The "Worst Street" in North America

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Is what they're calling it in this video, anyways. It could be. Saw this on Facebook. Apparently this journalist is from Sri Lanka.

Anyways, this is Hastings Street in the DTES (Downtown East Side) of Vancouver. This video was put online a week or so ago, but a search on YouTube found a longer cut that seems to be from the same filming day a couple years ago. Things are similar, but probably worse today.

It's probably the craziest neighbourhood in all of Canada, possibly the worst street in North America. I've spent some time down there this year more than ever helping look for a deeply addicted friend, as well as to buy some paintings by one of Vancouver's best artists. As crazy as the hood is, there's a real sense of community there - it's kinda neat.. but a lot of theft, violence, and death, death, death with 6 people/day dying from the opiod crisis.

On with the videos. Here's the one circulating on Facebook now:

https://fb.watch/i5vJDWFb0E/

^Note: The Grand Union Hotel - a friend who's been living outdoors for the last 7 years at the beach who's now clean from the hard drugs he used to do JUST finally got a room to rent in that building and I'll likely be helping him out a little by picking up and delivering a free bed and some furniture etc. While I'm there, I might have a bite at the new cafe another beach friend opened in the building (and the landlord of the room is another beach community member) & maybe a beer at the pub just to say I had one there lol.

Also noteworthy, the one comment on the video in a DTES fb group is that this must have been filmed on a slow Sunday or something as there are usually a LOT more people on the block.

Here's the one I found on YouTube that was filmed at what seems to be the same time:



Anyways, hope you're entertained by the absurdity of Canada's wildest slum - or at least the surface level of it.. the street art etc. The horrors of it are not represented in this video.. the addiction, violence, mental health issues, overdoses, murders and all other things you'd expect to only happen in horror movies. Thankfully I only know OF most of these things and have not been around there to experience them.

Pretty crazy for a city with astronomical amounts of wealth (and debt) all over the rest of it. lol this area is Not an area tourists go.. but, they Do want to go to Gastown and Chinatown right on the borders of it.. so people on tours of the city often get a dose of This on their travels and I'm sure it's quite shocking. Tour guides and businesses have major complaints about homeless camps and violence etc scaring away their business, but there's not a whole lot they can do until real problems begin to be solved - addiction services, housing crisis etc.

No one wants to join me for a tour?

Don’t worry, we can keep the car doors locked..

Speed limits are super slow there - 30kmh like school zones due to the nearly constant jaywalkers and.. intoxicated people stumbling across the street. So there’s little risk of any sort of speed related crash and plenty of time to scan and gawk around!

I get an even better view when I ride my motorcycle - no pillars, headliner, dash or hood to frame the view.

We could go to a nice part of town and rent scooters or bicycles and then head over that way for some DTES specialty food like sugary cereal & milk in a giant plastic cup topped with a couple scoops of ice cream and whipped cream. It looks like a giant Starbucks frapp. I’m told some of these drugs make people crave sugar, so it makes sense that the neighbourhood serves things like this.

I'd rather see the worst street in Canada. I hear that maple syrup overdose and moose-related violence is rather high over there.

It IS the worst street in Canada..

..and like all other street drugs, street maple syrup is Also contaminated with fentanyl or it's derivatives and shouldn't be consumed alone w/o naloxone nearby.

There is NOTHING anyone can do about moose related violence in the hood. Those things are HUGE and do whatever they want. We've long since given up on letting preschoolers ride them around the block.. way too many kids lost - but that was way back in the day before moose safety was common knowledge.

Scored a pretty much brand new queen size “bloom,” mattress for free for my friend that just moved into the building featured in that first vid. Might even go pickup and drop off tmw, along with sheets and maybe a stop at the beach to snag a log he wants to use for furniture.

Anyone wanna meet me there for a beer at the pub? It has views of some of the boosters selling stolen goods on the sidewalk - best people watching you’re ever gonna have!

Plus it’s technically possible we might see WP user Znoft -> that’s his hood if he’s still around.

For me, Dupont Circle.

I’m there rn having a beer in The Union Pub at The Grand Union SRO hotel. (The place in the first vid.)

The pub itself is totally fine for an old dive bar - quite clean and reasonably well kept. There’s maybe 20 people in here mostly 50’s-60’s, calm just sippin beers and chatting while music plays most of the time.

Also, someone in here has a doggo because s/he just came to check me out:



Also, delivered a brand new Queen size memory foam bed & some pillows and a sheet set to my friend. Only took a day to track down a free new mattress! He’s pretty stoked to not be sleeping on the floor.

There’s pretty much no rules in the SRO. You can only imagine what the halls/rooms look like.. stuff stored everywhere in common areas, a few really impressive paintings various people have done, psychotic drugged out graffiti and various types of property damage etc. I respectfully didn’t take any photos in any of those areas - a bit of an invasion of privacy.. this is peoples’ home.

Decided to go to the pub for a beer just to say I did And to have a clean washroom to piss in. The ones upstairs are so heavily used/bad my friend showers at a friends place a couple blocks away.

Oh, and this morning around 5am or so he was woken up by 2-3 people doing home invasions room by room robbing people and allegedly looking for someone. He stood inside his door with a hatched gripped tightly ready to strike if he got invaded but they left. A little later, 7am a body was discovered a few buildings down - homicide - might have been those guys.

Some guy just walked by and tried to sell me a little tub of haagen-dazs ice cream. Still frosty, he must have just stole it. For real. All kinds of stuff & groceries sells in this area.


We had some hot beef stew earlier from a mutual friends new little literal hole in the wall restaurant at the front corner of the pub. They sell bannock, slices of pizza, sandwiches/hotdogs/soup & canned drinks out of a window on the sidewalk and it looks like also through this window inside the pub:



They just opened it a couple months ago. It’s called Kookie Nanners because you have to be Crazy Bananas to open up a business in this place.

Apparently they all know the owner of the building who’s also a beach regular. Apparently the guy owns a few buildings and then some rental houses. I guess someone’s got to.


I should probably drink up, take a piss, and get moving. It’s not too late at only 10:35pm but I am illegally parked behind a construction site dumpster rn. Probably make my way home shortly. Might make a quick stop if the street market is active, but maybe not it’s getting late and raining.

I guess I Also don’t need to stick around and witness anything traumatic, either. Or here any more stories about active serial killers in the neighbourhood - legit; I believe it. 6 people/day die here from the opioid crisis, but others disappear all the time.. most never to be found, others mutilated or just a random body part here and there. Horror movie type s**t for real.

TLDR?

Just kinda figured there’d be a slight bit more interest in such a wild & different place vs crickets in a forum dedicated to random things is all.

I’ll def be back to the hood to deliver some beach log furniture and whatever else he might need there - not a lot of room so can’t be much.

I’ll also make a point of going to check out paintings for sale, too, as I def wanna buy more Ken Foster paintings while he’s still alive and creating art. Maybe others never know. Really truly good art often comes from very troubled souls in the grittiest of locales.

Couple other reasons to swing by the area now and then, too. Friends, donating to charities etc.

Kensington ave Philly looks worse.
Really sad.
https://youtu.be/Bi1Kf-1qd6Y

A contender.

That vid is a year old, and the one above is 2 years old AND must have been shot
on a slow sleepy Sunday.

A busy day on the block during nice weather literally has hundreds and hundreds of people all over the sidewalks and streets, in tents, stumbling around -
Maybe even thousands of people tbh. A busy summer day on the block is.. quite the sight. Probably more like 3-4 thousand people milling about the more I think about it. Doesn’t take very many for there to be 100’s.. hell, a single little night club can easily have a few hundred people in it and we’re talking both sides of the street jammed for blocks.

It’s gotta exponentially worse over the last couple years as the housing & opioid crises collide.

I mean idk some of the homeless here in the U.S could maybe do great things if given a chance. Or even if not great things at least get to a point they are improving their life.

But we don't really have programs to put homless people into housing here in the U.S(some counties in states try it out but there is no like federal program or anything), like a lot of those people could do something if they had a private place to keep their belongings and take a shower and go to the bathroom. But like the only places that provide that are charities and homeless people say their belongings are not respected in those places like they come back to what little stuff they had having been thrown out or given away by the staff at chairity shelters. Also a lot off shelters kick people out early in the morning even in sub-zero temperatures and they can't come back till night-time. And then you have cops all over harrasing those same people for putting up a tent to try and keep from freezing to death, or even just covering up with a blanket...cops will take that blanket and laugh about the person freezing to death.

^yep.

But some people have that chance literally stolen from them and they get trapped in the hood.

An ex-drug dealer told me that dealers on the DTES have deals with crooked cops to confiscate ppls ID and sell it to the dealers. Dealers probably just destroy it - they don’t want the person’s ID.. they just don’t want them to have it anymore.

Why? Lose your ID you’re FKD. Can’t get a job, open a bank account, rent a room - N O T H I N G. It’s a method to trap people in the hood and create a captive market for drugs. It’s crazy af, but apparently true.

Hard enough for anyone to work their way out of that life, but next to impossible when people conspire against you.

Vancouver? I thought the worst street in North America would be in Toronto.

Why? I've only been there once, the place is enormous. If the worst street is actually there you could spend years searching for it.

Honorable mention should go to Howard Street in Baltimore. It used to be the premier shopping street in Baltimore (much like St. Catherine's Street in Montreal) then in the 80s, as the department stores there began to struggle in competition with the malls, they decided to construct a streetcar line there. Construction took forever and basically killed whatever was left of that street. Now the passengers have to witness the result every day. You can probably take a tour on Google Streetview. I'm sure it has plenty of competition for top prize though.

EDIT try this, doesn't look so bad here though (Google may have cleaned some things up).

https://maps.app.goo.gl/SwuCo5vnznzwTaWN7

Therre's nothing about Toronto that appeals to me enough to want to ever go there. (Never been.) Might skip right over it and go to Montreal someday, and if I want to got a big city I'll go to NYC. (but not at 40% exchange rate like now lol no.)

Interesting changes. There used to be a streetcar line on this street/area probably 80 years ago or something.

There's a retail and residential area called Yaletown that's full of $$$$ condos, yuppies, restaurants where supercars go park just to be seen etc. 30 years ago it was an industrial area with quite the homeless population. So, areas do change.. sometimes for the better, others for worse.

There have been some renovated buildings and new modular housing built in the DTES and nearby Strathcona, but there's also been a lot more people becoming homeless + the opoid crisis + a LOT of fires that have displaced people. Also, gentrifying the area with new housing units looks nice and all.. but then people can't afford the rooms And if their drug addiction and mental health issues aren't tackled first, then those new rooms and buildings look a lot like the old ones pretty quick.

No easy solutions. Maybe some on the government side are just waiting for fentanyl to kill off most of the population there.. with 6 people/day dying in BC, that's a couple thousand a year right now.