The front page of the Vancouver Province today features a big screaming headline that says anti-Olympics protesters are going to picket the homes of Olympic officials, in an effort to drive them out of their homes - just like, they say, the Olympics are doing to low income people in this city.

What utter rot. Look, as much as this is a watchdog website, and VANOC has a whole lot of stupid (and sneaky, and corrupt) things to answer for, causing poverty in the downtown east side is not one of them.

Let's be clear: there are no Olympics preparing to take place in San Diego right now. There are no Olympics happening in Saskatchewan any time soon. There are no ski jumps being built in Las Vegas, or St Johns, or Hamilton.

And yet, in all those cities, property prices are booming, old, worn out neighborhoods are being bought up and gentrified, and the homeless problem continues to suck.

How weird! If you listened to the Anti-Poverty Committee and their assorted friends, you'd think that, without the Olympic Games, the downtown east side would be covered in flowers and children and everyone would have a brand new MP3 player and brand name jeans.

That, obviously, isn't the case. The downtown east side has long been, and will always be, as long as it is subject to the wills of Social Services Inc, a blight on the Vancouver map, and that comes from drugs, petty crime, major crime, prostitution and a distinct lack of political determination to simply clean the place up.

Why, just this week I had friends come visit from Sydney. They were supposed to stay a week, but their first day they made the mistake of going to Gastown, then walking back to their hotel via Crackville. Before I could even explain to them that the rest of the city isn't like that, they'd decided that Vancouver was kind of crappy and had changed their plans to spend the rest of their vacation in Calgary.

And let's remember, on any given week, up to 8,000 tourists walk that same path when they step off cruise ships at Canada Place.

The Olympics DON'T cause property owners to think "Why am I renting out rooms to crackheads for $35 a night when I could knock this place down and build a 25-floor retail/residential tower that people will pay $350,000 to buy a one-bedroom apartment in?"

The Olympics don't cause people in Langley, who face a 90-minute-plus commute to and from the city to get to work every day, to decide it's worth dropping a few hundred grand on a new property on the edge of convenient-to-the-downtown-core Crackville.

It's happening because it's overdue. It's happening because it's what happens in EVERY city that meets it's outskirts capacity - people want to live where the crackheads and prostitute currently squat. And they will, Olympics or not.

And not for nothing, but the Olympics have already proved a boon to the low income people of Richmond. The council in that city, having won the right to build the speed-skating oval there, sold off some unused land around where The Oval is being built, and landed a $100m profit by doing so. That money is being used to lower taxes for local home owners for the next few years, and will then be set aside as a legacy fund to pay for low income housing, cultural events, and the creation of parklands and community farms/gardens.

Elsewhere, as construction companies struggle to find people to help build the new hotels, condo developments, bridges, stadiums and train lines needed to make the Olympics a success (all of which this city desperately needs regardless of the Games), they're advertising on billboards and on the sides of buses for people to work for them - that's unprecedented, but it's also to no avail. Projects are behind schedule all over town because they can't get enough labor to work on them.

Why should there even BE an Anti-Poverty Committee when jobs of $20 an hour or more can't be filled?

So word to the wise, Anti-Poverty Committee folk - you're protesting the wrong thing. The Olympics are not about to suddenly be abandoned just because you're angry that families and office-workers are sick of commuting from Coquitlam every morning.

Rather than trying to stop the slalom, maybe you would be better served asking for something that can actually happen - like, perhaps doing what Sydney did with their Olympic Village, which was sold off for low income housing after the event.

Or maybe you could just send some of your number out to one of those condo projects, where they'll be able to start work today, get paid this afternoon, and even get themselves a union ticket in a few months.

Now THAT would be a good way to end poverty, wouldn't it?