With its million-dollar views of Vancouver and the mountains, the unhoused encampment at CRAB Park continues to attract new residents.
Its population is growing just as B.C.’s incoming premier, David Eby, prepares to take over the approach to addressing mental health and housing challenges in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).
“We’re basically just a nice friendly, multicultural gypsy camp,” said Kevin Morris, a new tenant of the CRAB Park encampment.
Morris, who is originally from Stratford, Ont., said he hitchhiked to Vancouver from London, Ont. just over two months ago, seeking “stability” on Canada’s West Coast.
“Some of us have PTSD, some of us were raised differently, some of us just don’t like living in a house in a conventional lifestyle,” he explained in an interview Sunday.
Eby has said he doesn’t think encampments are safe, or a solution to homelessness because he’s seen too many fires, injuries and deaths.
“What we need to do is get people out of the tents, into decent shelter and into social housing and supportive housing if they need it, and into health care if they need it,” the premier-designate said in a Nov. 9 interview.
Eby told Global News on Sunday that the situation with people living in tents on sidewalks and in parks needs to be addressed urgently and collaboratively with community members, law enforcement, businesses and service providers.
“If he cares so much about the homeless people getting put into shelters and going through the housing programs, and all the dangers about fires here and harm reduction, then first of all, why are the shelters half-empty?” asked Morris.
There are five temporary winter shelters in the City of Vancouver with a combined 151 additional shelter spaces open every night between November and March of 2023.
Earlier this year, a B.C. Supreme Court justice refused to grant the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation an injunction to clear the CRAB Park encampment.
Eby said the core of this and other court decisions is that people need to be treated with dignity and respect and that will be at the core of the new provincial approach.
“It can’t be that the current state of Hastings Street is an example of respect for human rights and the law. We can do better,” read a statement from Eby.
Anti-poverty activist and former Vancouver councillor Jean Swanson said it’s cheaper to end homelessness than maintain it and interim options are needed to house people until proper, dignified housing is built.
“So if we get the housing that we need and if we give people the resources that we need, it will actually be cheaper than keeping people in misery,” she said on Nov. 10.
Some DTES residents have said they would like to see CRAB Park returned to all users, but Emmanuel Cenithgoya isn’t confident everyone living in the current encampment will accept housing.
“They don’t want to move from there because if they go into an apartment they have to pay the rent,” the 82-year-old area resident told Global News on Sunday.
Cenithgoya walks his dog in that park daily and said it hasn’t been safe since tents appeared last spring.
In May, a man was fatally stabbed in CRAB Park in the city’s fourth homicide of the year.
Last month, 42-year-old convicted killer Denis Carlin Sleightholme was arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated assault and possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose after police were called to a stabbing spree in the park.
In 2016, Sleightholme was sentenced to four years in prison for manslaughter in the 2015 stabbing death of a man in the DTES.
Twice, Cenithgoya said campers have told him to leave the park because it belongs to them.
“I didn’t like that. The park (belongs) to everyone and we need the space to enjoy our life,” he said.
Morris, meantime, said if he were offered housing he would consider accepting it, but only if he could use the space as a work office to build affordable e-bikes for the homeless community – while still living in his tent in CRAB Park.