Vancouver homeless camp fight: Neighbours are sympathetic until the homeless are visible

Some people call Oppenheimer Park the backyard of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The one-block park is a welcome island of green space in a low-income district where grass and trees are at a premium compared with other parts of the city.

But local residents can’t use their backyard right now. It’s become a legal battleground pitting their rights with those of Vancouver’s homeless, who say they have nowhere else to go.

Nowhere safe, that is.

Advocates for the homeless are fighting a City of Vancouver injunction application that would force clearance of a sprawling tent city at Oppenheimer Park for safety reasons. The parties head back to B.C. Supreme Court on Monday.

A similar case involving homeless in Abbotsford, a city of 140,000 about an hour’s drive east of Vancouver, is expected to go to trial early next year.

The cases have the potential to affect the rights of homeless people across Canada if, as their proponents hope, the issue ultimately reaches the Supreme Court of Canada.

“I think it’s fairly likely that regardless of the outcome it will probably go up to a higher level of court,” says lawyer DJ Larkin of the Pivot Legal Society, the advocacy group representing the homeless in both cases.

“We need to follow this challenge through to set a precedent that every city has to follow so that they stop using these laws to criminalize people.”

Legal implications aside, these cases are also about society’s willingness to deal with the visible evidence of its failure to solve the homelessness crisis.The problem makes us uncomfortable, but is harder to ignore if the homeless aren’t scattered in alleys and under bridges, but are setting up communities in our parks.

“The discomfort is not something that can really be argued with,” says Michael Vonn, policy director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which is not an active participant in the cases.

“I think many people express that feeling. The question is, does their discomfort amount to a trump of other people’s right to be somewhere?

“Just like the sex trade, if you create zones where those people, those others, cannot be visible you are de facto insisting they be someplace more dangerous … We’re weighing discomfort against actual vulnerability.”

The most recent Vancouver homeless count found 538 people sleeping on the street, about double the previous year, while the regional homeless population was estimated at 2,770.

A 2008 B.C. Supreme Court decision, upheld by the Court of Appeal the following year, gave the homeless the right to camp overnight in parks or other public property and erect shelters – tents, tarps, cardboard boxes, whatever – if a city had no readily available shelter spaces for them. The Adams decision overturned a Victoria bylaw that was challenged by a group of homeless who’d set up camp in the city’s Cridge Park.

The court ruled the bylaw prohibiting temporary overnight shelters violated Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteeing life, liberty and security of the person.

“The constitutional analysis is if there is no other shelter that is practicable, then the state cannot come in and insist that they not be there and that they not shelter themselves,” Vonn said in an interview.

That didn’t keep Abbotsford from winning a court injunction last December to remove a plywood-walled tent city from Jubilee Park a few days before Christmas. Pivot is now challenging the bylaw itself on constitutional grounds.

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The City of Vancouver, whose media office turned down Yahoo Canada News requests for comment, is trying to skirt the Adams decision by arguing the Oppenheimer Park encampment represents a health and safety risk, citing open drug use, discarded needles, buckets of human waste in tents, fights and numerous police calls.

“In addition to worsening weather condition, health and safety conditions at the camp have deteriorated such that it has become necessary for the City to take action in order to ensure the safety and well-being of those within the park and to return the park to its intended use for residents and local organizations,” the city said in a Sept. 25 news release.

“Since the beginning, the camp in Oppenheimer Park has always been in violation of the city’s park bylaws. Camping is not allowed and neither is creating structures in parks because these create barriers and safety concerns for other residents who want to use and enjoy the park space.”

The tent city started in early summer as a small protest camp aimed at focusing attention on the lack of available housing for the homeless. It was limited to one part of the park, allowing local residents to use the rest, though some scheduled events were moved elsewhere. But the camp gradually swelled to an estimated 100 people, covering the whole park and leaving some residents feeling intimidated.

The city essentially is arguing the homeless camp has created a security problem both for inhabitants and local residents, according to Vonn. It ignores the fact being vulnerable is a way of life for the homeless, she said.

“One of the things that we’ve said publicly is, hey, living on the streets is dangerous,” Vonn told Yahoo Canada News, noting campers say they feel safer in the park than spending the night alone in a doorway or back alley.

“What the police are saying is this congregation of people is creating a safety risk. What many of the people have said is we’ve never been safer.”

The situation in Abbotsford is, if anything, even dicier. The city has had a reputation for being ham-fisted in dealing with its homeless population. City workers spread chicken manure in a park where homeless people camped, forcing the city manager to apologize. Police were accused of pepper-spraying the homeless and slashing tents to break up another camp.

Larkin noted a plan to create provincially-funded low-barrier housing on donated downtown land collapsed last year when Abbotsford city council refused to rezone the property to allow it under pressure from the business community.

“It was essentially not in my backyard sentiments from the community,” she said.

Mayor Bruce Banman, in an interview Friday with Yahoo Canada News, said things have changed. A 20-bed housing project just outside the downtown business district is in the works.

Abbotsford will also likely adopt recommendations from a task force report on homelessness that includes establishing a co-ordinator to help the homeless find housing and services and to intervene with those on the verge of being homeless, he said.

"We’re determined to do things differently," said Banman.

Vancouver has recommissioned aging downtown hotels and even a once-posh seafood restaurant as temporary refuge for homeless residents. But the demand for space outstrips the supply as gentrification dries up affordable places to live.

“We’re losing low-cost housing stock at an alarming rate,” said Vonn.”That’s not surprising in a city like Vancouver, which is a incredibly expensive city and development is at a fever pitch.”

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A geographer at Simon Fraser University whose work includes tracking displacement of the poor said the city’s public-safety argument channels public discomfort with seeing the reality of how people live rough.

“I think it’s a little bit of a Trojan horse, personally,” said Prof. Nicholas Blomley. “It’s smuggling in a bunch of anxieties about appropriate forms of behaviour.”

Many are ambivalent about the poor and their problems, including drug-taking, but also including those things that would normally happen behind closed doors, such as sleeping and going to the bathroom.

“I think it’s also just an anxiety that comes from seeing people sleeping in public, seeing people doing things in public that are supposedly confined to the private realm,” said Blomley. “A lot of the hostility that is generated about homelessness is behavioural.”

Those facts of homeless existence frame the legal argument against the injunction, said Larkin. Everything they do amounts to civil disobedience.

“Sleeping outside is illegal, eating outside is prohibited, setting up a tent is prohibited, you can’t go to the bathroom anywhere,” she said. “You’re limited in absolutely every one of your daily activities.”

The homeless in other parts of Canada could conceivably invoke a B.C. precedent if their provinces can’t house all those who want shelter.

“For all kinds of reasons we’re reaching a kind of vortex on these issues, needing to sort them out,” said Vonn. “And it looks like the time is now for that.”