Hoping to prevent the city’s large homeless population from bothering Olympic tourists, Atlanta police declared the central business district a “sanitized corridor”.

In order to enforce this security zone they mass-produced pre-printed arrest citations and used them to detain thousands.

The following information was included on the pre-printed tickets: African American, Male, Homeless. Spaces were left blank for the charge, date and arresting officer’s name.

I hope that a scenario like this does not occur in Vancouver but I have little faith that it won’t.

When the million-dollar question is asked I have never heard anyone honestly respond, “stop the conversions of the SROs, build more low-income housing, address systemic racism and tackle this very serious problem”.

It has recently emerged that the number of Downtown Eastside residents carrying a superbug known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has increased by 250 percent over the last six years.  

While the area has been plagued by outrageously high rates of HIV, Hepatitis C and pneumonia, this most recent pandemic presents something new.  

It is feared that the disease may spread beyond the marginalized and the deprivation of the Downtown Eastside and infect the wider Vancouver population.  Stephen Hume of the Vancouver Sun describes the conditions which have created this potentially disastrous situation.  

“Low-income slums with attendant problems of malnutrition, overcrowding, poor sanitation, widespread substance abuse and poor baseline health are incubators for infectious diseases that can break out to afflict the comfortable.”

Dr. Elizabeth Bryce, a medical microbiologist and infection control specialist with Vancouver General Hospital articulates where we now stand. 

 “These (injection drug users) could be the canaries in the coal mine.”  

The drug-resistant superbug has the potential to impact the lives of Vancouver’s affluent population far more than the desperate panhandlers and burglars who have so far been the only reminder of the despicable conditions just down the street.  

This will not be an inconvenience. We cannot look at the ground and walk by, or purchase high-tech home security systems to keep us safe. 

 While the possibility of a city wide pandemic is horrifying, perhaps this will finally provide the impetus for a genuine concerted effort to address the source of the symptoms evident in the Donwtown Eastside.  

I have always believed that fundamentally most humans are motivated by self-interest.  

Regardless of altruistic rhetoric, we often disguise our personal interests as beneficial for society and ignore issues that do not directly affect us. 

As long as the problems in the area are someone else’s they will never be solved.

Three years ago I decided to spend the summer working in Whistler. I had never been to Vancouver before, and while I had heard stories about the Downtown Eastside I thought I knew what “Canadian poverty” looked like.

I considered myself a relatively aware person. I had walked through Toronto’s Jane and Finch. I had been to Montreal’s St-Henri and St-Michel. However, nothing prepared me for the depths of deprivation in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Last weekend I took my friend Dave for a walk down Hastings. Dave moved to Canada from South Africa and he has seen his share of poverty. However, he was shocked at what he saw, just as everyone else has been.

Every developing country in the world, no matter how impoverished, has a small affluent minority known as a comprador elite. These wealthy few live in enclaves of luxury amongst widespread poverty.

Vancouver has the reverse, a concentrated minority living in the margins while affluence and decadence abounds around them: a slice of the third world in the middle of the first.

Perhaps what makes the Downtown Eastside especially shocking is its centrality.

It is not a distant project or outlying slum. Someone could stand up from their $500 seat at GM Place and within minutes find themselves in the epicenter of a Canadian neighbourhood where HIV and Hepatitis C infection rates are similar to those found in some of the most impoverished nations on earth.

While speaking with a resident a few months ago I was asked why I chose to report from the Downtown Eastside. I explained that one day I wanted to work as a foreign correspondent in the developing world and I thought that the area was the best place in Canada for me to train.

He looked confused, “One day?” he said, “Look around, this is the third world… How do you like it?”

One of the most scrutinized radical groups in Vancouver is the Anti Poverty Committee (APC).

While the APC is often maligned by the media, the group is small and their actions have been relatively few and far between.

In a city with such crushing poverty, where so many are deprived and desperate, I would have expected to see the rise of a large militant social movement, but so far this has not been the case.

I witnessed first hand the vital role that direct action often plays in a successful social struggle.

During the 2005 Quebec Student Strike, 300,000 university and CEGEP students went on strike after the provincial government cut $103 million dollars from the Quebec bursary program.

After months of petitioning, letter writing and peaceful protest the government refused to give back a cent of the money they had cut.

However, as the strike grew, protests became more heated and blockades, occupations, and property destruction occurred daily.

As the strike gained momentum and the level of militancy increased, the government offered to return more and more of the money until finally agreeing to give back $90 million.

Movements often need teeth. When faced with a government that refuses to make concessions, social struggles need radicals to engage in coercive activities and lend strength to the negotiating position of the moderates.

While CSIS is completely justified in forecasting a radical movement, as the conditions are perfect, it seems for now that they are chasing ghosts.

But as more social housing is lost and more people are made homeless as the games draw nearer it will be interesting to see how the situation develops.

I cannot think of anything more frightening to a government than a concentrated group of thousands of starving and angry citizens with absolutely nothing to lose.

Heroin produced in the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, China) and the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran) is easily smuggled into our city through the enormous port.

There is simply too much traffic and too little time to search more than a fraction of shipping containers. As a result, these streets have been saturated with heroin for decades.

However, the threat posed by the already dangerous drug is often accentuated by the malevolence of manufacturers.

Constable Dave Dickson of the Vancouver Police Department explains,

“Every once and a while the manufacturers bump up the strength of Vancouver’s heroin. At one point in 2000 the purity was 25% and they bumped it up to 90%. They did it because research shows that at that level one third of those who try it will become addicted.

That year was the record level of overdose deaths for Vancouver. We had 355 overdoses in one year.

Some of the people we found still had the needle in their arm. It’s that quick, they inject it and it shuts the body down instantaneously.

People wonder why they’d do that, why they’d kill off their customers. But if one third who try it get addicted then that year they’ve probably created 8,000 more addicts. 355 dead people? Big deal!

Now they’ve got all these new addicts and you take that 90% pure heroin and you cut it back to 50%. Those new addicts now have to spend $300 a day to get their fix instead of $150. Once you build up that tolerance it doesn’t go down, it keeps increasing.”

Recognizing the impossibility of stemming the flow of heroin, the City of Vancouver has adopted several harm reduction strategies, including the establishment of Insite.

While Insite is an invaluable contribution to the Downtown Eastside there are limitations to what it can achieve.

Not every addict uses the safe injection site and the facility could not handle the traffic if they tried.

Despite American outcry over Vancouver’s safe injection site, many U.S. cities have taken progressive steps that even Vancouver refuses to adopt.

Police in Chicago regularly make undercover purchases of heroin and issue an advisory to the drug community if a dangerous batch is discovered.

Furthermore, state health authorities have provided Boston’s heroin addicts with Narcan, a medication that reverses opiate overdoses.

The government needs to build upon Vancouver’s accomplishments and establish more harm reduction programs rather than constantly threatening to turn back the tide on successful efforts like Insite.

But as I watched the event unfold I couldn’t help but feel that for all the pomp and ceremony the real heroes were being ignored.

A few months ago I sat down for breakfast with a retired VPD constable in a tired little Downtown Eastside coffee shop.

Dave Dickson walked the beat in the Downtown Eastside for twenty-five years. He earned the respect of residents in an area where distrust of the police runs deep.

After retiring, he chose to stay involved in the community as the Sex Trade Liaison for the VPD. He had always helped the working girls and the new position made sense.

“My pager is on 24 hours a day and I’m always available to assist the girls when they get in trouble or have bad dates.

Some people will argue that we’re police officers not social workers, but when I talk to new recruits I tell them that that’s bullshit. I always tried to listen to people and help them with their problems.”

When speaking with Dickson I felt like I was in the presence of a humble avenger. He is a large man with an intimidating presence, but he speaks softly and obviously cares about those he serves.

Sometimes this meant going beyond the bounds of normal policing.

“I was willing to step out of the box and do things a bit differently.

For example, there was a girl who came to me and said there was a guy always hanging around trying to bother her. She’d call 911 and they’d say that they couldn’t do anything.

She calls me and I went down there and grabbed the guy. I told him to fuck off or I’d make his life miserable, he got the message and didn’t bother her anymore”.

As framed certificates are placed on walls in homes across the city, many of the everyday heroes are ignored.

We must honour police who spend their lives in the trenches fighting for those who have been forgotten by everyone else.

While she is a 59-year-old physically disabled woman, Sue is one of the strongest people I have met in the troubled area.

She told of fleeing abusive relationships while struggling to raise her children, fighting to assert her voice in male dominated Northern Alberta trade unions and working tirelessly to spread awareness of women’s issues in the Downtown Eastside.

It is clear that Sue is a survivor, a wounded veteran of a hidden conflict.

She told us about a disturbing phenomenon evident in her embattled community: young women walking the streets of the Downtown Eastside with scarred and haphazardly shaven heads.

Dealers violently shave the heads of sex workers who owe them money as a warning to others. This practice is reminiscent of the punishment dealt out by resistance fighters in liberated European cities against women who had collaborated with the Nazi occupation.

However, this is not a chaotic postwar society. This is an affluent, polished, gem of a Canadian city. Yet atrocities such as this occur every day just down the street from the luxury stores and tourist attractions of West Hastings.

How can this be?

The Downtown Eastside is a war zone. It is a vicious and enduring asymmetric civil conflict with a multitude of factions and no end in sight.

The gang wars make the front pages as the police struggle to reign in the violence boiling over from Vancouver’s multimillion dollar drug trade, but the scourge of heroin, desperation, poverty and exploitation creates countless more fissures where the battle lines are drawn and no prisoners are taken.

Parasitic slumlords, drug dealers and pimps feed off of low-income tenants, sex workers and addicts while the unaffected live their lives as if the conflict were foreign.

There is a war in our midst, yet while the marginalized victims demand emergency rations of bread, our government brings in a world-class circus.

Shortly after my arrival in Vancouver, I was shocked and relieved to find Brian panhandling outside of the Broadway Skytrain station. Brian told me his story and explained the conditions that motivated him to leave the city he had grown up in for an uncertain future on the West Coast. While his story is unique, it highlights the western migration of many of Canada’s poor and marginalized.

Born in 1948, Brian grew up in Montreal and graduated from Concordia University with a degree in civil engineering in 1969.

He became addicted to Dilaudid following the death of his mother in 1984. Brian’s life spiraled out of control after he moved on to heroin and he eventually found himself living on the street.

Convicted of theft, Brian spent two years in Montreal’s Bordeaux Prison. The infamous penitentiary is dubbed the “Bordeaux Beach” because of the regularity of inmates drowning each other in the prison’s swimming pool.

Brian left Montreal after living in the city for 58 years. He said that the winter had become unbearable. He explains that several of his friends have frozen to death. “People pass out unprotected and they’re gone in half an hour”.

While Brian came to Vancouver in search of more hospitable weather conditions, he discovered that Vancouver’s streets host a whole new series of challenges.

He explains, “A lot of guys come out here because you can sleep outside and food is pretty easy to get. But things are really hard here”.

Brian explained the difficulties of panhandling in Vancouver, described the lack of solidarity amongst the homeless and complained about unscrupulous drug dealers.

“The public is more desensitized here, they’re more suspicious and less inclined to give money”.

“There’s camaraderie amongst the homeless in Montreal. They are more inclined to help you there. Here they are more inclined to rob you. I’ve already been robbed twice since I got here”.

“They cut the heroin with anything here. It’s immoral and dangerous. If dealers tried to sell that bullshit in Montreal they’d be dead in hours”.

Even the weather conditions are not as he had hoped. “I’m not going to freeze to death but the humidity is a big problem. My arthritis is really bad and I’ve had pneumonia twice”.

While Vancouver may be an attractive destination for many of Canada’s most marginalized citizens, “The world’s most livable city” can be a dangerous and inhospitable place.