I host a talk show on community radio in Prince George, BC, an industrial town and regional centre of 74,000 souls. My show is the Monday edition of After Nine, a show that runs on weekdays. Last week, the Thursday host of After Nine had a twenty-five-minute interview with and five-minute editorial in support of a new downtown business owners’ group, as yet unnamed, fronted by two downtown commercial property owners, Melanie Desjardins and Jason Luke.
They presented a picture of a downtown overrun by homeless people living on the street, mostly indigenous and mostly opiate addicts, who engage habitually in not just property crime but violent crime. This group of people, they explained, are making downtown unsafe and, consequently, need to be “rounded up” and permanently removed from the downtown. Such an action was possible, they argued, because, by virtue of being opiate addicts, these individuals are habitual offenders and habitual offenders, in their view, “have no human rights.” It is only because “the human rights have gone too far,” they explained, that businesses are not prosperous downtown.
The only solution, they argued, was the forcible mass relocation and indefinite detention of a criminalized and racialized group of people. In other words, a pogrom. And, if the police wouldn’t do this, they might well take matters into their own hands.
Once the podcast of the show came out and more and more Prince George residents who do not listen to community radio normally began listening to the interview, local social media has lit up with expressions of horror, disgust and incredulity. Prominent local opinion leaders are now leading a boycott of the station.
The response of the business people has largely been incoherent and self-contradictory, repeatedly disavowing and then restating the same views over and over again. But there is now one new message: “well, how are you going to solve this problem?” By this, they do not really mean homelessness; besides, we know how to do that, with Finland-style “housing first” government policy at the provincial and federal levels that administer social programs. What they really mean is “how will my business become more prosperous and get more customers?” And, not because I deem their question sincere but because they have accidentally started a community dialogue, I have decided to use this post to answer it.
The first thing we must recognize is that one of the groups that contribute most to our downtown’s current functionality is the very group they seek to extirpate. Were it not for the street homeless of Prince George, our downtown would truly be in bad shape. Our downtown has been badly understood and, consequently, badly planned and badly managed. It is only by luck that we have as much commerce there as we do.
Eyes on the Street
That is because study-after-study over the past half-century has validated the theory of street crime put forward by Jane Jacobs in 1961, “eyes on the street.” In other words, the single biggest factor in whether someone commits a crime of opportunity against a stranger on the street is whether they can see other people watching them. And the theory is specific, beyond this, about which eyes have the greatest crime-reducing power. They are eyes with the fewest sheets of glass between them and the potential criminal. Eyes behind a window or windshield are a small fraction of being as effective as eyes on a stoop, a patio or a sidewalk. And eyes that might be watching from a camera are less effective still. And it turns out that it does not matter very much whose eyes are watching, just that there are other human eyes.
Because Prince George has over-prioritized the availability of parking spots downtown, many people who come downtown to shop will get back in their car repeatedly during a single trip, and move it to the next location in downtown. This means that most shoppers are not, during most of their trip “eyes on the street.” They are behind glass in a store or behind glass in their vehicle. In this way, we have shunted almost all of the work of having eyes on the street to the very people we think are making downtown unsafe.
What makes a place unsafe are empty sidewalks, hedges, privacy fences, arcades and indoor malls because they suck eyes off the street and place them behind things that prevent them from observing crime.
Slow Space
Another contribution that our local underclass makes to our prosperity and the life of our downtown is the way they help to generate the most coveted kind of urban space when it comes not just to commerce but to a vibrant civic life: slow space. To give credit where it is due, our city has helped to generate this kind of space by narrowing streets with angle parking, widened sidewalks and four-way stops in recent years. But this is not enough.
If one visits the most commercially successful, prosperous and friendly streetscapes, we see a mixture of slow-moving cars, bicycles being ridden without helmets and pedestrians paying some, but not too much, attention to traffic signals. People cross against lights, cycle slowly so they don’t get sweaty on the way to their destination, drive in circles, looking for a perfect spot or take ages to pull in and out of their hard-won parking spot. That is what is going on in the strip malls of Scott Road in Surrey, on Granville Island in Vancouver and all over the commercially successful parts of every major, mature European or Asian city.
People moving through slow space make more unplanned purchases, more unplanned library visits and have more unplanned conversations with friends and neighbours. Every time a member of the underclass crosses against a light or jaywalks, they are slowing our downtown space, making it more vibrant and prosperous. Cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create slow space, and here it is in Prince George, welling-up around the dispensary.
Petty Commerce
One of the reasons that my partner and I often go to the malls at Spruceland or Pine Centre to shop, instead of downtown is a lack of opportunities for convenience and petty commerce. There is nowhere downtown for me to buy cheap groceries if I need to make a last-minute purchase of something I have forgotten. There are no convenience stores downtown. There are no grocery stores. There is no liquor store. In other words, downtown is understood by Prince George residents to be a place to make specialty purchases, not a place to do a daily or weekly shop.
Places downtown that are for daily or weekly shopping, like the pharmacies, rely for their walk-in traffic on the minority of residents who do not use cars and find themselves at the bus terminus at 7th and Dominion or are getting around on foot. Again, the underclass of street homeless and marginalized people who hang out downtown are over-represented in this group. Chocolate bars, cups of coffee, energy drinks, pizza slices, deli sandwiches, 13 oz booze, tweezers, nail scissors, menstrual products, shoelaces, gum, mints: these are the lifeblood of any truly vibrant commercial area—convenience stories, groceries and pharmacies transacting small purchases are the places that keep a downtown going.
And again, the people who go to the most trouble to find the only cheap chips at Birch and Boar or actually buy their menstrual products at the Pharmasave or pick up some cheap gum at Third Avenue Pharmacy are the people who are on the street all the time.
Finally, A Shout-Out
I have lived all over and, frankly, I have to say that if you think Prince George has a zesty, rough or greasy downtown, stay here! You may be rugged and tough enough to survive a Prince George winter but I cannot imagine you being able to handle most of downtown Toronto, Providence, Boston or pretty much anywhere else interesting that I have lived or visited. Even Salt Lake City might be too much for you. But at least there, they have a merchant community and government that have the same bad ideas and keep trying to push vital parts of the community out of the city core and then suffering for it.
Anyway, a lot of friends have asked me how I like Prince George and its street life. The story I tell, every time, is how, whenever I buy flowers for my partner, women having tough lives, who don’t know me, that see me on the bus or on the street, take time to commend me for buying payday flowers and bringing them home. Every bouquet of flowers has generated at least one conversation with a stranger; and none have ended with me being hit up for money.
And that is what I really admire most about the people having a tough time on our streets: they don’t hold a grudge against people who look like me, just because of some bad apples among the downtown business community, the way so many people who look like me hold a grudge against them.
- Stuart Parker, President of Los Altos Institute, a Prince George writer and broadcaster
