Inside Vancouver
The Hellhole
By Michael McKinley published Dec 1, 2007
A drug dealer threatens to kill you for calling the cops on him. Your sleep is punctuated by shouting, car doors slamming, engines gunning, and the piercing drug whistle. And the police-often with dogs, ERT assault rifles, wagons-are such regular visitors to your street that your preschool daughter often speaks to them on her toy phone, asking them to stop by for apple juice once they've dealt with "the bad people."
What inner-city American hellhole is this, you wonder? Well, the hellhole in question is a toxic apartment building located on my nice residential street in our ethnically, socially diverse neighbourhood between Commercial Drive and the PNE. Like many such apartment buildings in Vancouver, it exists because of a staggering lack of civic political will to do anything about the slumlords who hold us all hostage.
The slumlords in our case are the Zen family, an Italian-Canadian clan with multiple local real estate holdings who have been riding roughshod on the city for some time now. In the 1980s, in partnership with the Aquilini family (since rehabilitated somewhat as developer-philanthropists), the Zens raised the rents so exorbitantly on their West End apartment buildings that a generation of elderly residents was forced into the street. At the time, the Zens and Aquilinis came under assault from the media, from the (now extinct) tenants' watchdog, the Rentalsman, and from the B.C. Legislature, where MLAs expressed outrage over the injustice of it all.
Twenty-five years later, not much has changed for the local weed that is Slumlordis Vancouveris. So, a group of neighbours on our street decided that, since we like our neighbourhood and don't want to be bullied into moving, we'd try to reclaim the garden from the weed.
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Like many buildings such as apartments in Vancouver, it was shocking lack civilian political will to do something about the slumlords who hold us all hostage. microsoft points Chicago is no better.
