Cityphile: Dave Eby

Everyone loves an underdog. But who wants to go up against the big kid, and risk getting pulverized behind the portables? Not us! But then who would stick up for the kids scrawnier than us? Somebody's gotta! Sloppy metaphors aside, David Eby has become the guy known for championing the legal rights of our city's less fortunate. He's inadvertently become a spokesperson for our country's most controversial neighbourhood. That's a good thing: we could do a lot worse.

He's the lawyer who wrote handy things like The Arrest Handbook: A Guide to Your Rights and who co-authored the much hyped Cracks in the Foundation: Solving the Low-Income Housing Crisis in Canada's Poorest Neighbourhood (Here's a very readable summary). Eby's like a hotshot lawyer who decided that he had bigger fish to fry than the chumps on LA Law.

Eby works with Pivot Legal Society, an awesome organization totally focussed on the downtown eastside. They rep people in need of legal help, focussing in on cases which have the most potential to improve the worsening plight of DTES residents. Hey people, this is the new world where everyone's supposed to have rights! Hear it straight from the horse's mouth after the jump.

You came to live in Vancouver in 2004. What brought you here?
I followed my partner out here for the summer of my first year of law school. I fell in love with Vancouver, and with the people doing such amazing and compelling work here. I spent my first summer working with the BC Civil Liberties Association, and then volunteered with Pivot from then on, until I joined Pivot full time in 2005.

You co-authored Cracks in the Foundation, a report which clearly identified issues and solutions for homelessness in the DTES. Are you happy or disappointed with the results the report has had?

Cracks in the Foundation has had a far greater impact than I could ever have imagined. That report caused the City of Vancouver to dust off some long unused bylaw powers that let it make repairs to buildings and bill negligent landlords for the cost of those repairs. It resulted in the City tripling the cost of converting SRO rooms to any other use. It contributed to the broader movement that resulted in the first welfare rate increases in BC in over 10 years. The report was one of the main resources at the table to tell the federal, provincial and municipal governments how to keep their (already broken) Olympic commitments at the VANOC housing sectoral table. That report will be out shortly. However, with all of those achievements, we see evictions increasing at an exponential rate, rampant real-estate speculation in the downtown eastside and a government spending its surplus on tax cuts instead of housing. We're getting there, but we've got a long way to go.

Many people feel that the Olympics and/or city can't realistically be blamed for rising property costs and the resulting trend of SRO hotel owners wanting to sell their properties. What's your opinion about the Olympics? Was it just foolish for the city to claim in the Bid Book that it would be able to prevent people from becoming homeless?

There's lots to address in that question. We had our first "official" Olympics evictions take place at the Golden Crown, where the owner actually went on TV and said he was evicting the long-term tenants there to make way for Olympic workers and workers at the Woodwards site. Unfortunately, most owners aren't that frank, and suggest that evictions are totally unrelated to the Olympics. What we have seen is a huge upsurge in real-estate speculation, with 1 in 5 rooming house rooms (there are 6000 in Vancouver) changing hands in the last year, or being listed for sale. Prices for buildings have doubled and tripled in a market that has been stagnant for some time. In my opinion, this speculation is directly linked to the belief that the Olympics are going to "clean up" the downtown eastside, clearing the way for development.

In some respects it was foolish for the City to sign on with a provincial and federal government that haven't funded housing for years to say that people would not be displaced because of the Olympics. Not surprisingly, neither level of government seems particularly interested in funding the replacement housing that is required to ensure that the privately operated housing in the downtown eastside isn't all renovated and rented to Olympic workers and volunteers.

And any opinion on Project Civil City?
It's probably easy to predict that I think a project that will spend $1,000,000 on criminalizing the homeless and harassing them out of Vancouver until 2010 isn't the best approach to our social problems. Crackdowns have been a mass failure in the DTES, causing drug dealing and use to spread from that neighbourhood along Broadway and Granville and into Mount Pleasant, causing decreased use of harm reduction initiatives like safe site and needle exchanges, and causing massively inflated bills for taxpayers when addicts are jailed instead of treated. You'd think drug treatment on demand would be available in BC as a first step, but we're not even there yet. If you're interested in detox, you'd better get ready for a waiting list. Same goes for any type of drug treatment after you detox.

Eby talks with the media at the Picadilley Hotel protest

What sort of action do you think the average Vancouverite can/should take to be part of the solution of Vancouver's housing and homelessness crisis?
It sounds corny, but letters to federal, provincial and municipal politicians do have a significant impact. People can become members of Pivot Legal Society and contribute to our strategic legal advocacy work through donations or by volunteering. People can also support the work of the Downtown Eastside Residents' Association and the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre through donations and volunteering as well. I think there are likely to be some great protests too, leading up to the Olympics, and it's always great when there's a good crowd.

There's a lot of consensus that we're living in one of the best cities in the world, but it's clear that Vancouver's not working for everyone. How would you describe Vancouver to someone from, say, Ontario?
Vancouver is a great city, no doubt about it. But it is only great for people who don't ever need our social safety net, whether it's healthcare, social assistance, disability assistance, social housing, supportive housing...the list goes on. I would describe Vancouver as a city of contradictions: the most beautiful scenery, the most grim streetscapes, the friendliest people, the most desperate people. Ontario is like a level line: in many ways not as great as us, but also in many ways, not as bad as us.

There's no doubt that the work you do would drive many to a nervous breakdown in a few weeks. How do you keep a level head through everything? What places do you like to go to relax and have fun?
I don't keep a level head through everything, but I try my best to make it look like I do. What amazes me are the people who live in the residential hotels who still seem like quite calm, reasonable people when I meet them. It's important for me to get out of the 'hood every once in a while to stay balanced, and it's my privilege to be able to do so. My clients aren't so lucky. Anyway, when I do get out of the DTES, I don't go too far. If I'm eating, I like to go to Budgies Burritos at Main and Kingsway, because they make the best burrito in town. If I'm going out, I like going to the Brickyard, Rhizome Cafe or Six Acres at Carrall and Water (especially when Dale is DJing).

Thanks for the interview, David, and good luck with all of your work.