A member of the Vancouver Police Department stands next to an individual inside a tent along East Hastings Street in Vancouver on April 5 as city staff were seen removing encampments in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.Kayla Isomura/the Globe and Mail
A day after Vancouver city crews and police cleared homeless people’s tents and belongings from a stretch of East Hastings in the Downtown Eastside, no one is quite sure where everyone has gone.
But shelter and housing operators, who were taken by surprise by the city’s aggressive campaign Wednesday, say they are worried about the ripple effects of dispersing a vulnerable group of people with no plan in place to rehouse them.
“We have a lot of outreach and the connecting was lost all of a sudden, because those people disappeared. Boom, they’re gone,” said Micheal Vonn, the chief executive officer of PHS Community Services Society, which operates housing, shelters and the city’s most used supervised-injection site, supported by Vancouver Coastal Health and BC Housing funding. “It takes work and time to establish trust and those connections are now lost.”
The feeling was the same at Union Gospel Mission, which runs a shelter and housing in the area using largely charitable funds.
“It’s just been a pretty heavy week for our outreach and support workers. There’s definitely some concern about where folks are going to end up. Many were just starting to gain trust,” said Nicole Mucci, the communications manager at the mission.
She said staff are hoping that people will reappear for Union Gospel’s traditional Easter dinner this Sunday so they can reconnect and be offered support.
Ms. Mucci said the dispersement happened so quickly that they couldn’t get workers out in time to talk to people.
In Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a society’s wounds hurt everyone
BC Housing and social-service operations were not informed about the city’s clearance action until about 9 a.m. Wednesday. It started a couple of hours later, prompting a scramble in the area to prepare.
Union Gospel Mission’s shelter was completely full Wednesday night, where staff had held 10 of their 92 spots open for newcomers, as is standard. By 11 p.m., they were full. But it was unclear whether any of the newcomers had arrived from Hastings Street, because the shelter is full every night and has been since January of 2022, Ms. Mucci said.
Shelter operators elsewhere had similar stories. A representative for RainCity Housing said its 28-room Triage shelter was full Wednesday night – as it is every night.
“We didn’t see a larger-than-normal increase last night of people self-referring,” said RainCity spokesman Bill Briscall.
And at Atira Women’s Society, where staff scrambled to set up extra cots in the spaces they run, the worry is that those chased away from Hastings Street will inevitably turn to friends who do have rooms in social housing or private residential hotels. That is going to add a new level of difficulties.
“My opinion is that we’re not going to see the full impact for a couple of days or a couple of weeks,” said Janice Abbott, the CEO of Atira, which also operates a significant amount of housing in the area, much of it in older residential hotels that the province has bought to preserve as affordable housing. “So we will see an increase in the number of people, in damage and more stress and trauma. It will only manifest over the next couple of weeks.”
BC Housing was unable to provide numbers by deadline of how many people slept in shelter beds Wednesday night but a representative did say there were 1,200 shelter spaces in Vancouver on the night of the first sweep and that temporary emergency shelters that are usually opened during cold or wet days were also open. The agency was working to make sure those temporary shelters stayed opened in the coming days.
On Thursday, as police and city crews continued to block various parts of East Hastings to remove tents and belongings, it was hard to pinpoint where people had moved to.
There was no sign that they travelled to CRAB Park, another long-standing homeless camp on the shore of the city’s inner harbour close to the Downtown Eastside. According to the park board and people working in a health-service van on the site, no new tents had appeared in the last 24 hours.
Some new tents did pop up along other streets near Hastings in the Downtown Eastside, such as Alexander and Railway, but not as many as were on Hastings. A few tents were re-erected on previously cleared blocks of Hastings.
Both Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim and Premier David Eby said Tuesday that they were aware that there wasn’t enough permanent housing available for everyone, but that there was some shelter space. Mr. Eby said there was enough for anyone on Hastings who wanted it. Vancouver city manager Paul Mochrie said there was not.
Both the Mayor and the Premier emphasized that permanent housing is coming, with 330 rooms or apartments being built or renovated in the next three months.
That includes a workcamp-like set of modular homes being set up at Main and Terminal, another temporary modular housing project near Olympic Village, a new building just being finished up on Main Street near the harbour and two older hotels that are being renovated extensively to make them more livable.
However, Mr. Mochrie also said there is a waiting list of 1,300 people for supportive housing in the city.