On a cloudy late-summer morning on Hastings Street near the corner of Carrall, a gaunt man in his 30s repeatedly swings a golf putter over his head and downward, as if he were going to chop wood with it. Passers-by give his slow, methodical swings a wide berth.
Further east on the crowded sidewalk is a tough-looking woman in black cutoff jeans and a frayed scarlet bustier, cigarette clenched in her lips, trying on a jean jacket offered by a sidewalk vendor — one of dozens on the block.
Bicycles of uncertain provenance, cigarettes at $3 a pack, odd bits of electronic gear, bootleg DVDs, used clothing — the north side of the “unit block” of East Hastings is a daily eruption of capitalism at its most unfettered.
The buyers and sellers — this day numbering around 60 — have for years dodged police and city work-crew efforts to sweep them away. More recently, they have resisted the lure of officially sanctioned vending spots, one on a city-owned lot just across the street.
“Nobody walks on that side of the road,” said 30-year-old vendor Scott, of the sanctioned market. He and his wife Crystal claim a spot on the north side of Hastings by 7 a.m. every weekday. “There’s more happening here. Everybody has to walk past my stuff.”
This day Scott and Crystal have spread out an assortment of baseball hats, women’s shoes, jeans, phone chargers, felt pens, a suitcase and three tennis balls in a plastic container.
“All of my stuff is given to me or bought, Dumpster-dived and cleaned up,” Scott said. “None of my stuff is stolen.”
Scott and Crystal tried selling for a day at the sanctioned spot across the street, but didn’t get the traffic they needed. They crossed back to the north side and spent two weeks reclaiming their old spot.
“There’s seniority, respect among the people here,” Scott said. “There’s the law and there’s our law down here. But I don’t have people who are friends down here. I don’t want to be owing any favours.”
The couple make $30 on a bad day, and more than $100 when sales are brisk. Panhandling supplements what they earn when times are slow.
But changes are coming to this block. Some thought the street trade would vanish when the United We Can bottle depot closed its doors last year, but it didn’t happen. There will be a stronger push to finally move the vendors to city-sanctioned markets after a new mixed-housing highrise is completed on the depot site next year.
Meanwhile, the chaotic street scene goes on, rain or shine.
Busier 'when people get desperate'
“It’s much more crowded at the end of the month, right before welfare, when people get desperate,” said Roland Clarke, watching from the other side of Hastings.
In the carrot-and-stick approach to unregulated street vendors, Clarke is handling the carrots as co-ordinator for the Downtown Eastside Street Market Society. On a vacant lot provided by the city at 62 East Hastings they’ve set up a big open-walled tent, tables, porta-potties and a snack bar that sells coffee for 50 cents.
Clarke takes down names from vendors, checks that they live in the neighbourhood and assigns them a table. No selling of drugs, alcohol, weapons or stolen goods is allowed.
The goal is to draw the vendors off the sidewalk and into this market, which runs five days a week. But after a few weeks in operation, just a handful are checking out the goods offered by the sole vendor that’s set up on this day.
“That is a little bit of a disappointment,” said Clarke.
Clarke said the people selling on the sidewalk are the city’s poorest and most desperate. Private single-room apartments go for $400 to $500 in the neighbourhood, while the monthly welfare shelter allowance is $375.
“So everybody effectively has to make a few extra hundred dollars, just to not be evicted,” said Clarke.
Frequent morning sweeps by police and city crews clear the trade only briefly. The wares are spread out again at one end of the street as the police leave the other.
The number of people selling on the street has increased this year, said Mary Clare Zak, the city’s social policy manager.
“Certainly, the weather has something to do with that, but we also know that it’s been seven years since any increases to welfare,” Zak said.
“We know that people do want to find some form of low-barrier opportunity to earn extra money. Also, the other thing in the Downtown Eastside is that there aren’t many places for people to socialize. ... the street offers the opportunity for that to take place as well.”
Sunday market thriving
Five years ago, the Downtown Eastside Street Market Society started a weekly market on the block of Carrall Street north of Hastings. The Carrall market is thriving. As many as 200 people are selling there every Sunday, earning a collective total of about $10,000 every Sunday, Clarke said.
Unlike the daily free-for-all on Hastings, the Sunday market pulls in customers from outside the Downtown Eastside — buying from many of the same people who sell during the week on the sidewalk.
Vendors Scott and Crystal are at Carrall Street every Sunday, sharing a tent with three others. That’s better money — they made $500 on their best day. On a Thursday morning when we talk, Scott said they will be up late every night until Sunday looking for more things to sell at the Carrall market.
They came to Vancouver three months ago from Ontario with their six-month-old son and $2,000 in savings. They voluntarily put the baby in foster care because he suffers from a severe heart murmur.
The couple was robbed of their money and their ID shortly after arriving in Vancouver, said Scott. Since catching bedbugs in a shelter they have opted to sleep outside. They set up tarps every night behind a Tim Hortons in Chinatown, where they’re left alone as long as they clear out first thing in the morning. They have two shopping carts to carry their belongings.
“I’m working on getting my ID back,” Scott said. “Then I can start working again at the temp agencies. I can’t even cash a cheque now. Give me a shovel and I’ll dig you a hole. I just need an opportunity.”
'Trying to make a living'
The city has given the market society an operating grant of $89,800 and use of another site on the 500-block Powell Street, where they plan to relocate the weekly Carrall Street market and expand it into a three-days-a-week operation.
The Powell site has been hosting vendors and their customers on Saturdays since the beginning of August, with most of the same vendors from Sunday’s Carrall market participating. Half of the Powell site has been paved, while demolition continues on the old foundry building on the other half.
Later this fall the entire site will be a market, anchored by a wooden pavilion designed and built by architect Michael Green and his students. The wooden pavilion was set up on Jack Poole Plaza last spring for delegates at the TED Conference, and the plan is to move it to the new market when it is complete.
At that time, police will start coming down harder on those who persist in selling on the sidewalk.
Pivot Legal Society executive director Katrina Pacey said some people will always sell on the street and should be allowed to.
“They, too, are businesspeople, trying to make a living and get by,” Pacey said.
A provincial court case mounted last year by Pivot on behalf of four Downtown Eastside residents who were issued $250 tickets for selling on the sidewalk ended this past spring when a judge upheld the city bylaw, but cut the fines to one dollar each.
Pivot wanted the bylaw overturned and plans to challenge that ruling in B.C. Supreme Court.
Vancouver police spokesman Const. Brian Montague said street vendors who remain on Hastings after the Powell Street market is complete “will be subject to police enforcement, probably a little bit more aggressively than we have been in the past.”
New developments on Hastings may well shut down the sidewalk trade, but the traders themselves likely won’t disappear.
“They’ll pick some other block that has a few derelict buildings,” Clarke said. “They’ll take over there. Five years from now everyone will be shocked and surprised. What we’re trying to say is, stop just letting this happen, stop being surprised when these people take over another block ... Let’s get ahead of the problem and figure it out.”
