Brian Hutchinson: Is Vancouver ready for its Olympic-sized close-up?

 

Final touches of plaster and paint are being applied. Volunteers wearing Games-approved smiles have hit the streets; police officers are at the barricades, waiting. Almost a decade in the making,

 

Vancouver's multi-billion-dollar party is one week from launch. Is this city ready for its close-up?

 

With so much at stake, residents are understandably anxious. Hosting the Winter Olympic Games presents enormous opportunities. But they are a 16-day open house for hundreds of millions of guests. People will drop in, either in person or via television, radio and newspapers. They'll poke around a bit and they'll quickly pass judgment.

 

Visiting media are already arriving and transmitting first impressions to their audiences back home. Vancouver has been described as insufferably damp and grumpy, where the vast majority of people are Games hostile. Or just hostile. Reporters are venturing into Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and are suitably appalled. Local entrepreneurs have found employment guiding out-of-towners up and down Hastings Street and into alleyways, where addicts injecting heroin, cocaine and meth will, if asked nicely, allow their photos to be taken.

 

One place the foreign press is not being led is inside a new, government-funded information centre that opened in the neighbourhood this week.

 

Called the Downtown Eastside Connect, the centre was conceived as a sort of clearinghouse for positive neighbourhood stories and news. The focus is on all the new, tax-funded social housing initiatives and programs in the neighbourhood. While no figure is attached to years of spending, it's been estimated to be in the range of $1-million a day.

 

So why not tout the effort? "We know reporters from around the world are going to be in the area, and they're going to see what everyone sees," a City of Vancouver greeter told me after the centre opened this week. "We just want to be able to give them another side to the usual story."

 

A positive side. That explains why the info centre has so far been popular with tourists and students but not with reporters looking for seamy underbelly features.

 

Visitors walk into an oddly shaped room festooned with posters. These bluntly describe the "abuse, untreated mental illnesses and addictions" that plague many area residents, and they address "the turning tide" that is transforming the Downtown Eastside for the better.

 

On offer are dozens of different pamphlets, brochures and documents prepared by more than 30 non-profit organizations that operate in the area. Participating groups include the Portland Hotel Society, one of the edgiest and controversial social service agencies in Vancouver. It operates Insite, Canada's first supervised injection site, housed just down the street. Insite has its own brochure inside the info centre, prominently displayed.

 

Ironically, some vocal supporters of Insite and the neighbourhood's well-entrenched poverty industry condemn the information centre, which is merely temporary; they call it a propaganda pushing "spin zone." NDP MLA Jennie Kwan has joined the chorus, telling reporters this week that "it's basically an attempt to sanitize what's really happening in the Downtown Eastside."

 

What's happening, of course, is a renaissance. The Downtown Eastside is the oldest Vancouver neighbourhood, where the city got started. Its sad decline and rampant poverty, crime, homelessness and drug abuse are not news. But conditions are improving as private developers and governments build new market and social housing options, and as businesses slowly return and set up shop. Downtown Eastside Connect is located inside the Woodward's Block, a unique, privately led housing development that also contains dozens of off-market housing units for low-income families and for singles. When the info-centre is dismantled after the Games, the space it occupies will be leased for retail use.

 

Until then, it's open to anyone. My greeter was cheerfully pessimistic. "We're sort of tucked away [inside the Woodward's block]," she said. "I hope people can find us. It's been quiet."

 

Not so, down the street at Pigeon Park, a tiny, triangular public space recently renovated and improved. Yesterday, media were invited to learn about pending Games protests. A good number turned up, including NBC, the American network that is spending heavily on the Games.

 

Protest organizers denounced the corporations involved with the Games, and the alleged "$7-billion" Games budget, and the "military police state" it has produced while "the majority of people in Vancouver are suffering."

 

They spoke in anger about the Alberta tar sands, residential schools and Bhopal. This was their own clearinghouse, for grievances. I caught the eye of another reporter. He winked. The TV cameras kept rolling, and the protesters kept speaking. They made the evening news last night.