We are one year away from hosting the Olympic games here. I haven’t mentioned it before – strange, me being such a Sports nut – but it has impacted the City’s life, that’s for sure. In fact the building, redesigning, and overall changes to certain aspects of everyday life has shown everyone what can be achieved when all levels of Government and other lobbyists come together to organise a massive event. There are always those that have found that by “dissing” the entire plan, they can forward their own agenda’s, however.
Just like the abortion argument, it appears that the loudest of these opponents are people that will not be affected by any outcome. When I see shots of anti-abortion civil disobedience, the ranks seem full of men, and women over child-bearing age – people who will not be personally affected by either a change of law, or the status quo. In this particular case it is ‘advocates’ of the poor that have been the most vocal. These spokespeople appear to be either university students, or people that carve a good enough living from this advocacy to afford to leave many salary levels removed from the epicentre of the day-to-day lives of those that have nothing.
Just a few kilometres from teach other (as the crow flies), our city is home to both the country’s richest and poorest neighbourhood. The latter is a 10 or 11 block area full of drugs, crime, mental illness and poverty. In the last 8 or so years, the city, province, and country have dropped over $1 Billion into this area, only to have it remain the same today as it was at the turn of the Century. Not worse, sure, but it is difficult to see what worse could possible look like outside of a post-Armageddon landscape favoured by Hollywood scriptwriters.
Outside of the two polarised political views of this situation; either ‘Everyone has a right to live the way they like and we should support their choices’, to ‘ We must get everyone out of this, whether they want to or not’, there is the middle view. While these two groups both believe that the unimaginable amount of money being spent on a sporting event could certainly make a difference in this area, that isn’t the argument. Surely what we should be saying is how can we help those that want to be helped. If you make your living selling drugs, and you have access into a neighbourhood that has a very high concentration of drug users, you certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone thinking for themselves and kicking the habit. This includes legal drugs like alcohol. If hundreds of people cannot stop drinking, what a perfect place to open a pub, and water down your beer! If things get ugly due to after effects of these ‘pastimes’, there is always the City’s police and other emergency services that are allowed in to clean up the mess. For many legal and illegal private businesses, it is a cash cow – especially when many residents are spending Government cheques to buy these items. When looked at in that light, we are paying taxes that support poverty in this area. In our city, a small step has been taken to try a different step.
When I was growing up in the UK, all of us teenagers from the suburbs were scared of people that lived in the subsidized towers built in the 1960’s for the lower wage earner: projects, the Americans called them. We were scared, because any group of teens from these areas just a few miles from us, always appear to be ready to defend themselves – even if the best way to do this was to attack first. They all seemed to move around in menacing groups, too, so you knew that one wrong word would result in a gang attack from which the only outcome would be pain. Of course, life is tough in vertical neighbourhoods where tempers are short, and living the best way you can is more important than getting out. We all know that these tower blocks were a mistake, now. The reason being that it reinforced a view that there was no escape, and those that preyed on these families made sure that it was impossible to get out – this was your life, and you had to survive it. This is exactly the position that most poverty struck areas are in. The only people that residents see are those either giving them money, or scraping the dead off the street.
Within our area, there is an old department store, empty for close to 20 years, and too expensive to do anything with. It is right on the corona of the area, and has been eyed by all strata’s of society as something that can probably make a lot of money for someone, if they can get it right: Gentrify the building and, therefore, the streets around it. A downtown University branch to save students having to travel to get their education, incredibly expensive lofts, condo’s and penthouses, a low-income block where drug abuse can be eradicated as a provision of moving in to it. Arguments on the one way to use this space have raged for years, with anyone disagreeing with one particular view only proving that you either happy with the poverty situation, or an uncaring animal who didn’t even see it. The answer is far-seeing and artful. They are going to please everyone.
The building will feature ground floor retail, and a university branch. The exterior lower floors are low income, the upper floors are as frighteningly expensive as anywhere else downtown. Everyone has parking, plenty of bike space, and transit is right outside. Cameras everywhere discourage the drug trade. It’s perfect, because it has been shown that if the poor can live with the next strata’s up, it will give them something to measure their own lives against. If they feel they want to try harder, they have models on their own doorstep to follow. If they don’t – they won’t.
All it takes from our point of view is to buy expensive real estate, happy with the fact that you are sharing your investment with the poor. Do we have the balls to do this on a large-scale basis? Would you like to do it? Of course, it won’t work. Human nature demands that you are the one becoming upwardly mobile, not the person on the rungs of the ladder below you. Our nature is one of watching our own backs first, not scratching someone else’s. If we looked after our neighbour first, the world would be a very different place, and we have had enough generations to achieve it. In theatres of war, doctors that can help the sick and wounded are, instead, ransomed and murdered as pieces on the board, rather than human beings. Banks are more interested in taking as much money from people as possible, rather than helping them make their own money first.
Any question on poverty, or abortion, war, economics, housing, or any other situation that touches our lives can easily be answered by looking out for the other guy, first. Without that, we will never change anything. While are waiting for someone else to do something, people are dying – and others are profiting from them.
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