Why is Poverty So Deep in the DTES?
By Jean Swanson
Thirty years ago, as now, the Downtown Eastside was a poor neighbourhood. Then, as now, people with addictions were visible on the street. In those days alcohol was the drug used most often. Now it’s other drugs. But thirty years ago the stores along E. Hastings St. weren’t boarded up. We bought newspapers at Universal News. Residents could afford a few breakfasts a month at the Princess Café, a hotplate at Benmors, a coconut bun at the local bakery, a cheap shirt at Fields, a coffee at the Two Eagles Cafés. Thirty years ago City Hall planners weren’t spending hours on end trying to figure out how to get richer people to move to the area in order to “revitalize” businesses.
Why are so many storefronts in the Downtown Eastside boarded up? One important reason is that the low income residents there have lost a huge amount of purchasing power in the last three decades. Thirty years ago, as now, most Downtown Eastside residents depended on low wage work, pensions, unemployment insurance or welfare for their income. The purchasing power of three of those sources of income has declined drastically. In 1975 the minimum wage in BC was 122 percent of the poverty line for a single person in a city (source: Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto, Social Infopac, June, 1975). Today the $8 an hour minimum wage is only 78 percent of the poverty line for a 37.5 hour week. This means people whose health keeps them from working full time, because they have depression for example, can’t survive on part time work by living frugally.
To look at it another way, a single person would have to make $12.51 an hour at a full time 37.5 hour a week job to have the same purchasing power as a minimum wage worker had in 1975. A person who depends on today’s $6 an hour so-called training wage, will only make 58 percent of today’s poverty line with a full time minimum wage job.
If only 25 percent of DE residents work at full time minimum wage jobs, an increase in minimum wage to the poverty line ($10.26) would increase purchasing power in the neighbourhood by over a million dollars a month.
Before 1991, 80-90% of unemployed workers were able to get unemployment insurance. Now a TD Bank reports that only about half as many unemployed people qualify for benefits. Many unemployed have to go straight to welfare, if they can get it.
Today about 30 % of DTES residents get their income from welfare according to the City. Welfare for a single person whom the ministry considers employable is a maximum of $610 a month, $235 for support and $375 for shelter. In 1981 the support portion of welfare was $205. To have the same purchasing power as it had in 1982, the welfare support allowance would have to be $355.48 today (source: Left Behind, SPARC BC, Dec. 2005). Today’s support portion of welfare is so low that most people have to use their food money for rent. Only % of DTES rooms rent for $375 or less. There are no other places in the city to rent cheaply. Today, the average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in Vancouver is $919 a month (Source: http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/odpub/esub/64725/64725_2009_B02.pdf?sid=8f1199dc5db14ebcb1ff8093294fffe7&f
In the 1970s and 80s, the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) required provinces to give welfare to people in need. In 1996 CAP was abolished. We now have a welfare system that has numerous ways of keeping people in dire need from getting assistance. They include the 3 week wait, the rule that you have to be financially independent for 2 years before getting welfare, the rule that you can only be on welfare for 2 years out of 5 (with some exceptions), employment plans, and numerous hurdles in the application process (such as the requirement to apply online) that make if extremely difficult for vulnerable people to apply and stay on welfare. As a result, homelessness has doubled in the last 3 years. Homeless people have to sleep in doorways and on loading docks, push their carts in the neighbourhood, go through garbage for recylables, and live outside exposed to the elements. They have no purchasing power. These huge changes to minimum wage, welfare and EI have created a massive depth of poverty.
