Have Victoria’s millions made a difference on Pandora Avenue? The Globe returns to check

Victoria is coming off a glorious summer. Tourism was up. The B.C. capital was named the world’s “best small city” by Condé Nast Traveller for the third time, beating Florence, Italy and San Sebastián, Spain with its bustling harbour and rain forest adjacency. A major new hotel broke ground downtown – the first in two decades – and a handful of new restaurants added to an already boffo culinary scene.

Most tourists, though, aren’t going the few blocks over to Pandora Avenue, where change is slower to come. The Globe and Mail chronicled the decade-long decline of the wide thoroughfare, from a leafy gateway leading downtown to an open-air drug market and carousel of despair. The reporting was part of the newspaper’s Poisoned series, chronicling fentanyl’s path of destruction.