Metro seeking solutions while tent cities grow
HOMELESSNESS: Mayors form task force as temporary winter shelters get set to open
The building at Pacific and Hornby in downtown Vancouver once housed a gardening store, so high windows provide good light, and the space is well ventilated and heated.
The city-owned building reopens Thursday, but will house people now, not plants. Forty plastic-covered foam mattresses are in rows on the concrete floor. A plastic tub at each mattress contains sheets and linens. Three shower stalls and four toilet-sink combinations have been installed, and workers were assembling tables on Wednesday in a day area that also includes kitchen and laundry facilities.
“As far as a temporary building goes, this is definitely one of the better ones that we’ve seen,” said Sean Spear, of non-profit shelter operator RainCity Housing.
It’s one of six temporary winter homeless shelters opening in Vancouver for a total of 195 beds, each to stay open until April, 2017. And if last year’s numbers hold, more than 500 of the city’s homeless will still be outdoors this winter.
Meanwhile, Metro Vancouver and the region’s mayors have formed a task force to look for solutions to the region’s homelessness crisis, with a report due next February. They will present a set of recommendations to the provincial government by next spring.
Maria Wallstam, an organizer with the Carnegie Community Association, won’t be among those giving the mayors advice.
“Another task force,” said Wallstam, who was among seven people arrested last Friday when Vancouver police and parks board staff cleared 15 tent campers from Thornton Park, near Pacific Station.
The campers had spent one night there after tent encampments had been cleared over the previous two days from 58 West Hastings, the Wendy Poole Park at the north end of Main and Powell streets next to the Living Room drop-in centre.
Such encampments have become a growing phenomenon throughout the Lower Mainland, with makeshift tent cities sprouting up from the North Shore to Chilliwack.
Wallstam said she has kept in touch with several of the campers cleared from Thornton Park last week.
“They’re just spread out across the city,” she said, adding that they’ve lost the safety in numbers they had at the camps.
Wallstam said Vancouver and other cities should designate spaces for homeless people to camp. She said even if there were enough shelter beds, many campers would prefer their own tents.
“I don’t think tent cities should be a permanent solution by any means,” Wallstam said.
But, she added, those in tent cities can choose the people they live next to, and the tents give them privacy, whereas shelters are “controlled spaces where you’re sleeping with another 40 people in a room.”
The shelter at Pacific and Hornby will have two staff on at all times, Spear said. It’s a “low barrier” shelter, where couples are allowed to stay together, people can keep their pets by their sides, and it has space for people to store carts and other possessions. Staff are trained to use naloxone kits in the event of overdoses, he said. People aren’t screened for drugs before their stay.