I haven't even been in downtown Vancouver for awhile now and the last time I went through this area would have been when we took the bus from downtown to the PNE in summer 2019 (bus route goes straight down Hastings to Renfrew). Looks like nothing has changed and if anything looks even worse.

It's sad and pathetic that a city as big and ridiculously expensive as Vancouver still has this issue that the political folks keep saying "must get resolved" yet absolutely squat happens to fix it.

   

Every city has a place like that. It’s still sad though. You can stroll through the lovely sights of Gastown, and then turn the corner and come face to face with the detritus of humanity.

   

There's zero excuse for not cleaning up the trash in the streets, not in a Canadian city that has monumentally high civic revenue available to it from it's insane level of property taxes. What's their excuse for not doing it? Too expensive to have the police escort the sanitation workers if necessary to keep them safe from any potentially violent street people? For a city that is supposedly the greatest urban area in the planet to live, according to some of these ridiculous polls of "liveability" (whatever the fuck that even means) you'd think the politicians & city admin would try a little harder not to let any of it turn into the Bronx from the 1970's and 80's.

   

I think their excuse is, it doesn’t solve anything. Where I live in Abby, we have the same problem on a smaller scale. Homeless people set up camp in a park or forest somewhere and eventually the police clear them out and the city cleans up the mess. And then a month later the cycle repeats itself somewhere else.

What they really need is help. But that kind of help is much more expensive and time intensive and very few governments at any level are that kind of forward thinking.

   

I concur. We have tent cities in Victoria and it was exacerbated by the current town council who allowed 24 hour camping during the pandemic, to disastrous results. Violent crime up, property values down. They have rolled this back but the horse has left the barn. Every other local municipality knew to not do this so the homeless population in Victoria downtown skyrocketed as a result.

We have to accept that this too is an aspect of a modern Canadian society. Does not mean we should be apathetic towards solutions but we need to come to grips with the fact that a square peg will never fit into a round hole.