Street Market Report - August 11, 2013

The day started off a little cloudy, went to a torrential downpour at 10am, then brightened up for the rest of the day.

Early on, we had a bit of excitement. We were putting up the fence along the west side of Carrall St., and a homeless women got quite annoyed. She started lunging at us and threatening. I had just grabbed my phone and started to say that if she did not calm down I was going to call 911, when a cruiser pulled up. Perfect timing. She ran down the street and the situation was diffused.

We had a few confiscations, but nothing that caused any of the vendors to complain. Constable Bradshaw seems to be acting quite fairly and confiscating only the offending materials. He is also very conscientious and makes sure to tell the volunteers why he is confiscating the items. When we get access to 62 East Hastings it will be a good time to have a vendor meeting and do the stolen goods education that the VPD is requesting.

We had a visitor - Josi from Guelph University. She is doing her masters degree on the economics of binning, and observed the street market and some of the meetings that we have on Saturdays and Mondays. I believe that she will be around for a few weeks.

I'm reading a book on John Maynard Keynes right now, and I can't help but think of the DTES Street Market when I read certain passages.

"He was in the process of staking out a radical intellectual middle ground between the Marxist view that capitalism was doomed to die of crisis and the classical nineteenth-century liberal view that it needed to be freed of political impediment so that it could do its good work. He condemned 'the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, ' as well as that 'of reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.'"

This passage resonated quite strongly with me. The DTES is full of wannabe revolutionaries. Ones that would only wish to incite violent change and believe that the system is on the verge of collapse. The ones that argue that any new business or restaurant is a spear into the heart of the population. These are the Marxists. There are also those that would forever plop their heads into the sand and deny that there are any problems with the current system, or that more money thrown at the problem is all that is required.

Keynes made arguments that government intervention was required to shift the inevitable economic equilibrium of high unemployment despite flexible wages and prices. This bad equilibrium exists now in the DTES, and the Street Market is an excellent example of his "fiscal multiplier" put into practice. The population of the DTES wants to benefit from productive activity, this can be seen by the enormous demand for vending space all over the neighbourhood. The residents merely require the low barrier environment that will allow them to make their own money, on their own time, in their own way. The residents are so desperate for the opportunity to vend that they will regularly risk harassment and jail by displaying goods on the sidewalks of East Hastings. They will travel miles all over the city and recycle goods from the garbage bins of the affluent just to make a few dollars to supplement their social assistance. This represents enormous untapped economic energy, and the DTES Street Market is the framework that is attempting to harness this energy.

The Street Market currently costs the City of Vancouver $30k per year to operate, yet delivers more than $500k of direct economic stimulus into the hands of the poorest residents of the DTES. This is a fiscal multiplier of almost 20 to 1. Keynes used to argue for deficit spending (in times of war or depression) that would yield multipliers of 2 to 1.

The key argument I am making right now is for the power of controlled low barrier markets to provide economic benefit and incentives to the poorest and most marginalized populations. This power is recognized in the third world with micro-lending operations like the Grameen Bank, and can be applied to the population of the DTES through participatory enterprises like the DTES Street Market.

Financial Summary

50/50 Draw: $50.50
Table/Tent Rental: $126.50
Coffee/Juice Sales: $105.00

Total Revenue: $282.00
Total Spending: $210.32
Total in Petty Cash now: $1,212.22

Vendor Count: 158@ 12:30

Please enjoy the pictures of the market day below. The careful chalking of the "no-vending" areas. The throng of vendors and customers, and the clean park and street at 6pm.