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Originally Posted by CivicBlues
I've lived DT for over 10 years now, worked DT for almost 20 years and have been coming downtown on weekends (with my parents first, then on dates) for like almost 30 fucking years.
Is it a fucking zombie apocalypse hellscape? No of course not. Don't be an idiot. I live outside of the business core but I walk every day up and down streets in every direction from Gastown to Coal Harbour to . It's perfectly fine, and the grime and homelessness that you see has been a part of the fabric since I've been coming here in the early 90s. I had some skid threaten to kick my ass back in 2006 on Seymour. A drunk native guy called me a "chink" one time I wanna say... 2010? Nothing since. Anecdotal? Sure but like I said I'm out on the streets every. single. day.
Is it worse than before COVID? Yes. But it's also noticeably gotten much better the past few months with the return of Office workers and Tourists.
There's literal ghettos a few minutes walk from the main tourist port of Marseille. I parked my rental car on the street and then had a ton of people come up and start staring at us. I noped out of there and into a secured parking lot. There's no where in Vancouver I would feel unsafe doing that. Even the DTES. Maybe because my ethnicity and i don't wanna sound racist but the ethnic makeup of this town lends towards safer streets and less confrontational behaviour. Not so in a lot of the world, Europe included.
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Imo you’re substantially downplaying it. Or you simply don’t experience parkades and other common areas as you are just going to and from businesses which are already open and home.
I don’t live downtown but a stones throw away. My wife worked at homer and pender for 4 years prior to moving to Broadway and my dad has worked at the Scotia tower for 25+ years. Both experienced a DRASTIC change to environments they typically felt safe in before. As I said, my wife’s building regularly either had multiple people sleeping in the entry way (awesome for a woman on her own to try and confront a sleeping homeless person in order to gain access to her work place) or she had piles of shit and needles in the alcove of the door.
Same went for my dad, the parkade he parked in would have literal encampments of people who snuck in for the night, people shooting up, PILES of used needles in door ways and corners.
If you go on overdose deaths alone, obviously the epidemic of drug addiction has gotten SUBSTANTIALLY worse.
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439 deaths were reported in VCH by the end of December of 2018
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http://www.vch.ca/Documents/CMHO-report.pdf
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Nearly 1,500 lost to illicit drugs in first eight months of 2022
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https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2022PSSG0060-001453
And yes, I get that many deaths occur “inside” residence but extrapolate that data to however you want and you come to the same conclusion.
Your example of Marseille is like the worst case example. Frances second largest city, a port town overrun with North African migrants? Hardly a representation for almost anywhere else in Europe.
To Mikes points with affordability, things are hardly affordable in these cities I’m talking about, or really anywhere in Europe in a major city. In Rome, Lyon, Croatia, etc. 2 bedrooms in any city centre are going for 400k+ Euros. Rome was extremely expensive for what you got. In a city almost 6 times the population of Vancouver. And again.. no homeless people sprawled out in the streets, no drug paraphernalia littered everywhere.
You cannot tell me anything I’m saying is wrong.. if you’re a tourist and you fly into Vancouver, you stay at any hotel downtown, you’re going to be literally stepping over homeless people and needles as you walk around downtown. That is simply not the case in pretty much any of these major cities Of Europe. Again, with a very similar climate, with similar if not greater populations.
In terms of left VS right thing.. it’s hard to quantify that in Canada because there are basically only two places you’re going to be homeless, Vancouver and Toronto. However when you look at the homeless per capita in the states, the top 5 are all republican states and it looks like 75% of the top 20 are as well.
I don’t really care left or right, it’s just time to fix it. It’s fucking embarrassing and disgusting the state we’ve let it get to.