28068 replies to this topic

[Victoria Watcher]

Retail giant London Drugs says it is shutting down its location in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside as of Feb. 1, citing a "careful assessment of safety and operational conditions" at the store.

President Clint Mahlman says in a statement that the store in the Woodward’s building "faced persistent safety incidents and significant operating losses" and keeping it open is not sustainable.


https://www.timescol...itions-11711165

Edited by Victoria Watcher, 08 January 2026 - 02:28 AM.

[Mike K.]

Here’s a video of street encampments in Miami, posted just under a year ago. How does Victoria compare?

https://youtu.be/-ve...KwhyuiubejnhwpN

[Mike K.]

Have a look at the garbage strewn around the sidewalk. It was never like this. There is a growing sense of disdain for the public realm and it builds, and builds and builds.

https://www.facebook...mibextid=wwXIfr

[Mike K.]

I guess the guy in the account above had his phone stolen? Have a look: https://www.facebook...mibextid=wwXIfr

[Mike P.]

I guess the guy in the account above had his phone stolen? Have a look: https://www.facebook...mibextid=wwXIfr

 

Methanie and Druglas enforcing the law on Pandora... Ahem, "their" law. 

[Mike K.]

Elon Musk calls the homelessness industry a scam: https://youtu.be/d91...pw5qk5h1IEP3TAH

He says the industry is incentivized to grow the number of clients it serves, and says “it’s not clear how to turn this thing off.” He claims the money is around $900k USD per person, for the industry in San Francisco. He also says police are in on it, by supporting the system.

Lisa Helps famously said that the new services and housing-first would reduce the costs per individual in the system to a small fraction of a million dollars, and she had made a comment to the tune of calling an example as Million Dollar Larry, or something like that.

[aastra]

Helping a homeless person or any person who needs help (spoiler alert: that's each and every one of us at one time or another) isn't a scam. But obviously the industrialization of any crisis is about human nature being human nature. Despite rumours to the contrary, human nature remains the same as ever. There isn't an administrative system in the history of the world that ever met a crisis it couldn't aggravate and/or turn into a self-justifying situation one way or another.

 

At this point the homelessness crisis monster is all about sustaining the homelessness crisis.

[aastra]

^And if a crisis itself should happen to wane, then the monster will sustain the perception thereof.

[Victoria Watcher]

One year in, how’s Portland’s sharp turn on homelessness going?

 

 

 

That story was about how a trucking company CEO had unexpectedly swept into the mayor’s office on a bold pledge to “end street homelessness.”

 

His plea to the public was: Let’s “treat the crisis on the street like a crisis.” He said he’d stand up 1,500 units of shelter, fast, as if a natural disaster had struck.

 

Then he’d enforce a camping ban to try to compel people inside, while sprucing up Portland’s public spaces, all in one swoop.

 

Something had to be done, Keith Wilson argued, because “Portland has normalized homeless encampments.” His approach though was a type of “enforced compassion” that has been anathema in progressive West Coast cities, including Seattle.

 

So one year later, how’s it going in Portland?

 

The city actually stood up the shelter, which by itself is startling. By December, as promised, the mayor and various volunteer groups had added about 1,200 beds of overnight shelter, plus another 400 or so “flex” beds (locations where beds can be added if needed). It more than doubled the city’s shelter system in less than a year.

 

https://www.seattlet...Registered User

Edited by Victoria Watcher, 17 January 2026 - 09:21 AM.

[Victoria Watcher]

Street stories: Scenes from the 900 block of Pandora Avenue

Few scenes reveal the gap between dream and reality more clearly than a shiny new development overlooking the Greater Victoria region’s most high-viz example of failed social policy.

 

https://www.timescol...avenue-11747754

 

 

Most of this article is garbage.  Starting with the implied premise there that there should not be nice new buildings when we have a mess on Pandora.  

 

 

 

Jody Paterson has been writing about B.C.’s most challenging and ­hot-button social issues for more than 40 years, half of that as a journalist and the rest as a communications strategist and advocate for non-profit organizations.

 

 

She makes her living off these non-profits.  Our tax dollars.

 

 

 

 

You with the dream of living in a cool new apartment downtown: Imagine the 7 a.m. wakeup call of city bylaw officers and their police chaperones arriving to tear down people’s tents.

But you’ll already be awake, because first comes the 6:30 a.m. clatter of all those same people hustling their worldly possessions onto a less visible street, into some nearby hidey-hole, before the barking call of “BYLAW!” rings out and everyone is on the run.

Listen for the clatter of people arriving from the three city parks with washrooms where they’re allowed to camp overnight — the nearest one three kilometres from most of the services — but only if they’re packed up and gone by 7 a.m. the next day.

Then come the sounds of people setting up again once the bylaw team moves on, a Groundhog Day cycle of disruption and rebuilding. Those who couldn’t hustle fast enough will be left to mourn the loss of all their worldly possessions yet again.

 

 

I know it does not exactly say it, but someohow you get the impression this is a daily routine.  It's not. 

 

In some theoretical world, there’s a process at City Hall for trying to get things back, but the chain of custody is loose at best and most likely non-existent if someone isn’t with their stuff at the time it’s taken.

 

 

Garbage.  The fact is, we give them brand new almost stuff daily.

 

She did not buy 50 new tents:

 

One woman says she has lost 30 friends in the past year due to toxic drugs, almost as many as the 50 tent setups she has had seized by bylaw officers.

 

Edited by Victoria Watcher, 18 January 2026 - 05:29 AM.

[Victoria Watcher]

Scarce resources are prioritized for people still able to put up a front of normalcy, who know how to “behave.”

 

It’s a form of triage, but done the opposite way that a hospital emergency room does it. Instead of helping the sickest people first, social triaging ends up serving the kind of people who are well enough to complete complex application forms and repeatedly demonstrate that they “want” help.

 

For those unable to muster that level of normalcy, the street is all there is.

 

People can wait years on the provincial registry for supportive housing without any offers of a place, as housing providers make their own decisions about who gets picked, or bypass the registry entirely.

 

A source inside one of the housing provider agencies says there are hundreds of people on Victoria streets who are banned from everywhere at this point, and not likely to ever find housing through the current process.

 

 

 

Of course that's the way it runs.  Why would a service provider want to provide itself an ongoing headache by taking in trouble-makers?

[Victoria Watcher]

Caught up in layers of morality and judgment around drug use, social systems have evolved to view the denial of care as a necessary motivator. People will be helped and housed when they want it badly enough to quit using drugs, the thinking goes, and when they can demonstrate their gratitude by abiding by the rules.

 

The approach has created the strangest of situations: The people with the most critical needs are the ones still out there, living their high-visibility crises in full public view.

 

 

Imagine, abiding by the rules!

 

“People are expected to put all their energy into making sure their deportment and the way they come across says that they’re rentable,” says Kevin. “They’re down here because they can’t do that. They’re too ****ed up to get help.”

 

 

YES, you want free help, act like it.

 

And if you are too f**ked up to get help, you have serious mental health problems, and need to be institutionalized against your will.

[Victoria Watcher]

A young man with schizophrenia shuffles his feet endlessly, a side effect of the prescription drug he is injected with as a condition of a strange new kind of institutionalizing, where people are subject to forced treatment under the Mental Health Act but left to live homeless.





^ does anybody believe that is happening? Do they come find him on the streets every day to inject him, by force?

[Victoria Watcher]

It’s a form of triage, but done the opposite way that a hospital emergency room does it. Instead of helping the sickest people first, social triaging ends up serving the kind of people who are well enough to complete complex application forms and repeatedly demonstrate that they “want” help.





^ does anybody thing these forms are so “complex” and/or there isn’t dozens of organisations to help people with these forms?

[aastra]

 

A big blow-up photo of a youthful mixed-race couple seemingly overjoyed at their new life hints at the future tenants who will one day fill the building. 

-

This block of Pandora Avenue has been a prime face for the region’s multiple social crises for years, but it has rarely looked worse than it does now.

 

Few scenes reveal the enormous gap between dream and reality more clearly than the ­troubling ­juxtaposition of this shiny new development ­overlooking the region’s most high-viz example of failed social policy and entrenched poverty.

 

 

 

Much of the fencing has no obvious purpose beyond making it much harder to cross the street. Some of the people on Pandora wonder if it’s a deliberate attempt to make the street even uglier, to underline even more emphatically to the public that only dirty vermin deserving of nothing live here.

 

-

First we're supposed to be troubled by the implication of joy and new life in a clean new building on the corner, but then we're supposed to consider the possibility that the street is deliberately being trashed as a sacrifice on the altar of nihilism.

The writer should be old enough and familiar enough with Victoria to know that this stretch of Pandora was a pleasant and active place for decades, long before any social policy crafters had ever dreamed of trying to entrench despair along there.

 

Methinks this is precisely why the contrasts between the despair and normal daily living are so stark on Pandora. The street has never actually produced "entrenched poverty" for anyone, and plenty of people still live and work their ordinary daily lives along it. Desperate social issues were never a big part of the neighbourhood's identity until programs and policies concentrated the issues there, and then concentrated them ever more aggressively. This effort to re-assign Pandora's fundamental identity could have happened on any street. It could have been Oak Bay Avenue, it could have been Quadra, it could have been Esquimalt Road, it could have been Cook Street.

Should we really be troubled because a dose of normality is being re-introduced in the form of the new building, thus demonstrating that the street's identity is in fact NOT entirely about social catastrophe? Maybe the reason why this troubles some parties is because it indicates how the agendas aren't necessarily all-powerful? Resistance to destruction and/or self-destruction isn't futile after all? We aren't actually obliged to yield and conform? Just because something was neglected for a while doesn't mean it can't be cleaned up and restored? I'm talking about streets and I'm talking about individual lives.

 

Whenever the system and its policies choose to poop all over a particular place, the last thing people should do is just throw in the towel and give up on that place. The damage can be undone to Pandora just as rapidly as it was done. The troubled people will of course still exist if they don't choose to get help and stick with it, but there's absolutely no necessary reason whatsoever that their troubles should be so concentrated and overwhelming on a few blocks of Pandora, or a few blocks of any other place.

 

Heck, instead of feeling troubled by the new building maybe we could try feeling exhorted by it? Pandora's deterioration is not irresistible. Hope is not lost. If a dead property can be revived and transformed, then maybe dead souls can also be revived and transformed? We hang on so tightly to yesterday's failed programs and misguided ideals because we're too proud to admit we were wrong. So why not just face it, admit it, and start changing course? Today is the day.

Edited by aastra, 18 January 2026 - 12:54 PM.

[aastra]

 

A big blow-up photo of a youthful mixed-race couple seemingly overjoyed at their new life hints at the future tenants who will one day fill the building. An expanse of street-level square ­footage and shiny new glass speaks to the potential retail ­outlets that will one day beckon happy shoppers in.

The marketing message is clear: Imagine living here.

 

See, but why shouldn't anyone imagine living on Pandora or patronizing a small business on Pandora? Homes and apartments and small businesses (and churches, and a school, and etc.) were up and down the street long before overwhelming despair settled in. Why should we exalt this particular moment right now -- the short-term product of so many mistakes, misunderstandings, and probably a fair bit of maliciousness, too -- as if it should somehow be triumphant or otherwise dictate the environment going forward?

[Victoria Watcher]

Accurate.

[aastra]

Street issues and pretty much all public policy issues tend to be politicized in that same manner: the terrible decisions & dramatic (often very sudden) changes that produced a mess are characterized as if they have some kind of inherent validity, but potentially good decisions that might change things back or change things for the better are characterized as if they were self-evidently invalid or intrusive.

[Victoria Watcher]

A new shelter is opening in Rock Bay in a two-storey building owned by the City of Victoria.

 

But the Bridge Street Pathways Shelter, which is expected to open this spring, won’t be directly accessible to anyone living on the street.

 

Instead, the facility at 2920 Bridge St. will work on a referral-only model, with spaces prioritized for those living on Pandora Avenue, Ellice Street and other downtown streets, who will be connected to the shelter by outreach workers.

 

The Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs said in a statement Tuesday that the province is funding the shelter through a $90-million B.C. Housing program focused on dealing with homeless encampments.

 

“Moving indoors can open new opportunities for people to build confidence and healthy routines that will help them move toward other longer-term housing solutions and a better quality of life,” Housing Minister Christine Boyle said in a statement.

 

The amount going to the Bridge Street shelter was not specified, but it’s expected to be the last temporary shelter and housing support that the province is providing to Victoria under HEARTH, or the Homeless Encampment Action Response Temporary Housing program.

 

 

https://www.timescol...ellice-11766713

[Victoria Watcher]

People experiencing or at risk of homelessness in Greater Victoria will soon have access to 34 new shelter spaces at the Bridge Street Pathways Shelter. The facility, located at 2920 Bridge St., will operate 24/7 and offer meals, showers, laundry, and other health and community supports.  The province, through BC Housing, is providing three years of operating funding, while Victoria is investing up to $700,000 for building renovations and an outreach coordinator to manage referrals.  Renovations include portable washrooms, sleeping and day-use areas, and office space for support programs. Overnight security patrols will also be provided.

 

Read more at: https://vicnews.com/...ck-bay-landing/