Vancouver—as a city of people—is in turmoil. Debate over social policy for the Downtown Eastside, “Canada’s poorest postal code,” has heated and come to a boil, just as I arrived for my short stint here. “Home” to something like 1500 homeless and over 5000 more folks living in flophouse hotels, the “DTES” is being gentrified with condos and yuppie retail, right (of course) in front of the eyes of its low- and no-income residents. And the Olympics is coming in three short years.

Tonight, after spending all afternoon at British Columbia’s busiest courthouse, right in the heart of the DTES, I headed to the Vancouver Public Library to hear a panel of street-level advocates talk about all of this. At the same time, in a room down the hall, the City of Vancouver was planning to have a public consultation on its 2007 budget. As I showed up, there were megaphones, TV cameras, library security, oglers, the smell of pepper spray, and police officers working in teams to restrain protesters. The Antipoverty Committee had succeeded in its effort to shut down the budget consultation, and was in the process of watching its members and allies get arrested.

I spent a little bit talking with some of the people around this action, and navigated through it into the panel discussion. Inside, Dave Eby, a lawyer with the unpigeonholeable and maverick DTES legal organization Pivot, had just begun his bit. He spoke over the screams, chants, and other sounds of confrontation that made their way through the walls from down the hall and upstairs, where the demonstrators were regathering. He didn’t make it too far into his remarks before a gray-haired envoy from upstairs came in to call him away to give legal help to the protest.

A few blocks east, in the DTES, 40 women had begun an occupation of the Women’s Centre, demanding that the city fund a female-only shelter. The City of Vancouver, as Jean Swanson of the Carnegie Community Action Project pointed out in the panel discussion, is operating with a CAD$3 million surplus and has happily committed millions of dollars for the 2010 Olympics. The Province of British Columbia has over CAD$2 billion in surplus, and the Canadian federal government recorded a near-record CAD$13 billion surplus in 2005; these two governments have teamed up to provide massive financial support to the Olympics, including $30 million to house athletes in Vancouver. A women-only shelter would cost about $500,000 a year, apparently. Yet staff at the Women’s Centre report that pleas to patch the lack of a women’s shelter for Vancouver have been met with, “Yeah, we know it’s bad, but there’s just no money to be had.”

The Antipoverty Committee, who say that “the money wasted on the Olympics could have housed every homeless woman in Vancouver,” have been fighting the gentrification with direct action, too, and are coming off several flophouse squats that ended in riot cop interventions and arrests.

But what’s much worse is that Starbucks has been suffering.