DTES Street Market Reports: Street Market Report

Summary of the day

After having several conversations with a student doing her Masters on the economics of binning, I began pondering some of her questions again... What would change the life of an average binner, and what would make a big difference to their health. My short answer was greater availability of low barrier services such as public bathrooms and public showers. I couldn't help think of this when, in the morning when we were washing the park, one of the vendors ran up and asked our volunteer to clean his feet with the garden hose. He probably had not washed his feet in several days if not weeks, and jumped at the chance of a cold shower. It was an interesting and educational moment for the hard life of a binner.

An RPIC (Responsible Person In Charge) had to be sent home today. It was unfortunate, but it is the condition of democracy and peer run enterprises that the peers truly do have the power to hire and fire. The person that was RPIC#1 in the morning was upset at the behaviour of RPIC#2. She felt that he was yelling unduly at some of the volunteers, and also tried to fight one of the vendors. She fired him on the spot, and we managed the rest of the morning with only a single RPIC.

The road opening at 5pm and the cleanup afterwards went amazingly well. Most of the north end of Carrall St. was empty before we had to open the road.

I do remember a good conversation with a police officer at the end of the day. We were collecting garbage at about 6pm, and the officer came over to assist with someone that was being belligerent. We then started to talk about the market, and I got a good feeling that this officer really 'got' the purpose of the market. He said, "on Sunday, we really see a decrease in the vending on the side walk [of the 100-block of East Hastings]." I said, that this was really our goal. To create a legal area for vending, and thus remove the necessity for the punitive ticketing that is going on. If we create an area that is safe for the binners to sell their items, we can separate this survival vending from the illegal activity that is inevitably mixed together up and down the side walks of Hastings St. This benefits the local businesses, saves policing costs, and benefits the vendors that are just trying to survive. A well run market creates a social benefit for the binners, but also creates an enormous social benefit for the neighbourhood and the City as a whole. The policing costs are dramatically reduced, local businesses will not be blocked by the unregulated street disorder, and pedestrians and shoppers will no longer avoid certain side walks out of fear. The binners are an enormous recycling engine for the whole city. I have talked to binners that regularly travel to the West End, Kitsilano, or even the North Vancouver for their cans and binned items. Why not celebrate and nurture these industrious people instead of creating a regime that criminalizes them?
Our estimate that $500,000 of business is done at the Street Market every year also implies an enormous amount of recycling. These goods are plucked out of bins all around the city and thus do not enter landfills or polluting gasifiers, and are purchased by consumers that no longer increase our trade deficit (if you assume that most appliances or clothing or footwear is manufactured outside Canada). An extremely conservative estimate of the magnitude of this recycling effort provided by the Street Market (if each dollar only represents about an ounce of material), would be that over 20 Tonnes of material a year is removed from the waste stream through our Street Market. Another estimate can be made by looking at our own garbage at the end of the day. We dump about 1/4 Tonne of garbage every week, this means that we have to dump about 12 Tonnes of our own garbage every year. If the garbage represents only 10% of the material that is sold at the market, this implies a much larger amount of recycling - more like 100 Tonnes!
The reality needs to be properly calculated (perhaps we can find a student that is interested), and could be multiplied immediately if we were allowed to move to daily markets, or if we were to find a larger permanent location.

We know that the DTES Street Market is a critical piece of Vancouver's Zero Waste Initiative, but is the City of Vancouver ready to fully embrace it?
http://vancouver.ca/green-vancouver/zero-waste.aspx

For any questions about this report, or any past Street Market Reports - please contact Roland Clarke @ 778-323-5415, or roland.clarke@gmail.com

Financial Summary

50/50 Draw = $75.80
Table/Tent Rental = $107.50
Coffee/Juice Sales = $138.50

Total Revenue = $321.80
Total Spending = $312.83 (mostly due to new purchase of a PA system for Street Market vendor meetings)

Petty cash now = $1,440.58 (corrected upwards from last week due to the arrival of our weekly stipend checks from VANDU)

Funding for the Street Market has historically been from only one source - the City of Vancouver. The revenue experiment has provided a needed boost to our funding and an incredibly necessary emergency fund that has allowed us to survive "glitches". Recently, Hope in Shadows with funding from the Central City Foundation has provided us with a much needed equipment grant. This will allow us to buy more amenities like tents and tables and will improve the look and acceptability of the market. We also plan to make vending carts that can be stored out of the way during non-market days and provide the binners with storage.

Vendor Count = 175 @ 12 noon

Please enjoy the nice graphs of our revenue experiment.