SHOPPING CART WOES
Group studying solutions
Four shopping carts filled with bags of stuff and bicycle tires are lined up beside a construction fence on Kildare Road behind Tim Hortons.
“This I’m seeing a lot more. I’m kind of shocked by it,” said Teena Ireland, who is part of a team studying the problem of shopping carts being left across the city. She estimates thousands of stray grocery carts litter the city. Sometimes they’re full of stuff including blankets and foam mattresses, suggesting the carts are being used by the homeless. Others are empty and sometimes left in clumps of 15 in a neighbourhood near a shopping mall. Ireland blames that on the decrease in good-paying jobs in Windsor and a lack of transportation for many.
Ireland and four others in the Leadership Windsor/Essex Program took on the issue of stray shopping carts almost a year ago for the Downtown Windsor Community Collaborative and will present their findings and possible solutions in early June.
“It is a hot topic in Windsor because people are frustrated. They want some answers,” Ireland said Tuesday of the growing eyesore.
Some of the solutions include storage lockers for homeless people and cart corrals around the city to tidy up the spots where they are frequently left.
It isn’t just a downtown problem. “It seems to be all over Windsor,” Ireland said.
On Kildare Road near Ottawa Street, Ireland noticed one cart at first and now there are four carts that have been there for a couple of months.
Scott Badder, who said he is homeless at age 30, said the four carts contain the belongings of an older homeless man who works yet doesn’t have a place of his own. “This is just one guy of many,” he said. “It’s a crying shame.” Sarah Cipkar, the Downtown Windsor Community Collaborative’s community engagement co-ordinator, said downtown residents raised the issue partly because the carts are noisy when they ’re being pushed down an alley or street at night.
Cipkar said it’s a symptom of homelessness and she would like to see secure storage lockers for homeless people. “I think that takes the shopping carts as storage off the streets, so that’s one solution,” she said.
What Cipkar doesn’t want is a bylaw that wouldn’t solve the problem and would only mean more red tape for people in crisis. Ireland realizes the shopping cart issue is complex.
Some people don’t bother putting carts back even in the parking lot of a store, so Ireland doesn’t know if cart corrals will work. Her study group — learning about leadership — doesn’t have any funding to implement its ideas. “The city really needs to step up and help with that because it would build some kind of relationship with people using these,” Ireland said.
“If we can’t keep them from using them, at least we can kind of assist on where they go.” Other solutions include selling affordable, collapsible carts that people could purchase at stores and reuse, an affordable grocery delivery system, a city pilot project to collect the carts, getting stores to label their carts and pay a fee to get the cart back and getting retailers to work together to collect the carts.
Ireland said the carts, worth about $250 each, are often insured, which may reduce the interest in retrieving them.
She’s seen carts with furniture in them, suggesting people are moving with them.
She sees empty carts abandoned across the city often a few blocks from a shopping centre.
“I notice them on Rhodes Drive. Don’t ask me how they got there.” The Leadership Windsor/Essex Program dates back to 2001 and helps people develop leadership skills through community action projects.
I notice them on Rhodes Drive. Don’t ask me how they got there.