User:Sidney Gordon/West End, Vancouver

Social issues
West End residents have been very active in shaping their neighbourhood and maintaining its liveability. In the 1970s, residents banded together to calm traffic that was using the neighbourhood as a shortcut between downtown Vancouver and the suburbs of the North Shore, across the Lions' Gate Bridge. They also staged a successful, yet destructive "Shame the Johns" campaign to rid the West End of the sex work that was then visible in the neighbourhood. This campaign was formed by a group of politicians called the Concerned Residents of the West End (CROWE), prominently containing cisgender white gay men, who aided in the formation of a 1984 injunction granted by then-B.C. Supreme Court Justice Allan McEachern. This injunction banned sex workers from working west of Granville Street, which forcibly displaced them away from the relative safety and community support of Davie Street. Following this, they were forced into Yaletown, then Mount Pleasant, where they were repeatedly protested by "Shame the John's vigilantes", and eventually into the Downtown Eastside, where already vulnerable workers are more open to violence and abuse than ever before. These displacements were a worsened repetition of the early displacements that happened on Dupont and Alexander Street. Further, this displacement largely targeted transgender, two-spirit and First Nations women, replicated the colonial practices and dispossession of land from the Musqueam, Burrard, and Squamish First Nations. Today, groups such as the West End Citizens Action Network, the West End Residents Association and West End Neighbours continue to be actively involved in keeping the West End liveable, while this history remains largely erased.