Downtown Eastside

It doesn't have to be the way it is.

I was walking downtown Eastside, and it was so catastrophic.

I had a family member die on the street homeless, so I'm very connected to this issue.

Even if I wasn't, I would care.

Well, I mean, I always say the only solution to poverty is wealth.

And then, as you say, you've got to make sure that wealth is properly distributed.

I walk through the downtown Eastside all the time.

And because guys, you know, homeless people, if they, well, they're not homeless, they live in a shelter or whatever.

This sounds great.

Where are we playing? Now, for those of you who don't live in Canada and don't live in Vancouver specifically, there is a very, very not great part of town called the Vancouver East Side.

Now, this was in the early 2000s, so it wasn't as sketchy as it is currently.

But... still incredibly sketchy.

In the 1970s, Ted Bundy killed in Washington State before his murderous spree carried him elsewhere.

gary ridgeway the green river killer buried and dumped as many as seventy victims within the same watershed that feeds into puget sound a stretch of water barely an hour's drive from where several of the feet had already surfaced north of the border canada had its own reckoning to draw on clifford olson who murdered children through the early 1980s, and Robert Pickton, whose victims came from Vancouver's downtown Eastside and whose case had closed only a few years before the first foot turned up.

A region with that amount of dark history needed little encouragement to imagine a living predator behind such a strange pattern.

Online forums filled with theories that a foot fetish killer, or something worse, was harvesting a very specific trophy and mailing the coastline his signature.

And the synopsis says that these characters, once they're let out of the school, they're alone and they're without skills, support, or family.

The teens find their way to the seedy and foreign world of downtown Eastside, Vancouver, where they cling together.

striving to find a place of safety and belonging in a world that doesn't want them the paths of the five friends cross and crisscross over the decades as they struggle to overcome or at least forget the trauma they endured each endured over during their years at the mission which was the name of their residential school With compassion and insight, Five Little Indians chronicles the bonds of friendship between this group of survivors as they help each other to reinvent their lives and ultimately find a way forward.

And so it's two things from that section of the synopsis.

Most of the people he recruited were down on their luck women who only agreed to go because he was offering them food and money and drugs and alcohol.

At the same time Robert was running this recruiting campaign, women from the downtown Eastside began disappearing in droves.

These disappearances were noticed by the men and women in the downtown Eastside, but they didn't report them because they had a general distrust of the police and of authority figures in general.

But as more and more and more women disappeared from the downtown Eastside, rumors of a serial killer operating in that area started to circulate.

Residents began only going outside if they could walk around in a big group of people and everybody was just totally on edge, keeping careful lookout for anything odd about the neighborhood, people that shouldn't be there, cars that shouldn't be there.

But despite this heightened security, women continued to go missing at a rapid rate and nobody knew why.

The police believed him and dropped all of his charges and let him go.

When Robert got back to the farm, Bill Hiscox, the one worker who still worked for the Pictons, he grew very suspicious of Robert.

and you're in the roughest area in North America.

Vancouver's downtown Eastside Gap.

I just got a bottle broken over my head.

As I was saying, this is the roughest neighborhood in North America.

The disparity between this neighborhood and Vancouver's reputation as one of the world's most livable cities is disturbing.

We

have this horrible secret that is the Downtown Eastside.

The most concentrated area of drug use in all of North America.