Whether Pivot does, as you claim, “good work to benefit the residents of the DTES”, is a matter of disagreement amongst residents.

The young lawyers at Pivot opened up shop on the Downtown Eastside claiming that they would defend the civil liberties of Downtown Eastsiders. Yet one place on the DTES where civil liberties abuses occur systematically and regularly is Carnegie Center, a community center known as the “livingroom” of the Downtown Eastside. Pivot has done nothing.

Pivot has proven reluctant to challenge left-wing groups such as Carnegie which hold power in the neighborhood. (Pivot’s staffperson, David Eby, just unsuccessfully attempted to securt the nomination to run for the centre-left civic party, Vision.) Carnegie Director Ethel Whitty has learned that Pivot won’t touch her, and there is speculation that Pivot’s inaction has emboldened her to continue the civil liberties abuses at Carnegie. A woman recently was told by Whitty’s head of Security, Skip Everall, that she was barred from the building because she had dared ask him his name. She didn’t take her case to Pivot because she says she knows they won’t do anything. And Whitty knows they won’t do anything.

If you sit at Carnegie or other meeting places on the DTES and listen to low income residents talk about Pivot, the general feeling is that Pivot has a preference for the ‘freak show’ aspect of the neighborhood; Pivot works to empower prostitutes, drug abusers, etc. Some of the young radical lawyers at Pivot appear to want to make a name for themselves by liberalizing prostitution laws etc. But the basic rights that are already in place in a democracy, like the right to actually hold office once you are elected, are not being upheld by Pivot. It would have taken Pivot half an hour to review the letter that Whitty hand-delivered to homeless William Simpson banning him from Carnegie Center just after he was elected to the Board, and to at least take a position on the issue. But they didn’t.

Thanks for the input. I’m not as familiar with the arts groups as I am with the major employers on the Downtown Eastside, such as Carnegie which has staff at their community center at Main & Hastings as well as outreach workers at Oppenheimer Park.

One problem is that Downtown Eastside residents define the boundaries of the Downtown Eastside differently than some povertarians. A povertarian living in neighboring Strathcona — most povertarians actually live much further away — and working on the Downtown Eastside may find it politically convenient to subsume Strathcona under the Downtown Eastside. But they know full well that residents of the Downtown Eastside clearly distinguish in day-to-day conversation between the Downtown Eastside and the higher income Strathcona. A DTES resident will say that somebody “lives on the Downtown Eastside” or “lives in Strathcona.” They don’t confuse the two. And I’ve yet to hear a home owner in Strathcona say they live on the Downtown Eastside.

There are no doubt exceptions to the rule that Downtown Eastsiders are having their lives run by outsiders who flock to the neighborhood every day to make a buck in the poverty industry. But there is no question that the majority of the workers who have real power on the Downtown Eastside do not live on the DTES. And there is no question that some of these staffpersons from more affluent areas are quick to violate the civil liberties of Downtown Eastsiders, knowing that they can’t afford lawyers. In this article, I identified Ethel Whitty, who comes to the DTES from a more affluent neighborhood everyday, as being involved in civil liberties abuses in her role as Carnegie Director. But there are many others I could have identified. A few of them are identified in the comments section of the copy of this article which appears on the Downtown Eastside Enquirer blogspot.