Vancouver's effort to balance poor neighborhood media coverage

With the Winter Olympic Games coming to Vancouver, Canada later this month, many journalists from around the world will be telling their home audiences about life in the city. Game organizers and city officials fear that the foreign press will do stories about the poor neighborhoods in Vancouver that will give a negative image of the city.

In an effort to balance the media coverage, the city has opened an information center about the city's poor Downtown Eastside area. The kiosk talks about the many social services available and the history of the area. However, many advocates of the poor call the center a propaganda machine and are planing a protest for the foreign journalists to see.

From the Vancouver Sun, writer Lori Culbert looked at both opinions of the information center.

“Someone can write a negative story by taking a picture of someone in a doorway, but we have some things to celebrate,” Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman said Friday.

The centre, which has a budget of about $150,000, is full of details about social housing, outreach programs and support services. Coleman said he hopes reporters will take away the message that B.C. “is facing the issue [of homelessness] head-on,” and is focusing on integrating services to try to keep people off the streets.

About 35 non-profit organizations that do important work in the community – such as initiatives involving clothing, meals, addictions treatment and harm reduction – will have representatives at the centre.
...

However, the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) and a half dozen other community groups are planning a protest outside the office doors today, dismissing the centre as a “propaganda kiosk.”

“This is government spin-doctoring,” said CCAP’s Wendy Pedersen.
...

As an example, Pedersen said, the groups want to expand on a wallboard in the centre stating that “homelessness is a complex problem that is the result of years of abuse, addictions, and/or mental illness.”

What the board doesn’t say, she added, is that government policies involving welfare rates and social-housing construction are also key culprits.
...

It won’t be clear until the throngs of media arrive in Vancouver whether international reporters will even bother with the centre, which is not visible from the sidewalk, but located in a courtyard in the Woodward’s development.

The effects of the Olympics on Vancouver's poor

With the Winter Olympics coming up in Vancouver, city activists are critical of the games taking much needed resources away from the poor. Activists will call attenetion to the problem by staging a competing "Poverty Olympics" just days before the winter games.

Vancouver promised to turn the Olympic Village into affordable housing, but construction of the housing has gone over budget. Activist now fear the city will change it's mind and turn the Village into Condominiums to help recoup some of the costs.

From the Seattle Times writer Kristi Heim writes this profile of the effects the games have on Vancouver's poor.

A few days before the official Games begin, advocates for the poor will stage a "Poverty Olympics," aiming to push the city's social problems into the global spotlight. The parody, which claims to "reflect the unique local flavor of the host city," has a cockroach, a bedbug and a rat as mascots.

"In the Downtown Eastside, the street scene isn't so pretty," said longtime community activist Jean Swanson, referring to the neighborhood that a U.N. official called one of the worst slums of a wealthy city. "We have the same HIV rate as Botswana, and we're a developed country."

An element of Vancouver's Olympic bid was a four-page statement of social goals pledging the Games would be used to benefit the inner city.

Organizers promised to employ neighborhood residents, build affordable housing, prevent existing residents from being displaced and protect civil liberties.

Those promises helped win passage in 2003 of a citywide vote for approval of Vancouver's Olympic bid. An Olympics-related housing committee later said eliminating homelessness was to be the lasting legacy of the Games.

Supporters argue that the Games have brought tangible improvements to the Downtown Eastside: building renovations, construction jobs, temporary shelters for the homeless and new low-income housing.

Yet, many critics say the neighborhood's problems have worsened and that the $6 billion Olympics-related spending spree has yielded scant social benefits for the poor.