Riverview Renewal | Christine Hatfull
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estled on 244 sloping acres near the junction of the Coquitlam and Fraser Rivers is a spectacular cultural landscape and unique 100 year-old arboretum. In 2012, it was placed among the Top 10 Endangered Places by the National Trust for Canada, and it continues to be “at risk” in 2016. This place is also the home of the former Riverview Hospital (1913–2012) that provided long term psychiatric care in British Columbia until policy changes in the 1980s and ’90s forced the move of patients into the community. Burke Mountain Naturalists (www.bmn.bc.ca) describes the area: The entire site is designed in the manner of a grand English country estate enhanced by magnificent trees and other pleasing landscape features such as stone walls and curved driveways. Riverview now hosts western Canada’s most significant collection of mature trees (over 1800 inventoried trees) collected from all over the temperate world. From 1911– 1925, it was the home of western Canada’s first Botanical Garden, which is now located at the University of British Columbia. The Hospital has a remarkable history, with outstanding
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heritage buildings and a graciously-designed site to support mental wellness in the midst of a world-class collection of trees. The funnel out of the emptied mental health facilities at Riverview has always led to the Downtown Eastside—a culturally engineered moniker for a socially engineered ghetto—where 40% of the homeless are considered to be mentally ill and fall repeatedly into the care of policing and prison systems not set-up to cope with the mental-health crisis. Currently, anywhere from 200–300 people are estimated to be in desperate need of permanent mental-health care and appropriate housing, not available to them on the mean streets of downtown Vancouver. A duty of care is fundamental to our faith as Anglo-Catholics, and nothing could be more in need of care than the crisis in St. James’ actual parish, that is, the Downtown Eastside. The issues are extremely complex and inescapably interwoven, much like the century-old root system that thrives beneath the Riverview site. But there is no doubt that the kind of intensive, market housing favoured by recent BC Housing planning and profit models would negatively impact the root system itself, and many trees could be lost. Meanwhile, Riverview’s