Real Change News | Selling on skid row

September 9, 2009
Vol: 16 No: 40

Feature

Selling on skid row

by: Sean Condon , Contributing Writer

Vancouver’s poorest neighborhood also has its biggest outdoor market: a new target of a police crackdown

Photo by: Christopher Bevacqua-Fink , Contributing Photographer

Police are targeting the underground market in the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver’s skid row, in a bid, some say, to rid the neighborhood of the poor before the Olympics begins in February. The Downtown Eastside will be a major transportation corridor during the Winter Games.

Photo by: Christopher Bevacqua-Fink , Contributing Photographer

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A long a crowded stretch of East Hastings on a warm July morning, two undercover police officers approach Donna Russell and ask her why she’s handing out cigarettes on the street. Russell, a thin, 46-year-old woman who needs the help of a walker to move around, tells the officers she’s selling the cigarettes by donation.

“I’m giving them to people who can’t afford them,” she says as her tiny dog, a Pomerian named Princess Chanel, barks wildly at the cops.

Russell’s explanation doesn’t satisfy the officers, who tell her she’s violating the Tobacco Act and confiscate her eight packs.

But before they walk away, one of the officers — stocky and bald- headed — launches into a verbal tirade against Russell and the rest of the vendors who work the block of East Hastings from Carrall to Columbia, a stretch of street that has effectively become the Downtown Eastside’s black market.

“What about the people in the Dodson [Hotel] who are too scared to come out because of all the people selling drugs, stolen goods and cigarettes,” the officer demands. “All this stuff is being bought by people coming in from the suburbs who treat the neighborhood like a toilet.”

Although Russell lost her smokes and any chance to make money that day, she should still count herself lucky — this time she didn’t get a ticket. In the past six months, Russell has been given more than 10 tickets for “selling cigarettes contrary to [the Tobacco] Act.” Each one comes with a hefty fine of anywhere between $200 and $575 — an amount that Russell, who is on disability, says she can’t afford to pay.
Despite the fact that many of the vendors and buyers are homeless or low-income, the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) has embarked on a concerted crackdown to break up the market. While the police claim most of the goods are stolen and that the market causes street disorder, the vendors insist the majority of goods are found and that they’re providing an opportunity for Downtown Eastside residents to buy affordable products.

“People down here are poor,” says Russell. “They can’t afford cigarettes from the store, these are the only ones they can afford. So why is this such a big problem for the police?”

Controlled chaos

Stretching from the Megaphone office to the United We Can bottle depot, the north side of East Hastings is often a bustling and chaotic block with vendors on all sides of the street screaming out sales pitches and haggling with buyers over the cost and quality of their goods. Some have their items laid out tidily on blankets, while others sell out of bags and shopping carts or simply hawk what they have out of their hands.

Stroll through the market and you’ll find cellphone chargers, electric saws and sanders, old belts and briefcases, bottles of shampoo and odd trinkets and sculptures of everything from surfers to exotic birds. Mingled between the vendors and the steady stream of bottle binners are drug dealers who advertise that they’re holding “Rock, powder, down.” When a vendor enters the market with a hot item, a crowd swarms and a frenzied bidding war erupts between pawnshop owners, drug dealers and locals; each one looking for a good deal they can either take home or flip for a profit.

Navigating through this maze of buyers, dealers and haphazardly strewn shopping carts can feel a lot like you’re swimming upstream and can require some determined maneuvering, not to mention quick reflexes, to get through the crowd.

Clearly, as the police assert, many of the goods in the market are stolen. Some vendors are selling stacks of clothes with the tags still on them; headphones and iPods still in their packages; and fresh steaks or blocks of cheese lifted from the store that vendors sell discretely on the side.

But it is obvious that the majority of the items in the market have been discarded or given away: vintage porno magazines; VHS tapes of bad ’80s comedies; dirty, one-eye stuffed animals; and old and worn books, clothes and appliances that are well past their expiry date. It is a curious wonder sometimes how the vendors manage to sell these items and who would ever want to buy them.

With prices set at $5 for a pack of smokes (50 cents for singles), $3 for a pair of jeans and $1 for a DVD, the Downtown Eastside market offers some of the cheapest prices in town. It is also the only place in Vancouver where iPods and bicycles can be bought for just $20.

While it is widely believed that the cigarettes are counterfeit knock-offs from China or come from native reserves, vendors insist most of the goods being sold have been given away by charities or come from dumpsters. With a large portion of Vancouver’s wealthy living in small apartments, old, but still valuable, goods are often discarded in alleyways when something new is purchased.

Holding up two old iPods he says he found in dumpsters in Kitsilano and the West End, John Jamison says the vendors generally police themselves to keep out stolen goods and ensure the market maintains some integrity. He says the market is important because it’s the only place that gives poor people a chance to earn enough money to survive.

“This is a place where people on welfare can make a buck or find something they can actually afford,” says the 66-year-old native man. “Anyone can go into the garbage, find an old radio and sell it for $2; and for that person that becomes a meal.”

Jamison says he feels the police are “persecuting vendors who are just trying to make a buck” with fines they can’t afford to pay.

Many of the vendors are homeless or live in the nearby Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels and vend as a way to top up their disability or welfare checks, which can be as low as $610 a month. When they receive a ticket for $575, it can bankrupt them.

An exercise in futility

Vancouver police spokesperson Const. Jana McGuiness acknowledges that some “legitimate” goods are sold in the market, but says the fact that there are stolen goods and that it is illegal to vend without a license means the police have to respond. She adds that the bustle is a safety concern because it blocks pedestrian traffic and attracts drug dealers. Regardless of whether the vendors can afford to pay the tickets or not, the police hope the crackdown will break up the market.

“Our concern is not so much people’s ability to pay, but if we made an impact to change people’s behavior,” says McGuiness.

According to McGuiness, Vancouver police handed out 676 tickets for municipal bylaw infractions in District 2, which includes the Downtown Eastside, from January to June, and another 29 Safe Streets Act tickets. This is a marked decrease from the 1,264 tickets the police handed out in the neighbourhood last December alone for everything from illegal vending and jaywalking to spitting and riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. While a public backlash forced the police to back down on ticketing for petty bylaw infractions, they have continued to target the market vendors.

But despite the heavy ticketing, the crackdown does not appear to be having any impact on actually dispersing the market.

When the police sweep through the street, vendors and dealers yell “Six up” and quickly scatter. The police usually catch one vendor, who was too slow or simply doesn’t care, and either give them a ticket or warning. But as soon as the police leave, the vendors and dealers return and the market resumes its bustling activity as if nothing happened.

With little positive progress to show for their work, community activists believe the police’s crackdown is part of a planned Olympic Games “cleanup” of the Downtown Eastside. Neighbourhood residents and community activists worry that when the Games start, the police will use the tickets as a reason to make mass arrests.

“It’s really hard to believe that it’s just a coincidence that this is happening in a lead up to the Olympics in one of the main transportation corridors for the Olympics,” says Harsha Walia, project coordinator for the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre.

“It seems that it’s a deliberate way to clean up the neighborhood and is a constant form of harassment and intimidation.”

Walia says if the police were simply enforcing the law, they would fine people in wealthy Shaughnessy for having garage sales or running lemonade stalls.

But aside from simply fining and trying to push the vendors away, the city has no other plan to deal with the market. The one potential alternative that could create some order out of the chaos and has the most support from vendors is the creation of a legitimate space for them to sell their goods.

Vision Vancouver councillor George Chow has picked up the idea, which has been bounced around the city ever since United We Can held a ‘Binner’s Market’ almost 10 years ago.

Chow says a sanctioned and regulated market, which would be policed to keep out stolen goods, could be a place where binners and vendors could sell the items they find in dumpsters and get the support they need to improve their lives. But it appears that little progress has been made on the suggestion—Chow admits he hasn’t even taken the idea to his party’s caucus, which controls city council.

Without any alternative in place, it seems that it will only be a matter of time before the Downtown Eastside’s black market will be shut down. It’s doubtful that the police will allow it to continue during the Olympics and the vendors will either be arrested or hide in the back streets and alleys.

The vendors say they have little choice but to continue selling, no matter how many tickets they receive. Many are battling addiction issues or have health problems and have few options to make money. But many also feel they should have the right to sell—they saved these items from the dump and are using the street as their “front yard” garage sale.

There is, however, little faith that the city will help make them legitimate and most expect the crackdown will only get worse.

“It’s ridiculous. They’ve got people selling crack down here and they’re hassling me over cigarettes,” says Michael, a cigarette vendor who has received at least two $575 tickets. “I’m going to end up going to jail over this and become even more of a burden to the taxpayers. I don’t think the police understand what is going on down here.”

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