Communities, community workers and local government

While 80% of the SRO units of the city are located in this area, homelessness has increased since the end of the 1990s and the number of SROs has been declining.3 Contrastingly, the DTES is one of the most stable districts in terms of years of residence of the population (City of Vancouver 2002b). [...] The initial meetings with the city manager and project coordinator registered the many questions of the community about the absence of community consultation, their suspicions that the project was purely a political move by the city, the questioning of the absence of strategies for community participation in the project and their demands that the money should be given directly to the community. [...] In the year 2000, the implementation of the Vancouver Agreement allowed for the allocation of funding and support to several community initiatives, and in 2003, the election of a new city council materialized the support to various initiatives of the project. [...] The embracing of these principles required the transfer of control of process and decision-making to the community and a strategy of multi-layered negotiation not only with the various groups/interests in the community but also within City Hall and the various levels of government. [...] While the community saw the release of control of process and resources as a primary condition of engaging in the project and the most important step towards overcoming suspicion about the city’s commitment to community mobilization, the city and its workers struggled with issues of boundaries of power and authority and of how to keep the project accountable to the funding bodies and to the city a