Massive homeless camp cleaned up in St. Catharines
Outreach worker estimates it was one of dozens of encampments in region
A huge encampment that may have served as a home to as many as a dozen people at a time throughout the summer has finally been cleaned up.
St. Catharines municipal works director Darrell Smith said more than 17 truckloads of debris were hauled away from the encampment near Yates Street on Monday morning, and he expected several more loads would be required before the work was complete.
“This will take a while to get cleaned up. It was a very large camp,” Smith said.
He said outreach workers visited the area in the days prior to the cleanup, offering assistance to people living in the camps that need help.
“It’s a combined team effort,” Smith said. “It’s not just city forces. It’s the Niagara Region, it’s the Region’s outreach program, it’s the Niagara Regional Police. We all work together, and we have some really good protocols in place to help address the situation.”
Shelly Mousseau, the homelessness program manager for Gateway Niagara — the lead agency overseeing outreach programs for the Niagara
Region — said workers “have been actively engaging with individuals there.”
“There were probably four or five individuals living in that encampment. They’ve been able to house some of them which is fantastic,” she said.
“There was one individual left — one person who was still there.”
Members of the agency’s team of 13 outreach workers had been interacting with that individual daily.
“Unfortunately, that individual did not want to go to shelter or be housed,” Mousseau said.
She said team members are continuing to work with the individual, hoping they may yet be able to assist.
Pastor Bill Deguire, who runs an independent outreach program called Working the Streets Niagara, said his team members have visited the site numerous times during the summer months, too, working to help people who have been staying there.
He said as many as 12 people were at the camp during some visits he made to the area, but other times there were as few as three or four staying there.
“These camps don’t last a super long time,” he said. “They move around from place to place and we have to find out where the new camps are.”
Deguire estimated the site is one of “way over 60 camps” throughout Niagara, but Mousseau disagreed.
Mousseau said she was unable to access the agency’s database of homeless encampments Monday, but added that 60 or more sounds excessive.
“That seems a lot higher than I would expect to see for the Niagara Region,” she said.
Smith said there are several more encampments city staff are aware of that will be dealt with in the days to come.
St. Catharines resident Gerard Warner said he noticed the encampments while walking his dog along nearby Merritt Trail this summer and became concerned as he watched the mess and discarded needles from opioid use accumulate.
He said he was happy to see the progress being made Monday, after initially being frustrated by the city’s apparent inaction after he made councillors and staff aware of the issue weeks ago.
Smith said the city would have typically dealt with the encampment much earlier than it did, “but the reality that we’re dealing with right now has made things very difficult.”
“In a normal year, we would be able to address this more quickly than we were this year,” he said, adding the delayed response was the result of staff shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But Warner said there are “so many more” homeless camps in the same area.
“A lot of them are abandoned, but they’ve never been cleaned up. The people don’t live there anymore but all the junk and needles and all that stuff are there,” he said. “There are needles everywhere.”
Smith said the costs associated with the cleanup have yet to be determined, but they will be part of a report to be presented to city council in November.