‘It’s actually become like a dump site’
Residents riled over river valley homeless camps
Riverdale resident Ray Vallee looks disgusted as he pokes into the mound of junk left in the brush at an abandoned homeless camp.
Bedding, clothes, empty food cans, syringes and bicycle parts are strewn for 20 metres along the hill below Jasper Avenue near 92nd Street.
“It’s almost impossible to clean this unless you do it by hand,” he said Sunday.
“This is an embarrassment to the city.”
He and neighbour Jennifer Pede said the mess is part of the growing problem of people living rough in the river valley.
They back on Dawson Park, where there are typically about a dozen tents and makeshift shelters on the hills within a few hundred metres of their homes.
Last month propane tanks exploded during a fire.
“(I’m) actually afraid for anyone I would take up there. I don’t let my dog loose anymore,” Vallee said. “It’s actually become like a dump site, a toxic dump site.”
This is the worst year Pede has seen, as what was once mainly a summer problem has extended to all four seasons.
She regularly calls police in the middle of the night about fights and yelling.
She thinks the city is doing a good job with the resources it has — crews driving Bobcats removed bins of debris last year.
But the mess returned. Pede wants the provincial and federal governments to give Edmonton more money to deal with the problem.
“I have a three-year-old and a baby on the way, and when I hear someone screaming … it kind of makes me want to move to suburbia.”
Stacey Dumais and Violet Bilow have been tenting on the hillside since they were recently kicked out of their apartment.
They feel safer than staying in a shelter, going to drop-in centres for food, bathrooms and showers.
Dumais, who like Bilow receives Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped, said they had to remove lots of junk when they arrived at their campsite.
“I don’t understand why the city hasn’t come to clean it up,” he said.
“They should make the homeless pick it up.”
Jay Freeman, the city’s executive director of housing and homelessness, said close to 25 per cent of the camps they’ve seen are in Dawson Park.
What was once mainly a downtown issue is now spreading throughout the city, from the west end to south of Ellerslie Road, he said.
That’s partly because young people aren’t comfortable in adult shelters, he said.
In the past, illegal campers were evicted, but Freeman said they just moved somewhere else.
Now park rangers call police or firefighters about dangerous sites and put unoccupied ones on the cleanup schedule.
If someone’s living there, rangers contact the Boyle Street Community Services outreach team, which tries to put them into proper homes and programs.
That can take six to eight weeks, although the agency hired a worker this year just to locate homes for river valley campers, Freeman said.
“I understand the public’s frustration … but we really think the more effective approach is one we have been taking, which is a balanced approach.” The city has found housing for about 3,500 people since starting its campaign to end chronic homelessness by 2019 six years ago, Freeman said.
But with 60,000 newcomers in the last two years, there were still 2,252 people in Edmonton’s homeless count last fall, he said.
The city’s Homeless on Parkland committee, composed of rangers, police, social workers and other agencies, is looking at the best ways to handle the problem
Another cleanup is slated for Dawson by the end of April.
“The community is doing an excellent job of emptying the pool of homelessness … but the tap is still running,” Freeman said. “People are still becoming homeless.” gkent@edmontonjournal. com