DISQUS

ndrwclrk · 3 months ago

A slight twist I've always thought about as an alternative to panhandling. I'd like to see charities that help the homeless post a sign on a city block with a number to send a text message to. Something like "want to help the homeless on this block? Text 12345". That lets me help the homeless I see by supporting an agency that helps them find housing, rather than supporting and reinforcing panhandling as an activity. Also, if the block was eventually free of panhandlers, it would provide a reminder for me to continue to support the charity that helped it get that way.

Not necessarily an open data thing in and of itself, but was sort of twigged by your idea.

Stv. · 3 months ago

Here's a greasemonkey script to get VPL catalogue results when looking at Amazon book listings: http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/58190

Daniel · 3 months ago

I'm not sure how happy the landlords would be about this, but I've always thought it would be cool to crowdsource rental prices, amenities, etc. for a given community. I just moved back down to school where Craiglist (i.e. the antithesis of structured data) is the default method for finding housing. It would be really sweet to have an application where renters could self-report the prices they paid during the school year (as well as report number of rooms, when they had ant infestations, etc.) such that I as a renter had a database of structured information from which to make a decision. Using heatmaps would be a good way to visualize the price of housing in relationship to geography.

facebook-607616432 · 3 months ago

2. A Downtown East Side Landlord wiki

As a long-time resident of a community adjacent to the DTES, one considered part of it by certain city departments at certain times and for certain purposes, I’d love to see the area’s housing data made more public, although likely for reasons differing from the those of a majority of this site’s users.

The city is in the process of installing close to 1000 individuals along 3 blocks on Princess Street, between Powell and East Hastings. All suffer from the varying outcomes of poverty, racism and abuse; homelessness, addiction, prostitution, mental illness, etc. Nearly 400 such individuals will reside within a block of one of the area’s two public, elementary schools. For every child attending that school, there’s 1 to 1.5 persons in those shelters a block away. An additional 500 people, mostly men, will congregate there twice a day for meals.

One of the 3 sites has been deemed '‘low barrier’' housing, a designation I understood to mean people could keep shopping carts, personal possessions, etc., with them. Here’s the city’s definition:

http://www.heretohelp.bc.ca/publications/vision...

(Low Barrier Housing: Housing where a minimum number of expectations are placed on people who wish to live there. The aim is to have as few barriers as possible to allow more people access to services. In housing this often means that tenants are not expected to abstain from using alcohol or other drugs, or from carrying on with street activities while living on-site, so long as they do not engage in these activities in common areas of the house and are respectful of other tenants and staff.

Please note there is no requirement to be ‘'respectful’' of neighbours, neighbourhood, community, etc.)


In a recent conversation with one of the low barrier facility’s support workers, I learned it’s become a more or less a state-sanctioned crackhouse, and that worker had been fired for bringing this to the attention of the managing agency. Apparently when hired, he had been told, '‘short of murder, we don’t want to know about it…’' (He’s since been reinstated, but of course, conditions haven’t changed.)

This particular facility is one of the places people were sent when the 36-bed shelter in False Creek North was closed after '‘fierce community opposition.’' The evictees were youth from that area, and stated they did not want to be moved to DTES, were frightened of its far more violent environment.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story...


While no on can fault either the city and province’s very belated efforts to address the needs our damaged fellow citizens, aka clean up the streets before the Olympics, the results only continue a failed policy in Ghetto-building 101. I live with the effects of this short-sighted experiment, which include:


- unsafe environment for our children; why do they not merit the same safety standards as children of West side neighbourhoods?

- the creation of a mono-culture of poverty. Placing all of Vancouver’s desperate within a few square blocks, in hope that this engineered ‘community,’ and its millions in social services will somehow magically transform its residents, be different from near-identical past endeavours, is a flawed understanding of the dynamics which produce such damage. To use a simplistic analogy, it’s about as effective as placing someone who’s trying to quit smoking in a room full of heavy smokers.

- the disappearance of small businesses and light industry from the area has a direct effect on the environment. Until the early 90’s, it was possible to do all one’s shopping either via a quick bus ride or on foot. Cobblers, grocers, butchers, shops for art supplies, clothing, auto shops etc., lined East Hastings Street. Now we drive to the West side for most of this.


- NIMBY and cui bono, the latter being Latin for ‘for whose benefit.’ It strikes me that the rest of our so-called ‘world-class city’ would benefit from and by sharing some of their calm and stable community ambience with our more indigent residents. I’m pretty certain my kids will never consider heroin as they’ve grown up surrounded by the dark outcome of that addiction. Trust me, it’s a lot more effective than a one-time school visit from a former junkie. Shouldn’t every community should have its own walking PSA? At best, such dispersal might help more Vancouverites understand some of the less visible consequences of their decisions. At worst the DTES wouldn’t be the sole repository for the negative outcome of same. People in our communities could finally get affordable home/business insurance. And maybe, East Hastings Street could support local businesses rather than the current mash-up of abandoned buildings and poverty agencies.

- One of the so-called benefits of such densification is thought to be the more effective delivery of services, a position put forth by both the agencies which depend on poverty for their livelihood, and by our less than progressive civic and provincial governments. The police supported this policy of containment until recently, but have since come to understand this densification only adds an unnecessary degree of volatility to the human environment, and is destructive of communities, environment and property.

- In one of his numerous and essentially sympathetic books on the Peoples’ Republic of China, American author William Hinton concludes that any Right policy, when allowed to run unchecked, becomes identical to that of the Left, and vice versa; but more importantly, that we should all be very scared when Right and Left concur. The current state of the DTES is a testament to the veracity of his view.

file://localhost/* http/::en.wikipedia.org:wiki:William_H._Hinton

Rob Cottingham · 3 months ago

Stv. rocks!

Meanwhile, Dethe Elza and DrWeb left comments on my blog post about your blog post (are we meta enough yet?) pointing me to two other solutions for looking up library books via Amazon:

http://jonudell.net/LibraryLookup.html - LibraryLookup, which lets you create a bookmarklet for libraries using one of several backends, and

http://www.bookburro.org/ - BookBurro, a FF extension that lets you look up books on a whole lot of libraries, online bookstores and other services.

You can grab the bookmarklet Dethe created in his comment on my post: http://bit.ly/hY9xZ.