By Harsha Walia and Andrea Pinochet

With provincial elections on the horizon, all candidates are paying lip-service to the “poverty problem”. While government officials make proclamations and entrepreneurs profit from innovating solutions to the homelessness crisis, the Downtown Eastside is home to an increasing number of poor women, homeless women, women at risk of violence, and women needing critical health and treatment services.

There are now 15,000 homeless across B.C., with 3,000 homeless in Metro Vancouver. A B.C. Housing report found that homeless shelters in Metro Vancouver turned away people more than 40,000 times—with 16,000 women and children turn-aways—during a nine-month period. Low-income housing in the DTES is of such sub-standard quality—no private kitchen or washroom, bedbug and rodent infestations, police searches without warrants, and illegal evictions—that many women prefer to sleep on the streets.

A June 2007 report by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions found that two million people have been displaced over the past 20 years to clear space for the Olympics. The DTES is no different: over 1,200 low-income housing units have been lost in the neighbourhood since 2003, while a “condo tsunami” overruns the neighbourhood. According to long-time resident and DTES activist Joan Morelli, “The government should put the needs of ordinary people before corporate Olympic profits.”

While the solution to homelessness includes more affordable housing and the solution to poverty includes higher incomes and assistance rates, we cannot ignore the causes that force women into abject poverty or the societal dynamics that allows for such inhumane realities to persist. Common stereotypes depict women in the DTES as lazy, unable to care for their children, addicts, worthless prostitutes, disease-ridden, criminals, and a burden on taxpayers. Such labels rob these women of their basic dignity, while blaming poverty on the moral fabric and lack of capability of each woman.

In reality, systemic barriers including provincial cuts to income assistance, legal aid, childcare services, women’s centres, and support services totalling $2 billion; rising housing and living costs; and growing precarity in labour, including changes to the Employment Standards Act, have forced more women into poverty (and consequentially children—one in four children lives in poverty in B.C.). Since the 2002 amendments to social assistance and disability regulations, approximately 16,000 women have been removed from assistance in B.C.

The structures of capitalism and colonialism give rise to inequality and poverty all over the world. The poor in our province are products of a political system that creates cuts in public programs while prioritizing Olympic corporate bailouts; an economic system that exploits low-wage labour (mostly women of colour) in a corporatized economy that places basic necessities such as shelter onto the market; a colonial system that has stolen land and forced assimilation onto indigenous people; and a social system where families are predominantly headed by single mothers.

Anne-Marie Monks, a 60-year old homeless woman with disabilities, told us, “The government has the ability and the capacity—but not the political will—to ensure the elimination of poverty and affordable housing for all. I challenge any politician to switch places with me. Sleep in the alley, stand in a food line, and live off $6 a day; then perhaps you will understand our pain. We are all someone’s mother, daughter, and sister; why is it so hard to treat us as human beings?”

Politicians have also done little about the heinous violence that continues to take the lives of women in the DTES. Women are subject to extraordinarily high rates of violence especially as indigenous women, trans-identified women, homeless women susceptible on the streets, and women surviving the dangers of sex work and/or the drug trade. Organizations such as the Walk 4 Justice and Aboriginal Women’s Action Network have been calling for a provincial public inquiry into the lack of adequate police and government response in the DTES and along the “Highway of Tears” in northern B.C. According to community member Beatrice Starr, “We demand justice for the all the women—especially Native—whose murders in this province have become a closed chapter for the government.” In addition, family members have been demanding that the provincial attorney general’s office conduct a trial on the 20 outstanding charges against Robert Pickton.

If history serves as an indicator, regardless of who wins the provincial election, the women in the DTES will continue to be trapped amongst false promises and a labyrinth of services that only serve as Band-Aid solutions. As service providers, we watch the daily ritual from the streets to different agencies and back to the streets. And yet amongst the alienation, stigma, and an unflinching political and societal apparatus, the women in the DTES have created a community of dignity for themselves, where human solidarity is the norm and where possibilities rest for a transformative future.

Harsha Walia and Andrea Pinochet are local activists and are project and program coordinators at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre.

The Power of Women Group at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre has the following demands:

1. Safe, supported, and long-term affordable housing should be available immediately.

2. Women who are survivors of violence, especially those with children, should be given high priority for affordable housing.

3. No housing units, including supportive housing and special-needs residential facilities, should be exempt from the provincial Residential Tenancy Act.

4. An immediate moratorium on conversions of low-incomes housing to condominiums in the DTES.

5. Rent controls as well as price controls on foods and other basic necessities.

6. No one be forcibly evicted or displaced from the DTES or other urban, rural, and indigenous communities due to the Olympics.

7. Immediate withdrawal of the $1-million Project Civil City, which includes bylaws that prohibit camping on sidewalks, and an end to police ticketing and street checks.

8. Social assistance rates should be increased by 40 percent, and removal of barriers to accessing assistance such as the three-week wait, two-year independence test, two-year time limit, and single parent employability rules.

9. All women should have access to subsidized childcare instead of apprehending children due to women and child poverty.

10. A full provincial public inquiry into the ongoing tragedy of missing and murdered women.

11. Establish a living wage of at least $16 per hour (calculated by the Economic Security Project) and abolish the $6 training wage.