The Fall Of The Poverty Entrepreneurs

With its multitudes of addicts, prostitutes, drifters and homeless people, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is Canada's epicentre of human dysfunction – a magnet for the down-and-out. It is also the epicentre of the poverty industry, which seems to flourish no matter what else changes. There are social agencies on every block – more than a hundred of them, which compete and overlap to offer every imaginable kind of service. The giant of them all is the Portland Hotel Society, which receives $27-million a year in public funding. It manages housing for a thousand people at a dozen sites, as well as numerous other services. It is also largely responsible for Insite, the controversial supervised-injection site that has attracted world attention for its progressive approach to drug addiction.

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