It was time for Evans and the Portland Hotel to go off on their own. She approached Green and explained the situation from their perspective.
“This is about protecting a more radical space that doesn’t really exist anywhere else,” she explained. “In order to make sure that we don’t water down what this is, we feel that we need to have a society created to protect what the Portland is doing.” Green gave them his blessing.
“There was enough internal frustration and anger and hatred, frankly, of what we were doing, for DERA to happily let us go and be our own entity,” Evans says.
Late one night in August 1993, Evans, Stuerzbecher, and Townsend stayed up late around the same kitchen table where they had met. They drafted a constitution for what would soon be a registered nonprofit organization called the Portland Hotel Society, or PHS. Summarized, the organization’s stated purpose would be to provide housing and support for the people that no one else would house. “To promote, develop, and maintain supportive affordable housing for adult individuals who are poorly served elsewhere in the community due to their physical health, mental health, behaviour, substance dependencies, forensic history or for those who are homeless,” it begins.
It’s explicitly stated in this document that PHS would not push people into treatment or rehabilitation for any of those challenges. Among key principles described there is self-determination, defined as “Allowing each person to determine for themselves the time, place, course, and method of therapeutic treatment chosen if any.”
The constitution concludes with an eviction clause: “The Portland Hotel Society endeavours to find an alternative to eviction in each and every situation,” it reads. “This clause is unalterable.”
On its own, the Portland Hotel Society began to expand. The Portland Hotel was falling apart long before it was given to Evans to manage. And so she had been looking for a suitable building nearby to which they could move its tenants. Townsend, never in his life accused of lacking ambition, decided they would try for a brand-new building, designed specifically for PHS from the ground up. And who did he want for the job?
“Who is considered the best architect in Canada?” Townsend recalls asking himself. The answer was Arthur Erickson.
Erickson, who passed away in 2009, was in his mid-seventies at the time and had enjoyed an illustrious career that made him wealthy. His work includes many buildings famous for their designs that drew inspiration from Canada’s First Nations people, including the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, Simon Fraser University’s Academic Quadrangle, and the King’s Landing building in Toronto, among others.
“Instead of treating these people like Bedlam [psychiatric hospital] patients in the old days in England, instead of keeping them in deplorable conditions, we’ll have Arthur design the building. As a political statement,” Townsend explains. “Arthur was a way of saying, ‘These people deserve space.’”
It was easier said than done. “We had so little money,” Townsend continues. “The budget was, like, $12 million, and we only managed to cobble together $6.5 million. And we were going to design a building for fire starters and very difficult people.”
Townsend approached Erickson with a challenge: Could he design a social-housing complex specially fitted to accommodate the Portland’s unique tenants on a budget that was barely a fraction of what such a project would normally cost? Erickson quickly accepted.
“He was really sweet and really generous and really kind, as was the rest of his team,” Townsend says.
It was nearly a decade before funding was secured, plans were drafted, permits were acquired, and the building was constructed and ready for tenants. In the meantime, PHS seized on an opportunity that arose when BC’s provincial government took a new interest in low-income housing.
In addition to the Portland Hotel, PHS now ran the Sunrise Hotel (today called the Irving) and the Washington Hotel (today the Maple), both located one block east of the Portland Hotel, on the opposite side of the street.
Evans remembers the expansion as exciting and obviously a victory, but also as uncomfortable. Almost overnight, her role had shifted from that of a nurse caring for tenants in one hotel to that of a manager responsible for staff working at three hotels. “I remember being very nervous and anxious, like a scared mother,” she says.
What had been one tight-knit group had to grow into a much larger team, and so 1998 serves as the beginning of a second iteration of the Portland. Many new hires joined around this time, an unusual number of whom came from Vancouver’s indie music scene, giving rise to a longstanding joke about PHS as an employment program for out-of-work musicians. Among them was Darwin Fisher.
He hates to admit it, but Fisher is devastatingly good-looking. He has a slim build, thick wavy-brown hair, and a youthful demeanour. In the late 1990s, he was living in Vancouver, but where he first connected with the Portland was in Europe, at a café in Amsterdam.
“Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but prior to the Portland, I was playing some music,” Fisher says with a laugh. “I was with some musicians, and I knew Kerstin [Stuerzbecher] and her husband Kevin Grant from the local music scene. I’d see them at the Railway Club. I was in a band called the Ronnie Hayward Trio. We were touring some festivals in Europe at the same time Kevin and Kerstin were on holidays there.”
The three of them got together for breakfast and, instead of bonding over their shared love of music, fell into a deep conversation about harm reduction and social-justice issues. At one point, Fisher made a joke about how work at the Portland didn’t sound very different from the life of an eccentric band on the road. Stuerzbecher laughed and extended a casual invitation for Fisher to stop by the hotel after his tour wrapped up.
A month or so later, he got in touch and they met at the Portland Hotel. “Then Liz burst into the room, and she was pissed,” Fisher recounts. “My first impression of Liz was as somebody who is acutely pissed off about something … and being very sharp-tongued about that. And so that put me back a little bit. But long story short: it was a good, full conversation. Not a stereotypical job interview. The idea was, ‘Why don’t you come down here and try it out?’”
The day the Portland Hotel Society officially took over the Washington Hotel, Fisher was given the night shift there and was working the front desk.
“First night on the job, the first night that we’re open, it’s getting close to nine p.m., so I’ve got to make sure the place is safe for folks coming in and introduce myself to everybody,” he recounts.
One of the Washington’s new tenants was a sex worker, Fisher continues. She was bringing a client back to her place, and her place was now at the Washington.
“She came by with one of her gents, and I had to tell her, ‘It’s a bit late for guests right now,’” Fisher continues. “I’m saying that through the glass door there. And she kind of smiles, red dress on and the classic red spiked heels. She backs up and does a high kick and kicks that locked door right open.” The Plexiglas stood up to the kick but the door did not, almost breaking from its hinges.
“They walk in right past me,” Fisher says. “Like, whelp, that happened. So we’re going to show a little bit of that flexibility for which we’re famous. And I think I’ll make sure the place is safe for the night just the same.”
In recent years, a social policy that’s gained attention from governments across North America is called “housing first.” It posits that by giving people a roof over
their head, you begin to stabilize a person’s life to a point where they can then work on their addiction issues, mental-health problems, prospects for employment, and relations with family and friends. If you first give a person a home and ensure that they can stay there, research shows that this degree of stability will give them the space and the time that they require to figure out the rest.30
More than a decade before anybody called it housing first, in three beat-up hotels on two blocks of East Hastings Street, people with complex combinations of mental-health and substance-abuse problems received rooms from which they would not be evicted.
There was still a lot of confusion among Vancouver nonprofit service providers about what the Portland was doing. Drugs were not allowed anywhere else in the neighbourhood—in homeless shelters, for example. Evans recalls meeting with managers running those facilities and attempting to get them to stop evicting addicts for fixing in the middle of the night. Needle exchange was still only happening under strict limitations. And more radical harm-reduction policies, such as a supervised-injection facility, were barely even topics of discussion.
Townsend increasingly focused on the question of how to begin getting people to talk about the ideas that he was already sure had to be deployed in order to bring the neighbourhood’s HIV and overdose problems back under control. “We became obsessed with providing education and information,” he says. “People aren’t unkind and people aren’t stupid. So we thought they just needed the information.”
The Portland had to watch where it stepped. As a registered nonprofit with charity status, there were legal limits on the extent to which it could engage in activism.
Tom Laviolette is considered another founding executive member of the Portland Hotel Society, but he wasn’t employed full time by PHS until 2003. Why he gets credit for being there alongside Evans, Townsend, and Stuerzbecher since the beginning reveals the secret weapon that the Portland developed to push radical harm-reduction policies as far as it did.
In 1996, Laviolette took a job with the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP), a group of political activists based out of the Carnegie Community Centre, which is just two blocks east of the Portland Hotel. From his office there, Laviolette worked closely with Townsend and PHS, serving as the public face of what was really a PHS-driven campaign.
“The Portland needed an avenue to give a source to its direct action,” Laviolette explains. “It needed a proxy.” That was him and CCAP. As PHS increasingly engaged in activism, it used this strategy—deploying a front organization that was largely under PHS control—to hold protests against the government that were otherwise too risky to conduct under the Portland name.
In early November 1998, pamphlets appeared on Vancouver telephone poles advertising a conference called “Out of Harm’s Way” that was planned for later that month. “Carnegie Community Association presents an international symposium on solutions to drugs, crime and addiction in the inner city,” they read.
Curiously, however, the task of organizing the conference went to Tanya Fader, a mental-health worked on the payroll of the Portland Hotel Society. Fader had joined PHS just a few months earlier. A close friend of hers had died of a drug overdose when they were in grade eight, and she’d helped another childhood friend battle a heroin addiction.
“I went to hell and back with her so many times,” Fader says. She remembers being aware of the good families that those friends came from and the strong support networks that didn’t save them from addiction. And then there was the Downtown Eastside, where so many people didn’t have families and lacked support of any kind. “That was a big motivation for working down here,” she says.
Fader recalls how Townsend vetted her. When she arrived at the Portland Hotel at the time they had agreed upon, she was buzzed into the building and proceeded up to the second floor, where there was a small common area. Townsend was nowhere to be found. But there were a number of the building’s higher-needs tenants to keep Fader company. She was left there not knowing what to do for twenty minutes. Finally, Townsend showed up and invited her into an adjoining office where Evans and Stuerzbecher had been waiting all along.
“I had never done that type of work before, and so I made a promise to myself that if I didn’t feel totally comfortable with it from the get-go, that it wouldn’t be fair to the people I would be serving,” Fader recalls. “And then I loved it, right away.”
Fader spent her first couple months at the front desk of the Portland Hotel, which is more work than it might sound. “It was action all the time, nonstop,” she says. “People needing their meds, people needing medical attention, people just wanting to talk, people losing their minds, people fighting, people getting drunk on rice wine and becoming completely unmanageable. Then Liz said to me one day, ‘We have this money to organize an international conference. Can you do it for us?’ And I was, like, ‘Sure, okay.’”
The idea was to host the sort of conference that one might find in a ballroom at a Hilton Hotel. They would invite experts from various fields related to drug policy and health care from cities around the world where harm-reduction programs were already implemented. But instead of hosting the event in a fancy hotel, this conference would take place in Oppenheimer Park, where the Killing Fields protest had culminated in July of the previous year.
“The speakers weren’t told,” Townsend says with a chuckle. “They were just invited there to give their normal talk.” That might not have mattered had the event occurred in the summer.
“Unfortunately, this was in November and it was pouring rain,” Townsend adds. “If the conference had gone on one more hour, the tent would have collapsed under the weight of the water.”
Fader recalls it all coming together as a mad scramble. “I had to get permits and organize all the international speakers’ travel and timing, and then figure out the actual timing of the conference and try to get the word out about it.” All tasks she had never dealt with before. “I had to do a lot of stuff where I was just flying by the seat of my pants,” she says.
The speakers list was impressive. Werner Schneider was the name around which there was the most excitement. He held the position of drug-policy coordinator for the city of Frankfurt, Germany, and had spent the previous decade integrating harm-reduction programs into the city’s response to illicit drugs. Schneider had overseen the establishment of supervised-injection rooms that by this time had operated successfully for years. Representing a modern European metropolis, the hope was that Schneider would take the stink of activism off what in Vancouver was still a very radical idea, present the concept of a supervised-injection site from the perspective of the establishment, and therefore normalize it in the minds of Canadian authority figures.
There was also Steffen Lux, chief of the Frankfurt police department’s drug squad, who Townsend thought could catch people’s attention as a progressive voice from the realm of law enforcement. Hannes Herrmann came from Switzerland, where he had implemented a “four pillars” response to illicit drugs consisting of enforcement, prevention, treatment, and—notably—harm reduction. Herrmann had also established a program called “heroin maintenance,” where long-time addicts were administered the drug in controlled doses supplied by the health-care system. That novel concept had caught Townsend’s attention especially. It was something nobody in Canada had ever heard of before. Vancouver’s own Bruce Alexander was also there to share the results of his Rat Park experiments and findings on how environment can affect drug use.
Stuerzbecher remembers that a conscious decision was made to keep VANDU members and Portland staff off the speakers list. “We knew that in order to save people’s lives, we needed to bring some of these experts in so that people who had the ability to make decisions would listen,” she says. “Because they were not going to listen only to activists. If that is the only voice you have, you are not going to be able to convince bureaucrats.”
The idea was to show Vancouver that so-called serious people�
�a judge, a police officer, doctors, and lawyers—were talking about harm reduction. And to attract the attention of politicians and policy makers in Vancouver while also making the event accessible to those affected most acutely by drug policies: the residents of the Downtown Eastside.
“We were talking about things like prescription heroin and supervised injection, and there was very little support for these ideas,” Evans says. “But we were, like, ‘Fuck it. Nobody is going to listen to us. We’re just a bunch of crazy people running a hotel. So let’s get some of these experts from other places to come.’”
They planned for 200 or maybe 300 people to attend. Close to 800 people showed up. The tent was packed all day long. “When we opened the tent in the morning, there was a lineup all around the park,” Evans says. “Drug users, nurses, social workers, community workers from Carnegie, cops—anybody and everybody, really.
“People sat and listened all day,” she continues. “There were literally rows of people at the front the whole day taking notes. Seriously, note-taking. And by the end of the next day, people in the community were saying, ‘Hey, have you heard about this thing called a supervised-injection site?’ All of the sudden, these totally radical and crazy ideas were no longer crazy or radical; they were things that other people had done.”
An article published in the Vancouver Sun ran under the headline “Tent Revival Message” and began, “An extraordinary event occurred in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside … It brought together disparate and often antagonistic groups: residents, business people, city bureaucrats, provincial cabinet ministers, federal health officials … Coroner Larry Campbell and the drug squad sat along one row, a group of junkies and young adults with day-glo hair sat nearby. It was a remarkable scene full of mutual respect.”