Here’s a housing solution: dig a home underground
Mitch Lagimodiere is proud of his hobbit hole, but already thinking about how to improve upon it when he feels, inevitably, that he will have to move and dig a new burrow.
Lagimodiere was surviving quite nicely, thank you, in an underground bunker he built into the
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side of the muddy, slippery bank of a ravine near Lakewood Street and 12th Avenue in east Vancouver — that is, until a chance discovery by Vancouver police on Oct. 4.
“I’m trying to peacefully live here,” he said. “I’ve been here a long time and no one has bothered me. No one knew I was here.”
Lagimodiere arrived at the site in March, living in a tent on his own, then in a shack he built.
“I sat down one day and looked at the ground. I thought, ‘This would be the perfect spot for a bunker. I’d sooner not be seen above ground.”
So Lagimodiere began digging. He dug and he dug and he dug, for two and a half months.
“Once I think I dug for two days straight,” he said.
“I was here for the first shovelful,” his buddy Romeo said. “It was just one small hole — that’s how it started.”
The site is only a few feet off a busy street, behind some shrubs.
“A shovel and a pick,” Lagimodiere said. “I mostly dug at night because I didn’t want to be seen.”
The clay was heavy and hard to dig, but once he got a big enough hole cleared — perhaps five by seven metres, and two metres deep — the dried clay made for good walls.
The walls have drywall on them, There’s wood panelling on the ceiling, a fire extinguisher and first aid kits, a built-in bed, a DVD player, even a makeshift trip-alarm system. Supplies came mostly from dumpsters at construction sites.
Collecting empties supplements his income.
“Welfare isn’t enough, even though they raised it $100,” he said. “A hundred dollars is a drop in the bucket compared to what people need.
“That’s why there’s so much crime — but I haven’t broken the law in a long time, in 18 years.”
Lagimodiere is 54 and has 10 kids. As a little boy himself, his grandfather taught him bush and survival skills, which come in handy now.
He grew up in the crime-riddled North End of Winnipeg, fighting and surviving.
Moving to Vancouver and still not yet 10, Lagimodiere had lost the memory of everything he’d been taught in school. Drinking lacquer thinner had erased the lessons. It wasn’t until he was in his 40s that he learned to read and write again at community college.
“I remembered everything else about going to school,” he said. “Faces, classrooms — just not what I’d learned in class.”
Taking a cue from the self-sufficiency taught by his grandfather, Lagimodiere became a jack of all trades, learning carpentry, electronics, plumbing.
“People are scared to come into my bunker,” he said, “but I’m confident in my building ability.
“I’m pretty confident it could survive an earthquake, even.”
He was discovered on Oct. 4 when police officers and a K9 unit tracked a man with outstanding warrants for assault and weapons possession to his bunker.
“They were banging on the door. I was: ‘I’m coming, I’m coming.’ I was shocked,” he said.
He said he didn’t know about the warrants. The friend had pneumonia and Lagimodiere was caring for him, making him soup and giving him somewhere warmer to lie down than on the ground above.
“I know he’d do the same thing for me,” Lagimodiere said.
When contacted, the Vancouver Police Department and the city both said they cannot comment because of privacy concerns, but that they work together to try to find housing for homeless people.
Lagimodiere said if you give him a knife and a magnifying glass, he can survive comfortably in the bush. In the city, he has been homeless almost nine years.
“I’m not bothering anybody. I just want a place to live until they do something about this huge homeless problem,” he said. “Everybody has to live. They keep kicking us out, but where are we supposed to go?”
This is his seventh bunker-type dwelling. He figures with the publicity, he could soon be surveying where to dig No. 8.
“Every time, I get harder to find,” he said. “Every time, I go deeper underground.
“The next one, I’ll be there and you won’t even know I’m there.”