Fighting for Space Read online

  Evans wondered how anyone could ever really get better when health-care professionals never even attempted to look beyond the symptoms a patient displayed to what was truly bothering them below the surface. She wanted to look at each patient as a whole and begin to address what had caused them to experience a crisis. “I was only seeing them in the emergency department,” Evans says. “So there was this giant disconnect between what mattered to people in their day-to-day lives and these brief episodes of emergency.”

  Her superiors noticed her restlessness and reluctance to embrace the norms of psychiatric care. “In one of my evaluations there, I was told that I rebelled against seeing people as sick,” she says. “I found that years later in a review from a head nurse.”

  Evans had grown up around mental illness. Her childhood was happy but confusing for her. She was born in New York City where her father, Emyr Wyn Evans, worked as a pathologist. When Liz was three, the family moved to Newmarket, Ontario, where Wyn (he used his middle name) settled permanently. Her mother, Jane, left a few years later, when Evans was six. In the years that followed, Jane came and went, occasionally taking Evans for short periods to wherever she was living. One year it was London, another it was Colchester, the next it was Frinton on Sea.

  “I was pretty much raised by my dad,” Evans says. “My mum really didn’t ever feel competent to be a mother. So when I was born, she took one look at me and decided I didn’t need her, because she was not really fit. And so even though she was around, on and off, she never really was very present.”

  Evans recalls one weekend when she was eight years old, her parents sent her on a Girl Guides trip to a lake in Ontario. “I didn’t know any of the other girls there and I really hated it,” Evans recalls. When the weekend was finally over, her mother and father picked her up for what she thought would be the drive home to Newmarket.

  “My mum was wearing a black fake-fur coat,” Evans remembers. “I was sitting in the back seat of the car, and she said, ‘Oh, Lizzy, we’re driving to the airport.’ I said, ‘Really, why?’ And she said, ‘Oh, because I’m going back to England.’”

  Evans buried her head in her mother’s big fur coat and sobbed the rest of the way to the airport. “So it’s just me and dad again,” she remembers her little eight-year-old mind thinking. “It happened many, many times. There was no warning ever.” Evans never blamed her mother. “To me, she was my mum, and I just loved her,” she explains. “I didn’t think she was sick or mentally ill. I just thought she wasn’t very happy.”

  It wasn’t long before Evans quit her job at Vancouver General Hospital.

  “I would come home [from work] and cry all the time, I hated it so much,” she says. “I just wasn’t particularly drawn to looking at people as sick. I didn’t find it a helpful mechanism for helping people. So I left.”

  It was the spring of 1991, and Evans had just moved from Vancouver’s West End to the edge of the Downtown Eastside. Shortly after, a friend of hers employed as a social worker told Evans about a community group called the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, or DERA.

  Formed in 1973 as a nonprofit organization that focused on affordable housing, in the decades that followed, DERA became a political force in Vancouver and successfully lobbied the government to support several large housing projects in the Downtown Eastside. Just before Evans moved into the neighbourhood, DERA was awarded a contract to run a mental-health program in a few rooms of a rundown old hotel called the Rainbow.

  “I didn’t know anything about the Downtown Eastside at that time,” Evans says. “But I just showed up and went in and started talking to Jim Green.”

  Green was DERA’s larger-than-life leader. An old-school organizer like you might find on the front lines of a rowdy union picket line, he was an effective champion of affordable housing for the working class, but he didn’t know a lot about about mental health. And the Rainbow Hotel was a dilapidated building filled with problem tenants who had been kicked out of just about everywhere else. Nobody in DERA was sure what to do with it. Green renamed it the Portland Hotel after the city in Oregon had implemented a series of progressive social-housing policies.

  “Really, that was as far as Jim got in his thinking about what to do with the actual building,” Evans recalls. She didn’t know what she would do with the hotel either, but Green just about hired her on the spot. “I walked in the door of my house after the interview and the phone rang and they asked if I could start right away.”

  Chapter 4

  Hotel of Last Resort

  The Portland Hotel is located on the southeast corner of Carrall and East Hastings streets. The hotel shares the intersection with Pigeon Park, a small collection of benches screwed into a concrete space with a couple trees hanging over them. An open-air drug market operates there, and the benches make it a popular spot for the neighbourhood’s homeless people and alcoholics.

  The hotel itself was built in 1908, and when Evans took the keys in March 1991, that was apparently the last time anyone had bothered to give it so much as a fresh coat of paint. Vancouver’s old cable-car line once ran down East Hastings, making the hotel a prime location in the early twentieth century. But those days had come and gone. The Portland was now a slum; paint peeled off the walls, the pipes leaked, the floor was filthy, and the lighting was dim. The Portland’s tenants were only there because it was one step better than living on the streets.

  “We ended up being known as the ‘hotel of last resort,’” Evans remembers.

  On paper, Evans’s job was to support ten of those tenants who were diagnosed with severe mental-health issues. In fact, the entire hotel was hers to run as she saw fit. “To start, I focused a lot on practical things: vacuuming and cleaning, changing door locks, and trying to figure out how to paint a room and hang curtains,” she recalls. “I did everything from cleaning to personal care to helping people with their welfare workers or whatever issues people had. It was absolutely, completely overwhelming.”

  There were a lot of empty rooms in the hotel, so Evans also began to fill them up, taking people in off the street who were blacklisted from everywhere else. After just a few weeks, Evans was responsible for sixty or seventy people. “People who came with mental-health issues, HIV, criminal histories, and drug use,” she says. “That is who needed the support.”

  Outside of the hotel, the Downtown Eastside was just as beat-up as the building Evans was given.

  In British Columbia, welfare cheques are issued on the last Wednesday of every month, so once every four weeks, the Downtown Eastside is flooded with cash. Drug dealers circle the banks like sharks, looking for anybody with an outstanding IOU and potential customers who can rack up new debts. Government officials call it “Welfare Wednesday.” Residents of the Downtown Eastside call it “Wely” or “Mardi Gras.”

  Liz Evans remembers her first Welfare Wednesday working at the Portland.

  On the ground floor of the hotel, just around the corner from her office, there was a rough bar called the Rainbow. “The bartender was a big guy who kept a baseball bat behind the counter,” Evans says. “On my first welfare day, he smashed some guy’s head open with that bat. Someone came screaming into the hotel to get me. I went running out—I remember, I was wearing the most inappropriate clothing, a cotton skirt and my hair in pigtails.”

  The man lay on the sidewalk with his skull broken open. “I’m holding this guy’s brain in, and there’s blood everywhere, all over my skirt. I remember waiting for the ambulance to show up, wondering if he was going to live or die,” Evans recalls. “It was just one of those moments,” she adds. “What the fuck am I doing in the middle of all of this? Holy shit.” It was May 1991, and Evans was twenty-five years old.

  “He was a Hispanic drug dealer, was what I was told,” Evans continues. “But as far as I was concerned, he was another drug user. That’s one of so many stories that illustrates the hatred of people who used drugs in the community, not just by the outside world, but by peopl
e in the community too. Drug users were seen as scum.”

  In the early 1990s, the Downtown Eastside’s drug scene was blowing up. The city had begun a slow but sustained effort to thin out a concentration of bars in the Downtown Eastside that had come to give it a rough edge. But closing the bars had the unintended consequence of pushing some people into drugs and creating room for that market to grow. Around the same time, injection cocaine arrived on the scene.

  Everyone who lived at the Portland was severely addicted to drugs or alcohol. Evans estimates that ninety-five percent were injection users. “They were treating themselves badly and treating each other badly because they didn’t feel like their lives were worth much,” she says. “I was getting to know people and listening to their stories. And always the common denominator was, ‘My life is worth shit and I don’t matter.’ That was the piece that really made me think about my mum and think, ‘Well, fuck, these are just people in the world who don’t feel like their lives have a right to occupy space.’”

  While she was never abused, Evans saw her own life in the lives of her tenants. “I had grown up with a mentally ill mother. I never had thought of her as sick; I just thought she was a really nice person who was broken and sad,” she explains. “And so I just saw [the Portland tenants] as broken and sad. These people are lovely, but they don’t fit. For whatever reason, there is no space for them. They don’t fit anywhere in the world, and the world, to them, feels like a very unwelcoming place.” Inside the Portland, she worked to create a sanctuary.

  Her tenants were the hardest to house in Vancouver. A survey she conducted that year found that Portland tenants had lived, on average, eleven different places during the previous twelve months. “They literally moved every month because they were so complex to deal with,” she says. At the Portland, Evans found ways for those people to keep a roof over their heads. “That meant, when people were psychotic, not forcing them into a hospital,” she says. “When people were doing eccentric things, it meant not arresting them for it, and learning how to accommodate a lot of different, eccentric behaviours and characteristics.” Instead of pushing people to fit into the rules of the hotel, Evans bent the Portland’s policies and safeguards to fit around its tenants.

  “One of the first guys we housed was a really sweet guy named Joe,” Evans begins. “He had a tendency to hear voices and then smash his fist through glass windows. That was just sort of his thing. He would hear something and then he would put his fist through glass or he would throw something out his window. He was a very gentle person, actually, very charming, sweet. The staff all loved him. But he would do this thing where he would smash windows, and that made him hard to house.”

  Evans bolted his television set to his dresser so Joe could not throw his television out the second-storey window. To prevent him from punching through the windows, she installed large sheets of fire-grade Plexiglas that were impossible to shatter. The same measures were taken throughout the hallways on Joe’s floor.

  “We did lots of crazy things like that,” she says. “It was about accommodating people, really understanding who people were and creatively making space work for them.”

  Another tenant, a chronic alcoholic named Stan, repeatedly attempted to kill himself. He “was tortured with suicidal thoughts and very, very sad,” Evans says. “I’d go up and knock on his door and go and check on him, and I would find him sobbing and sobbing and sobbing.” He had come into the hotel off the streets. There were other homeless people like him—First Nations guys who were barred from most other SROs in the neighbourhood, discarded as hopeless alcoholics. Evans identified a few who were Stan’s friends and found room for them in the hotel. “We got some of his buddies from the street into the building and created more of a community for him,” she says. Stan slowly grew a little less despondent.

  There were many subcultures within the Portland Hotel: heroin addicts who flopped around the building; stimulant users who stayed up all night smoking crack cocaine; and drinkers like Stan who got blind drunk on the alcohol in mouthwash and hand sanitizer. Evans quickly found that people were happier when there was a bit of balance among the different groups and enough of these different communities for everyone to feel at home.

  Other tenants just took a little getting used to. In these cases, behaviour that would have resulted in an eviction somewhere else simply became a personality quirk.

  “We had this woman, Linda, who was six-foot-two and screamed at the top of her lungs all the time,” Evans recalls. “The first day she moved into the building, she screamed so loud, everybody in the lobby jumped three feet off the ground. It was terrifying. It was like somebody was being murdered—a terrible gut-wrenching screaming.”

  The Portland’s staff and tenants realized that Linda’s shouting didn’t actually signal that anything was wrong. It was just an involuntary outburst. “When she moved into the hotel, there was a process of getting used to her,” Evans says. “But after about a week, I remember her walking through the lobby and screaming and everybody just going, ‘Oh, that’s just Linda.’”

  Others required different creative solutions.

  “One of the first people I met and who I cared for a lot was an old guy named Fred,” Evans says. After forty years of chronic alcoholism, his body was giving out by the time Evans found him. That meant constant bouts of diarrhea. And because the Portland had only shared bathrooms, Fred kept a bucket in his room and used that when he needed to relieve himself. “I’d go in and change his bucket and it was really smelly. There was a strong stench in the hallway. And so, we installed an extra door in the hallway.” With a second barrier in place, the smell wasn’t quite so terrible.

  “It was never an option to kick somebody out,” Evans says. “It was like, ‘Okay, what can we do to manage this situation?’ Everybody was a new challenge. So what new solution did we have to create to make sure that person stayed housed?”

  The primary goal was not to fix people but to give them a space to live in the greatest degree of comfort that the Portland could create. There were a lot of unhappy endings at the hotel, but endings that would have been worse had they occurred on the street.

  Fred passed away in his room at the Portland two years after Evans met him. “He aspirated on his vomit,” she says. “He was hanging out of his bed when I found him. That was one of the first and really incredibly depressing realities that I was confronted with. I couldn’t fix things. I couldn’t make Fred better. I couldn’t fix forty years of chronic alcoholism. But I could bring him inside and be kind to him, and I could give him a clean bed. I could check on him every day, and he could have a home.”

  Evans was able to give other tenants more time. Many lived long enough to reconnect with family. One of those tenants was Tilly. “She was a sex-trade worker. Tilly was a beautiful First Nations woman, but she had had a really complicated childhood and had been severely abused,” Evans begins. “When I met her, she was still working in the sex trade. One night, she came back to the hotel after she had been extremely badly beaten. She was bloodied and bruised head to toe. She’d been raped. But she didn’t want me to call the police, and she didn’t want me to do anything.”

  Evans walked her up to her room, cleaned her up best she could, and cradled her in her arms for hours that night. “I was holding her, and she was crying and sobbing. And what she kept saying to me over and over again was, ‘It’s my fault. I deserved it. I’m a bad person.’” It took Evans back to her childhood, when her mother’s detached nature and repeated absences left Evans feeling like she had done something wrong and that she was the reason her mother abandoned her. “I thought, ‘Holy fuck, there is no difference between me and Tilly, except that she had nothing and no one and no support, and I did,’” Evans says.

  She worked with Tilly for years, helping her take small, incremental steps to improve her life. The victories were far from total but still real. “She was always in extremely violent, abusive relationships,” Evans says. “S
o it was really sad. I worked with her, but I couldn’t force her to charge any of the people who abused her, and I couldn’t force her to leave any of the abusive relationships she was in. But I could give her a home.” Tilly died of AIDS, but not until many years later.

  “We were too late for her because by the time I met her, she was already HIV-positive because nobody ever gave a shit about her when she was using. [No one] gave her a clean needle,” Evans says, still audibly angry. But before Tilly passed away, Evans had stabilized her heroin addiction with methadone and reconnected her with children with whom she’d previously lost touch.

  At the time, the medical community would not have classified Tilly’s case as one where progress was made. But she had made a lot of progress. “In so many people’s minds in those days, what we did was seen as without value,” Evans remembers. “Because people only respected interventions that led to recovery or to rehabilitation.”

  Evans was simply giving a home to people who, up until then, had been told they weren’t good enough to have one. The months flew by in a blur, but this chaotic period marked the beginning of something much bigger than the Portland’s tiny staff could have imagined.