Vancouver’s other Olympic torch
p2pnet view P2P:- It’s 10 feet tall, 200 pounds and it’s made out of concrete and an old garbage can.
It’s BC’s other Olympics torch.
With five days to go before the official launch of the 2010 winter games almost here, “Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside, has an HIV rate of 30% — the same as Botswana’s”, says the Poverty Olympics site.
Yesterday, “Hundreds of demonstrators turned out for the poverty torch relay in downtown Vancouver” to “spread the message that money should be spent on fighting poverty, not staging the Olympic Games”, says Metro News Vancouver.
“Spending C$178 million ($166 million) for a skating oval isn’t really impressive when you’re sleeping in a doorway”, says Robert Bonner.
But this time, the story isn’t in a local newspaper.
It’s in Reuters, for all the world to see.
“Vancouver, on Canada’s Pacific coast, has been ranked in surveys as one of the world’s most ‘livable’ cities but it is also home to one of Canada’s poorest and most drug-infested neighborhoods — the Downtown Eastside,” it says.
The average income for poor BC parents is over $11,000 BELOW the poverty line, says Poverty Olympics. The rate for aboriginal children is more than 40%, and for children in single parent families, 50%.
“The Games (February 12-28) have a mostly privately funded budget of C$1.7 billion but the government has spent C$580 million on venue construction costs and budgeted C$900 million for security,” says Reuters, going on >>>
A provincial auditor’s report in 2006 put the real cost to tax payers at C$2.5 billion but Olympic critics claim it is actually closer to C$6 billion — figures that Games organizers and government officials dismiss as too high.
Olympic critics say the Games have increased homelessness by fuelling gentrification in the Downtown Eastside, leaving the poor with few options in a city that already has some of Canada’s least-affordable housing.
But “Olympic supporters say hosting the Games has actually benefited the Downtown Eastside by promoting economic development and spurring job training programs to get residents involved in Olympic-related construction,” sasys the storty, quoting Rusty Goepel, chairman of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), as stating:
“We’ve been there and tried to help in every way we can. The Olympics are not designed to solve all of the problems of the world.”
[Slightly re-jigged photo by The Blackbird]
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Metro News Vancouver – Demonstrators put poverty in the spotlight, February 8, 2010
Reuters – Give a home to us not the Olympics, say protesters, February 7, 2010
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February 8th, 2010 at 10:27 am
“We’ve been there and tried to help in every way we can. The Olympics are not designed to solve all of the problems of the world.”
The Olympics should NOT be an excuse to clean up the DTES!
The Province and the CITIZENS should be working with the City to properly clean it up, and I do NOT mean with bulldozers! You (province) closed the hospitals that were housing many of these people, just to save a buck; we know that court ruling was total BS and would be used as an excuse to cut the number of beds!
So your employees brought the mentally ill from a place that protected them to the DTES, cheap hotels that gave them 20% on the dollar exchange for their government check, and when the went out for food, the landlord rented their room out 20 minutes later. And who waited for them outside, without their medication, that’s right, drug dealers “We’ll help you with your demons, oh and here’s a corner for you to sleep on when you’re completely fucked out of your mind on our substandard drugs”
Then there’s the other people, those that were beaten and raped during their adolescent years, whom walked down to the DTES looking to escape home-life, and were also preyed upon by the dealers hoping to sell them an escape. Escape they did, into a new hell! Escape into a black hole!
And what will happen thanks to the Olympics and the many (NOT ALL BUT MANY) ignorant citizens of Vancouver and BC? The same as Yaletown. What? You didnt’ know Yaletown was much worse than DTES? Yes it was, warehouses filled with rats, young boys drugged so they would be prostituted. They cleaned that up didn’t they, pushing the destitute a few blocks away into Gastown and Chinatown.
Don’t let this continue, wake up! 50% of the calls to the VPD are to deal with mental illness! That’s your freaking tax dollars! You are spending much more with them being homeless than your home’s devalue that will only occur because YOU made it happen!
1) People think bank is unstable, so they start to withdraw money
2) More people do the same, bank becomes unstable
3) Bank crashes as a result of people’s suspicion!
Mixed housing will only drop your home’s value if YOU FEEL IT WILL! Why? Because you’ll start spreading how it dropped and others will spread that same rumour, and the rumour now becomes truth, thanks to YOU!
May the negative press make you all think twice, and in some cases six times, about this situation. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll realize how you, the city, and the province have taken a small problem and made it 10x worse! Only you have the power to actually solve it, not put another bullshit band-aide!
Cheers,
~Robert
February 8th, 2010 at 10:55 am
Vancouver is the biggest housing bubble in the world ever. Its housing offerings are the least affordable.
The charts are here ( http://www.chpc.biz/Major_Cities_Chart.htm ), but they are in dollars and not as an amount of median household income there. If you plot a ratio of house prices and median household income, you will see a clear sharp rise of prices in 2001, which is the year of dotcom bust. Now you know where the money that was gambled in the dotcoms went.
I plotted the charts for several Canadian cities and will post them here soon.
February 8th, 2010 at 3:03 pm
Boycott the Vancouver Olympic!
February 8th, 2010 at 8:14 pm
The Olympics are going to drastically hurt the working class families forever.
As it is, for the average working class couple/family it is already difficult to afford to buy a condo in downtown Vancouver. It’s already very expensive, and the cost of property will no doubt explode after the Olympics.
People that were fortunate enough to buy their property 10+ years ago were lucky because back then things were reasonable. Today, only high income earning couples can afford to buy downtown, and the newer skyscrapers that are going up will only be affordable to the wealthy. Many of the towers are already being bought out by foreign investors where they don’t even live in the condominiums and you can tell this because you never see anyone in the more expensive units and you never see the lights go on, ever.
There is a already a huge separation of class in Vancouver and it will continue to get worse. There’s the hard working working class income earners that can not afford to buy property and will have no choice but to rent for their entire lives paying money to property owners/investors. The wealthy will continue to become wealthier and the renter just stays at the same level for their entire lives. Then there’s the high income and wealthy people that get to amass wealth and can afford to live downtown or in other richer neighbourhoods.
The working class can always buy property in Surrey, Langley, Maple Ridge or Chilliwack I suppose, but then they would have to find jobs nearby otherwise they’d be forced to deal with long commutes on our slow, congested, poorly planned and embarrassing highway system.
Oh hey that’s life I guess. Thanks to the Olympics, things are going to get much worse. At least the wealthy will become wealthier though, and the working class will always remain working class. That’s the name of the game.
February 8th, 2010 at 8:49 pm
@BruceLD:
I wouldn’t be so sure. Vancouver is LONG overdue for a bubble correction. Given the Games will place a great strain on the city and the province, residents included, and with the security cameras remaining in place post-Games, and the strong risk of massive debt for BC, the bubble has to burst sooner than later.
It is purely unsustainable the climbs Vancouver has seen in the real-estate market. We know it is the fault of the developers, realtors, rich investors (if you can blame them), and the city for not being responsible.
Just like the NASDAQ crash of 2001, Vancouver’s housing market bubble must also correct itself and it will, it’s just a matter of when and by how much. I doubt we’ll see 50% drop like areas of the US, but 10 – 20% can be expected, yes even after the previous slight burp of 2008/9.
February 9th, 2010 at 12:14 am
Here is the chart: a ratio of median (or sometimes, average) sales price for single-family homes and family household income is plotted
http://fastpic.ru/view/1/2010/0209/3f0332f605a72f9d3c373bf27239f505.png.html
Vancouver already had a 1993 bubble, which corrected, but not too much. Median price for single-family detached homes was still 6 times the median household income.
You see that price-over-income ratio starts to rise sharply in 2001, which is the year after the dotcom bust. Speculators and gamblers moved their capitals away from dotcoms into real estate. I would not name them “investors” like the posters above, they are just gamblers whose only purpose is to inflate bubbles and make others’ lives miserable. They did not produce anything useful, they are parasites of the society, they are to blame for the crisis and we must ensure that they pay the price for it.