Downtown Vancouver business owner says rampant open drug use is everywhere

The owner of a downtown Vancouver flower shop says he has dealt with street crime and disorder since purchasing the business in April.

D&D Flowers, located at 531 Richards St., is across from the Hotel Canada low-barrier shelter.

“I’m no stranger to addiction,” D&D Flowers owner, Kurtis Lemon, told Global News.

“I definitely had a pretty severe addiction to cocaine for several years.”

But Lemon said the shelter across the street has become a source of ongoing problems, with rampant open drug use keeping customers away.

“Just all day long and sometimes even late into the night,” he said.

“I’ve been here very late into the night to do orders, sometimes overnight. We were here once and there’s just a ton of drug use and people coming and going on drugs, stealing things. I see stolen property all the time. There’s just a ton of drug use on the street, feces on the pavement, that sort of thing.”

Lemon added that his primary focus is to make his business successful and while he does not like to see people addicted to drugs and suffering on the street, he also does not like to see tourists and potential customers avoid the street or have to step off the curb to avoid drug users.

“When you have a group of tourists that are maybe going down to the cruise ship terminal and they don’t have to go down this street and they’re at the set of lights and they see a group of people that’s laying around doing drugs, they may say, well, let’s just go one more street down and then we’ll go down the hill,” Lemon said.

He added that he is frustrated because it seems like nothing is being done.

“I’ve been trying to get attention about the drug use on the streets and the SRO across the street for, I guess, maybe two months now,” he said.

“And it seems like all of a sudden somebody made a phone call and told the operators of this SRO that they need to keep their act together or to do better. And so they have been doing better. But it lasted about a week. And then it kind of went back to normal.”

Municipal leaders from across B.C. say they are seeing similar situations in their communities.

At the Union of B.C. Municipalities, many leaders announced they are signing a five-point Contract with Communities calling on senior levels of government to prioritize their responses to the crisis.

“Those issues that we’re grappling with are complex and integrated and demanding,” Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto said.

“And frankly, it is unsustainable for local governments to have to step in to this degree in all of those complex areas.”

One of the five actions being called for by the Save Our Streets group is the development of standards to ensure low-barrier services do not negatively impact their neighbourhoods.

Lemon said it is possible for the situation to be improved.

“It’s clearly possible for the street to be kept clean when people make an effort, when people know that things are not appropriate,” he added.

“So that would definitely be the frustration is that we can definitely do these things, we can clean these things up, but nobody’s really doing it. Nobody’s really making an effort. It takes somebody like me to have to call out the situation for something to happen.”