Fighting for Space

  “We were trying to create a shelter for people who had been kicked out of every other shelter and banned from every other building,” See begins. She explains that it was winter, and while Vancouver is generally a lot warmer than most of Canada, a night on the street in November can still be dangerous. But many homeless people hate shelters even more than they do no shelter at all. Some can’t deal with the rules—no shopping carts inside, for example, no couples sleeping together, no smoking, and so on. See and Bond wanted to create a space where these people felt comfortable.

  “So Andy and I would drive around late at night and try to entice people to come inside,” See says. She recalls finding one young man who was asleep on the sidewalk that winter, literally stuck to the ground in a frozen puddle. “We actually had to chip him out of the sidewalk,” she says.

  At first, nobody wanted to come with them. This group was distrustful of authority to such an extreme degree that they refused to accept help. But word slowly spread that the New Fountain was different. That even after you were barred from every other shelter in Vancouver, PHS would take you in at the New Fountain.

  Sarah Blyth, another PHS staffer who worked at the New Fountain in its early days, explains that this population was a little different from that of most other PHS buildings—quite a bit younger on average and, for whatever reason, this group’s drug of choice was methamphetamine, or crystal meth. “There were a lot of mental-health issues, a lot of meth users, a lot of people who just couldn’t live anywhere else,” she says. “The New Fountain was the last stop. You could come drunk, high—anything. There was nothing else like it.”

  Andy Bond recounts how they applied the Portland’s trademark flexibility. People spending the night were allowed to bring shopping carts inside, for example. PHS actually creating a ticketed valet system for them. Couples were allowed to share beds. You could even smoke inside (unheard of anywhere else in Vancouver).

  Kailin See describes the community that developed there as “hard and beautiful … It could get pretty nuts,” she concedes. “There were fights, there was violence, there were overdoses, there was everything that comes with working with that population.”

  Bond similarly says it wasn’t an easy place to work. He remembers there was a two-hour period in the middle of the night when there was only one PHS staffer looking after the entire building. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be five or six drug overdoses in a twenty-four-hour period, and so during those two hours just before the morning shift came on, staff prayed they wouldn’t be forced to respond to more than one OD at a time. “It was insane,” Bond says.

  At the same time, the New Fountain’s staff and clients made huge progress together. Because the shelter’s population mostly consisted of regulars—people returning to the same bed each night—their lives were given some routine and stability, which led many of them to reduce their drug use. Blyth organized a group of them into a soccer team that she took to France and then Brazil for two rounds of an annual tournament called the Homeless World Cup. In barely a year, PHS took street kids who couldn’t obey the rules long enough to spend one night in a homeless shelter to a mental state where they were together enough to travel the world playing on a sports team.

  Then the provincial government’s housing agency, BC Housing, announced it would discontinue funding for the New Fountain.

  “When spring was here, we knew they were going to close it,” Bond says. “But it had been so successful. We’d housed people and we started the homeless-soccer thing. So we did this campaign. And that was what really made BC Housing angry.”

  Blyth organized a marathon twenty-four-hour soccer match in the heart of downtown Vancouver, a location notably outside the Downtown Eastside and significantly more visible to the general population, which might otherwise have no interaction with homeless people or drug addicts.

  Next PHS made a direct assault on BC Housing itself.

  Early one morning in April 2011, Bond, See, and dozens of the shelter tenants themselves piled into a bus that PHS had rented and drove across town to the housing agency’s headquarters in Vancouver’s neighbouring city of Burnaby.

  “The people who slept there at night were with us at every demonstration,” See says. “They were able to communicate to people in a way that we couldn’t, why the service was so essential to them. And that’s who stormed the BC Housing office.”

  While half the group staged a demonstration just outside the building, the other half forced its way inside, occupying space on several floors in the offices where bureaucrats were working at their desks. They banged drums and used an electric bullhorn to blast a siren that made it impossible for anyone there to ignore them. Some New Fountain tenants took small posters they had printed about the shelter and walked right into people’s cubicles to pin them to the walls there.

  “We wanted people to feel uncomfortable, we wanted people to wish we would go away and wish we would stop,” See says. “It was an absolute onslaught on all your senses. It was visual, it was visceral. They couldn’t ignore this population because all of a sudden, the problem was in their offices.”

  PHS had always walked a fine line with advocacy and its public demonstrations. The New Fountain protests crossed that line. They were different from previous actions. Instead of targeting an entire level of government, the New Fountain campaign focused in on one agency, and not just any agency, but a primary funder of PHS programming. In 2011, the year of the New Fountain protests, BC Housing provided the organization with $7.9 million CDN, up from $6.1 million just one year earlier.64 And now PHS was demonstrating inside BC Housing offices, literally down the hall from the bureaucrats who had written those cheques.

  “It began to draw too much attention to [BC Premier] Christy Clark,” Bond says. “She, basically, said, ‘What the hell is going on? There is so much noise behind this shelter. Can you guys just give them the god-damn funding?’”

  BC Housing caved.

  “We won,” Bond says. But he remembers that their government partner was angry. “It was not just a disagreement,” he explains with hindsight. “BC Housing would say that it was the way that we disagreed, that it was, quote, ‘frightening.’”

  Just after it was announced that provincial funding for the shelter was extended, Townsend received a call from BC Housing CEO Shayne Ramsay, who lives in the Downtown Eastside and who had known Townsend and Evans for fifteen years.

  “Why did you do that?” Townsend recalls Ramsay asking him. “You should have told me. I would have sorted it out.”

  “We did tell you,” Townsend replied. “We told you twenty times. You could cut our management fee, but you could not do this [close the New Fountain].”

  As an organization, BC Housing had had it with him. Ramsay generously describes the actual protests as “respectful,” even when PHS held them inside BC Housing offices. He notes that they never called the police. But Townsend continued to push even after the sit-ins had ended.

  “There was one time where Mark was trying to get a point across and made my vice-president of operations, a woman, afraid. He followed her out to a car and was berating her about something, as Mark would do,” Ramsay says. “From that point, we would only deal with Liz or Dan.

  “Staff were frightened,” Ramsay adds.

  Less than a block from the New Fountain Shelter is the Rainier Hotel. It opened in 2009 in response to a need. Asked what the Rainier is, Tanya Fader recounts taking one of the Portland’s tenants to Harbour Light, a detox program located in the Downtown Eastside that’s run by the Salvation Army.

  “I walked her in there to help her do intake, and immediately she was being cat-called,” Fader says. “Literally, the first thing somebody said to her was, ‘Hey, baby, haven’t seen you in a while.’ Another guy did a whistle. Just to get inside and talk to a staff member, she had to go through this crowd of men. It was just so humiliating and demoralizing for her. So, of course, she wasn’t going to stay,” Fader continues. “I wa
s surprised she even did intake.”

  As a woman, former sex worker, black Canadian, and recovering drug addict, she was marginalized to an extreme, Fader explains. And then she had relapsed. “She was feeling completely vulnerable. And when I walked her in there, her body just tensed up.”

  Fader had given the woman her cell number and received a call from her two days later. “I can’t stay here,” she told her. “When I’m asleep, I feel like I’m not safe. I feel like I have no privacy, like I’m constantly a target … like my whole past is up in my face.” The woman returned to the street, using again, and doing everything she had to do to satisfy her addiction.

  “So that was the idea behind the Rainier,” Fader says. “Before the Rainier, there was no women’s-only treatment down here.”

  Liz Evans describes the Rainier as a refuge with a unique approach to addiction. “What people think treatment is, versus what people actually need, are sometimes very different things,” she explains. “What the Rainier did was give people what they needed … It was designed around the very specific needs of the most at-risk women in our community.”

  The Rainier was a women-only supportive-housing site and treatment centre wrapped into one. It took in former sex workers, women who had been physically abused, and those who were working on getting clean but were still struggling with addiction issues and often had mental-health problems as well. Then, instead of giving them a list of rules and a workshop schedule, Rainier staff asked the women what they felt would help them get better.

  “‘What do you need?’” Evans remembers asking them. “‘We’re going to design our program around who you are right now.’

  “They’d had their guts ripped out of them and their souls beaten down,” Evans says. “So the way we tried to restore balance was by giving them space and love and dignity and things to do to help them re-establish and reconnect with the part of themselves that was missing or that they’d lost.”

  PHS had a three-year grant from Canada’s federal government and an understanding with Vancouver Coastal Health that if the Rainier’s programming worked on that trial basis, the regional authority would take over funding in 2012. The Rainier opened with forty-one supportive-housing units spread over two floors. Half the beds were marked for short-term detox while the other half were for long-term treatment. There were counselling services backed by clinical staff inside the building. Living at the Rainier also came with non-clinical programming designed with input from the tenants; for example, acupuncture, grief support, counselling, and writing workshops.

  After three years, PHS managers were pointing to the Rainier as one of their favourite success stories. An evaluation by the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS described it that way. But the health authority disagreed and took issue with the study.

  “At Vancouver Coastal Health, we must conclude that we do not see compelling evidence that the current way of delivering care to the Rainier’s residents is leading to the best possible health outcomes for these women,” the organization’s executive director wrote in an oped published in the city’s daily newspaper. The article maintains no woman living at the hotel would lose their room or support services. However, it goes on to detail how programs would change. “On-site staff will be replaced by a wider range of outside clinical staff such as counsellors, case managers, nurses and doctors operating from centres in the broader community that offer more evidence-based care,” it states. “This different approach will mean some non-clinical and administrative services that the Portland Hotel Society put in place will be reduced.”65

  A Portland Hotel Society staffer named Kailin See played a central role in 2012 protests against government cuts to the New Fountain Shelter and Rainier Hotel.

  Photo: Andy Bond

  PHS saw the changes as nothing less than the government abandoning the women for whom they had promised to provide care.

  Kailin See had helped get a lot of the Rainier’s programming off the ground. As the end of the three-year term of federal funding drew near, she met with the Rainier’s tenants each Wednesday evening and asked them what they thought PHS should do. “There was a lot of conflict within the Rainier community about identifying specifically with sex work and addiction when so many of them were trying so hard to get out of that,” See recounts. “So this would be about their right to be women and their right to be safe and their right to have a home.”

  See remembers one of the women looking down at the table they sat around, almost talking to herself. “We are not faceless,” she said. “It came from constantly being tossed aside and forgotten and made to compromise,” See recalls. “She just wasn’t willing to do that anymore.”

  One afternoon in December 2012, Vancouver Coastal Health staff gathered for a conference at the redeveloped Woodward’s Building, less than two blocks from the Rainier. See met with tenants at the hotel and asked them if they wanted to mount a protest against the impending program cuts. They developed a plan together. The women who were living at the Rainier felt like they didn’t matter to anybody, as if they were invisible. To symbolize that, they would present themselves at the health authority meeting wearing white masks that obscured their faces.

  Forty women assembled outside the VCH meeting that day, representing the forty tenants who were living at the Rainier. The group was comprised entirely of women from the Downtown Eastside, and most of them were Rainier tenants. They didn’t interfere with the meeting in a physical sense. The path to the boardroom that VCH used wasn’t obstructed in any way, and it was a silent protest. None of the women wearing a mask said anything to anyone. They simply stood there, lining the staircase and the hallway outside the boardroom, wearing white masks that symbolized how they felt the health authority was treating them.

  “We got in a line that went all the way from the elevator to the meeting door,” See recounts. “And we stood there and we waited. They were supposed to break for the end of the day and then it went long,” she continues. “So we just stood there. You could hear a pin drop as we stood there forever.”

  Finally, VCH staff began to file out of the boardroom. They walked down the long hallway, past the women in their white masks, toward the stairwell and the building’s exit. “They opened the door and filed out—and they completely ignored us,” See says. “But there was power in forcing them to be ashamed when they ignored us.”

  In the Downtown Eastside, Vancouver Coastal Health works very closely with BC Housing. They co-fund many projects together, including the Portland’s buildings and health services. Now the two government organizations were both feeling like PHS had them under siege.

  Evans recalls meeting BC Housing vice-president of operations Craig Crawford at a café one morning shortly after the masked demonstration at Woodward’s. He was angry. “You do realize, Liz, that Vancouver Coastal Health staff felt really intimated and threatened and very upset,” Evans remembers Crawford telling her.

  Evans concedes that, in response, she became frustrated. The power dynamic between these two groups of people was so imbalanced in favour of the government, she explains, and yet Crawford had claimed that the bureaucrats, who held that power, felt threatened by a group of marginalized women.

  “The point was to illustrate that the women living at the Rainier didn’t feel like their lives mattered,” Evans said to Crawford. “Honestly, Craig, you’re telling me that the same women who every day are at risk of being raped, killed, or violated, whose lives are not seen, and who people don’t care about at all, that they are intimidating to bureaucrats?”

  But this was just the latest in a series of actions that Mark Townsend had organized to target Vancouver Coastal Health. Townsend had spent the last twenty years of his life helping PHS provide housing to people who every other agency had said could not be housed. But there was another side to him—he had a temper. In fighting for people who could not fight for themselves, he could bully opponents and exhibit cruelty. In December 2012, Townsend unleashed this other
side on the people he felt threatened to hurt the women who lived at the Rainier Hotel.

  In addition to the public campaign, Dan Small recalls how hard Townsend pushed on the Rainier issue behind the scenes, repeatedly calling VCH staff. “He would call them and say, ‘Hey, I’m waiting for you. It’s five o’clock. You better fucking call. Because you’re going home to your lovely little wife and your dinner and you’re going to put your slippers on and these women don’t have anything. So what the fuck?’

  “Those professionals had never dealt with anything like that,” Small reflects. “They had never been on the other end of that kind of heat. And that heat got turned up way high on the Rainier. Higher than we’d ever turned it.”

  On December 13, 2012, Jack Bibby, the president of the Portland Hotel Society’s nine-member board of directors, received a letter from Dr David Ostrow, then the president and CEO of Vancouver Coastal Health.

  “As you are no doubt aware, PHS, led by Mark Townsend, has been staging various protests to voice opposition to Vancouver Coastal Health’s (VCH) decision to change how services are delivered to clients of the Rainier Hotel,” the letter begins. “The manner in which this is occurring is completely unacceptable and undermines the credibility and sustainability of PHS as a service delivery partner to VCH. The protest activities have become increasingly disruptive, invasive, and aggressive to the extent that VCH must re-evaluate being associated with such an organization.”

  The letter states that these disruptions included “intimidating and harassing VCH staff and clients. Many have become fearful of coming to work and at least one has had to take sick leave because of the tactics being used as part of the protest activities,” it continues. “While this may be seen as a victory for some in your organization, we consider this to be an intolerable situation.”