page_title: Downtown Eastside
section_title: 1990s to present
hierarchical_section_title: Downtown Eastside / History / 1990s to present
caption_attribution_description: English: Three people seen using crack cocaine, in a downtown eastside alley, in Vancouver BC Canada.
context_page_description: The Downtown Eastside is a neighbourhood in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The area, one of the city's oldest, is the site of a complex set of social issues including extremely high levels of drug use, homelessness, poverty, crime, mental illness, and prostitution. It is also known for its strong community resilience and history of social activism.
  Around the beginning of the 20th century, the DTES was the political, cultural, and retail centre of the city. Over several decades, the city centre gradually shifted westwards and the DTES became a poor, although relatively stable, neighbourhood. In the 1980s, the area began a rapid decline due to several factors including an influx of hard drugs, the release of mentally ill individuals, policies that pushed prostitution and drug-related activity out of nearby areas, and the cessation of federal funding for social housing. By 1997, an epidemic of HIV infection and drug overdoses in the DTES led to the declaration of a public health emergency.
context_section_description: In the 1990s, the situation in the DTES deteriorated further on several fronts. Woodward's, an anchor store in the 100-block of West Hastings street, closed in 1993 with devastating effect on the formerly bustling retail district.  Meanwhile, a crisis in housing and homelessness was emerging.
  Between 1970 and the late 1990s, the supply of low-income housing shrank in both the DTES and in other parts of the city, partly because of conversion of buildings into more expensive condominiums or hotels. In 1993, the federal government stopped funding social housing, and the rate of building social housing in B.C. dropped by two-thirds despite rising demand for it. By 1995, reports had begun to emerge of homeless people sleeping in parks, alleyways, and abandoned buildings. Cuts to the provincial welfare program in 2002 caused further hardship for the poor and homeless. Citywide, the number of homeless people climbed from 630 in 2002 to 1,300 in 2005.
  Without the presence of a viable retail economy, a drug economy proliferated, with an accompanying increase in crime, while police presence decreased. Crack cocaine arrived in Vancouver in 1995, and crystal methamphetamine started to appear in the DTES in 2003. In 1997 the local health authority declared a public health emergency in the DTES: Rates of HIV infection, spread by needle-sharing amongst drug users, were worse than anywhere in the world outside Sub-Saharan Africa, and more than 1000 people had died of drug overdoses. Efforts to reduce drug-related deaths in the DTES included the opening of a needle exchange in 1989, the opening of North America's first legal safe injection site in 2003, and treatment with anti-retroviral drugs for HIV. A shift among users from injected cocaine to crack cocaine use may have also slowed the spread of disease. Rates of HIV infection dropped from 8.1 cases per 100 person-years in 1997 to 0.37 cases per 100 person-years by 2011.
  In the 21st century, considerable investment was made in DTES services and infrastructure, including the redevelopment of the Woodward's Building and the acquisition of 23 SRO hotels by the provincial government for conversion to social housing. In 2009, The Globe and Mail estimated that governments and the private sector had spent more than $1.4 billion since 2000 on projects aimed at resolving the area's many problems.
  Opinions vary on whether the area has improved: A 2014 article in the National Post said, "For all the money and attention here, there is little success at either getting the area's shattered populace back on their feet, or cleaning up the neighbourhood into something resembling a healthy community." Former NDP premier Mike Harcourt described the current reality of the neighbourhood as "100-per-cent failure." Also in 2014, B.C. housing minister Rich Coleman said, "I’ll go down for a walk in the Downtown Eastside, night time or day time, and it's dramatically different than it was. It's incredibly better than it was five, six years ago."
caption: Crack cocaine use in a DTES alley
exif: {}