By Mike Archer. For those not interested in reading a full discussion of the ADBA’s opposition to ACE’s proposal for a homeless shelter I’ve presented my conclusion first. If you want to read the article on which it is based it’s called ‘It’s Complicated’ and starts below the conclusion.
– Conclusion
No It Isn’t
No, it isn’t complicated.
The Abbotsford Downtown Business Association (ADBA) says it wants to have a say in what happens at the proposed Abbotsford Community Services (ACS) shelter and how.
By what right?
What expertise do they have in the treatment of alcoholism or drug abuse? What expertise does the ADBA have in dealing with mental health issues? What do they know about what to do if and when someone is experiencing an overdose? What can they add to the success of a project designed, in part, to add some simple human dignity to the lives of people who don’t seem to belong in the city we’ve built.
Why would the ADBA want to insert itself into a matter of public policy such as the way we treat our poor people?
We’ve seen what happens in this community when the interests of business take precedence over the interests of human beings. We end up with a decade of inhumane and sickening behaviour on the part of city officials and community leaders and, ultimately we end up with the Abbotsford Chicken Manure Homeless Incident.
The only significant example the ADBA has provided to this community is that when faced with the horrors of homelessness and drug abuse they choose their own financial self-interest over the lives of the helpless men and women who are victims of our society. The fact those poor people were living there before most of the ADBA members even decided to take advantage of the cheap land seems to be left out of almost every conversation about the issue.
By any human measure of right and wrong the homeless have more right to claim downtown Abbotsford as their home than most of the businesses which have moved in and chased them out.
Using press releases, access to the media and petitions to convince the community as a whole to join their side of this issue, when the homeless have no equivalent means of standing up for themselves and enunciating their side of the story is simply crass and unfair.
By starting a petition and involving the whole community, they have made this a community issue in which the whole community now has a say.
So … No. After what Bob Bos has shown us about how he deals with the homeless and others he doesn’t want downtown, the ADBA has disqualified itself from having any say in the way the proposed shelter is run or how this community starts to repair the damage of a decade of conflict with the poor led primarily by its former leadership.
——
It’s Complicated
By Mike Archer. It’s complicated. That’s usually what most of us say when we have something unpalatable to say, or something we don’t feel like talking about. When we do this we are actually speaking in public relations language, not in truth. Afraid of having our agenda hijacked by being misquoted or taken out of context, we hope to frame the conversation in the best possible context for ourselves.
That’s how organizations like the Abbotsford Downtown Business Association (ADBA) or the Chamber of Commerce or politicians like John Smith have always talked about the manner in which Abbotsford treats its poor – it’s complicated.
And so, when Abbotsford Community Services (ACS) publicly released its plan for a low barrier, 20-unit housing project for homeless men, the ADBA sent out a press releases to the media and began a petition in an attempt to draw the rest of the community into their battle with the homeless and ACS.
Not having the benefit of media contacts or a public relations team that will send press release out to the media on their behalf, maybe it’s time someone spoke up for the people whose lives are being decided upon by the rest of us.
Everybody on all sides of this issue will attack the things I’m about to say in this column because they all want to be seen to be working together for the better interests of the community and the last thing they want in this complicated public relations battle is to be seen as anti-homeless or anti-business or anti-anything.
There are, nonetheless, some truths this community has to hear if this discussion is going to be anything other than what it has been for the last decade – a complete and utter waste of time.
First of all; saying things like ‘I’m all for helping the homeless but it’s my business we’re talking about’ is not covering all your bases. It is taking a position that your business is more important than lives of the homeless people.
The word ‘but’ makes it so. Not right or wrong just true.
So, just to have both sides on the record, ‘I’m not at all against businesses making money but it’s people’s lives we’re talking about.’
Secondly; let’s take all of the BS out of the equation and get down to brass tacks. This has nothing to do with business people’s concerns for school children at neighbouring schools, the difficulty residents will have solving their substance abuse issues so close to liquor stores, or any of the window dressing wrapped around the discussion. This is about citizens or business owners deciding what happens in the streets of downtown Abbotsford.
By refusing to have an open, honest discussion; by refusing to make a commitment to help it’s poorest citizens; and by not allowing the community as a whole – which includes the homeless citizens – to have a say in the issue, it has been allowed to fester and grow to the point where businesses are justifiably concerned for their survival and so are those who deal with and speak on behalf of the homeless.
A Failure Of Leadership
A more damning example of failure in community and political leadership is hard to imagine.
Like any city of its size Abbotsford has a predictable number of people who, for whatever reason, cannot, won’t or simply don’t fall into today’s established norms of what our commercialized society likes to describe as ‘productive members of society.’
Whether because the provincial politicians, wishing to spend our money on something else, threw them out on their ear facing mental health or addiction issues, without any help or hope of survival, or because local politicians, wishing to spend our money on something else, chose not to help them even though they are fellow citizens, or the Sally Ann, because they don’t help people with substance abuse problems, chose not to help them … (the wrong kind of fellow citizens it turns out) here we are. And here we have been for more than a decade.
Some of our fellow citizens are living in awful, horrid, and demeaning conditions with no home, no job, no money, no food and no hope of getting any of those without the helping hand of their fellow citizens.
The people who like to call themselves our political and community leaders have consistently and repeatedly chosen to displace and disperse them [Our Collective Silence] rather than find a way to help them.
Back in 2008 When Pastor Christoph Reiner of the Peace Lutheran Church decided to do what he thought to be the Christian thing and feed some of these poor souls, he was met by the three big cheeses in the community at that time – Councillors Bruce Beck and John Smith, and ADBA president Bob Bos who told him to stop feeding the poor. [Implausible Deniability – The Actions Of Bullies]
“It is only a person that has never had to struggle for their next meal, never wondered where they will sleep tonight, never had to deal with mental illness, nor suffered under the genetic predisposition for addiction that can be as cruel as we have been to our homeless and needy.” – Vince Dimanno, President ARA
Follow The Money
Let’s look at the money. Because that is all this is really about – the money. Who has it; who wants it; who it was promised to and who is going to get it.
As long as business interests are part of this discussion it is not about humanity. It is not about morality. It is not about doing the right thing.
It is simply about money.
Virtually every old downtown area in every community in North America has, to some degree or another been wiped out by the advent of the shopping malls forty years ago and big box stores in the last decade. This process, facilitated by local politicians eager to fill municipal coffers and foster economic growth no matter what the economic collateral damage, left old downtown areas moribund and failing because, with the encouragement of those municipal politicians people were convinced they prefer to shop elsewhere.
Perhaps out of a feeling of guilt or simply to respond to political pressure, governments created a variety of grant money and miniscule amounts of financial support to pay lip service to the idea that Downtown Business Improvement Areas could somehow reverse the trend they had started.
With very few exceptions (Langley is among them) downtown business areas became places where speculators could pick up cheap land or buildings and, with minimal investment, charge low rents and make a profit.
Old downtowns also became a place where homeless people, street people, drug addicts, people with mental health issues, prostitutes and other of society’s rejects* could find shelter from the elements and the authorities and, needing a home of some sort, they congregated in these urban slums.
*I’m not being unkind … I’m referring to them in exactly the way we treat them. If we’re going to decide their future we can at least talk honestly.
The businesses which began to gravitate to these urban slums were, in the early days, an awful lot like the homeless. They tended to be low cash flow, low profitability, marginal businesses – tattoo parlours, cheap restaurants, bargain stores, swap shops and ‘antique’ stores – you know … the kind of establishment ‘nice folk’ don’t frequent.
Most of the rest of the buildings were simply left vacant.
Enter the entrepreneurs who saw an opportunity to buy low and sell high by acquiring cheap land and buildings and, by investing in the buildings and their businesses, both their life savings and their hard work, hoped to change their circumstances, both their own and their communities’, by building a new downtown.
There is nothing to be ashamed of in wanting to make a profit, make money, build a business or build a community.
They were encouraged by the politicians who, aware they had created these urban slums, decided they could do something about it and promised that, if business would plunk down their money and buy the land, municipal governments would find ways to encourage and reward investment in the area.
Business Interests vs Community Interests
When business interest coincides with the public interest good things happen. Jobs are created, tax dollars abound and government is able to invest in things like; infrastructure for the whole community, education, health care and all of the things we have come to associate with prosperity.
But that mythological connection between business interests and the interests of the community as a whole begins to fade and disappear when business chooses to look after its own interests at the expense of the community as a whole.
When money is short or government incompetence throws things out of balance, business interests and community interests begin to collide.
Without competent political leadership things begin to go terribly wrong.
In Abbotsford the Chamber of Commerce has been on the wrong side of every single public policy decision of any significance in the last decade. Think about that for a moment.
From Plan A to George Peary’s Deal, from taxes and the cost of development to the decision to spend our infrastructure money on two federal overpasses over a federal highway instead of our old and decrepit water and sewer system, to investing in out-of-town hockey teams instead of local businesses, the Chamber has been at the center of the problem rather than part of the solution on every important issue in the last ten years.
That’s a pretty amazing record. It is also a clear indication that the Abbotsford Chamber of Commerce, far from having its interests aligned with the interests of the community has simply been very effective at bending the public agenda in its own favour.
The ADBA has put itself in a similar position and now, right when the eyes of the world are looking at Abbotsford to see how it deals with the Abbotsford Chicken Manure Homeless Incident the ADBA has launched a petition against the modest proposal to create a home for 20 homeless people on the outskirts of downtown.
Forget that the homeless were there before many of the businesses currently hoping to profit from their investments in cheap land and property even considered investing in Abbotsford.
Forget that the only reason many of them did invest in Downtown Abbotsford, and the only reason any new money is coming into the area, is that politicians like John Smith, Bruce Beck and business people like Bob Bos have done their damndest to ensure that the manner in which public funds are spent, planning decisions are made and departments are run, conforms to their vision of a future, fictitious Abbotsford with high rises, commercial buildings and high density, expensive housing in the railway corridor along Gladys Avenue.
A fictitious future on which a lot of people have invested a lot of money.
A lot of promises must have been made to a lot of people who have either been convinced, are in the process of considering or have already decided to plunk down their money and gamble on a future downtown Abbotsford which may or may not ever materialize. Based on this City’s ability to make things happen I certainly wouldn’t be betting my money on it but many people have.
Throw into this high stakes gambit a few hundred unfortunate souls who happened to be living in the neighbourhood where those with money and political clout, like the ADBA, the Chamber of Commerce, developers, business people and property owners, want to make their dreams come true and you have a pretty serious conflict.
That conflict has been brewing for a decade and has occasionally boiled over. Mostly it has, like so many others, been relegated to the dirty little secret department over at City Hall where everybody is deaf and dumb.
The City of Abbotsford has resisted any and all attempts to solve or even mitigate the issues surrounding and contributing to homelessness by blindly expecting that, by simply using the police to displace and disperse them, using an ultra vires and unconstitutional bylaw [Simon Gibson’s Anti-Harm Bylaw] to deny them health care, and by poisoning them with chicken feces and pepper spray, they might just get the message and go away.
John Smith’s unwillingness or inability to effectively represent the needs of the Abbotsford Social Development Advisory Committee (ASDAC) has been a direct cause of the disaster our treatment of the poor has become and one of the reasons it is now a matter of embarrassment to us around the world.
If we cannot learn to accept that some of our fellow citizens are poor, suffer addiction and mental health issues and that we cannot make them go away and deal with it elsewhere, then we will never grow to be the glorious but fictional community our media tell us about and our politicians and business leaders like to talk about in their press releases or sell to developers and business people.
Unless we face up to the fact that something rotten at the core of this city allowed senior city officials and politicians to think it was OK to treat the poor in such a disgusting and reprehensible manner, we will not grow into anything but what we are now.
These people are our fellow citizens. They deserve to live among us and be helped by those of us who are luckier than they are, not hunted like vermin and shunned like lepers.
Business As The Victim
Throughout this process, and until this paragraph, some might have thought that throughout this column business has been made out to be the bad guy in this festering sore on the side of our community. An argument can be made, and I am most certainly making it, that the businesses which have invested their money, their labour and in some cases a good chunk of their lives into rebuilding downtown Abbotsford are just as much the victims of this colossal piece of bad planning and dishonest community management.
Rather than solve, or even make a pretense of trying to solve the homelessness issue, the City of Abbotsford, through its officials and its politicians, seems to have paid lip service to the members of the care community without ever addressing their concerns, and all the while it seems to have been making commitments and acting in the interests of select businesses and organizations in ways that have led them to believe their investments would pay off.
If that is the case then those businesses have every right to consider themselves the victims in this tragicomedy. Individual businesses facing the possibility of losing their livelihood have every right to be angry.
In a comment on the story in the Abbotsford News on the subject, ADBA Treasurer Asger Hansen said, in part, “Several businesses including mine are planning to relocate if the proposal is approved. Some of you say I’m fear mongering but the fear is real. It’s our livelihood that’s at stake here.”
I am hard pressed not to agree fully because the sense of fear, anger and betrayal is, in my opinion, completely justified.
But the fear and anger and sense of betrayal has no place being directed at the homeless or those who are trying to help them. As previously noted, the homeless were here long before many of the businesses in Downtown Abbotsford joined the community.
It is those representing the City of Abbotsford who have allowed this issue to fester for over a decade with no resolution and anyone who may have given the impression that, if push ever came to shove, business interests would prevail.
If such commitments were made then this City is in a whole lot more trouble than the story the Abbotsford News originally floated saying it was all the work of a handful of lower level authorities.
This is no longer a PR issue which can be handled in the old media with press releases and political posturing.
This is an issue of survival and common human decency on the one hand and business profits on the other. Neither the businesses involved not the homeless asked or planned to be on opposite sides of this debate but the politicians have put them there are we are reaping the results of the ruinous lack of leadership shown by some of our leading politicians in this community.
It will be interesting to watch where John Smith, the former head of ASDAC who never seemed to get any of their concerns dealt with, and Bill MacGregor, the current council representative on ASDAC, will vote on this matter.
For the record – using the APD , chicken manure and pepper spray are no longer on the table as acceptable solutions to the homeless problem.
No, It Isn’t
No, it isn’t complicated.
The ADBA says it wants to have a say in what happens at the shelter and how.
By what right?
What expertise do they have in the treatment of alcoholism or drug abuse? What expertise does the ADBA have in dealing with mental health issues? What do they know about what to do if and when someone is experiencing an overdose? What can they add to the success of a project designed, in part, to add some simple human dignity to the lives of people who don’t seem to belong in the city we’ve built.
Why would the ADBA want to insert itself into a matter of public policy such as the way we treat our poor people?
We’ve seen what happens in this community when the interests of business take precedence over the interests of human beings. We end up with a decade of inhumane and sickening behaviour on the part of city officials and community leaders and, ultimately we end up with the Abbotsford Chicken Manure Homeless Incident.
The only significant example the ADBA has provided to this community is that when faced with the horrors of homelessness and drug abuse they choose their own financial self-interest over the lives of the helpless men and women who are victims of our society. The fact those poor people were living there before most of the ADBA members even decided to take advantage of the cheap land seems to be left out of almost every conversation about the issue.
By any human measure of right and wrong the homeless have more right to claim downtown Abbotsford as their home than most of the businesses which have moved in and chased them out.
Using press releases, access to the media and petitions to convince the community as a whole to join their side of this issue, when the homeless have no equivalent means of standing up for themselves and enunciating their side of the story is simply crass and unfair.
By starting a petition and involving the whole community, they have made this a community issue in which the whole community now has a say.
So … No. After what Bob Bos has shown us about how he deals with the homeless and others he doesn’t want downtown, the ADBA has disqualified itself from having any say in the way the proposed shelter is run or how this community starts to repair the damage of a decade of conflict with the poor led primarily by its former leadership.
Also read: It’s Complicated: An Addendum