Homeless campers in CRAB Park face abrupt eviction process

Officials have announced plans to close the designated homeless encampment in Vancouver’s CRAB Park within a matter of weeks, prompting worry and frustration among residents.

Park rangers attended the waterfront park Wednesday morning to deliver a draft closure plan to the seven homeless campers still living there in tents.

The city intends to clear the designated camping area in just 15 days, on Nov. 7.

In the meantime, deputy city manager Sandra Singh said a homeless outreach team will be working with the campers in an effort to identify adequate housing or shelter options before they are evicted.

“Five of the seven people remaining have been offered housing and have refused those offers, with one person having refused three offers,” Singh told reporters at a news conference Wednesday.

“Just last week a very, very good housing offer was refused and we were quite disappointed.”

Her remarks were briefly interrupted by calls of “bullshit” from Andrew Hirchpold, a man who identified himself as a former CRAB Park resident.

The park’s designated camping area is the only place in Vancouver currently exempt from a city bylaw requiring homeless people – who have a legal right to shelter themselves from the elements overnight – to pack up their tents every morning.

A B.C. Supreme Court Decision issued in January 2022 established an area of CRAB Park where campers could remain 24 hours a day, citing a lack of adequate indoor shelter spaces to accommodate them across the city.

Speaking at Wednesday’s news conference, Steve Jackson, general manager of the Vancouver Park Board, said officials feel they have now provided sufficient options to those living in the park.

“At this point in time, we’ve made the decision that there’s no longer justification to keep the temporary designated zone in place,” Jackson said.

Many homeless people have expressed concerns about the state of some of the shelters available in Vancouver, taking issue with everything from restrictive rules in some locations to filthy conditions in others.

CRAB Park resident Sasha Christiano said he would accept an offer to live in decent housing, but not in a single-room occupancy property.

“I’m very against the organizations that run them and how they’re run,” Christiano said. “I don’t want to die there like a lot of people I know of.”

The city has come under fire for its handling of homelessness in CRAB Park from multiple sides – with some area residents keen to see campers forced out, and some homeless advocates outraged by the intense scrutiny residents have been placed under by park rangers and police.

Video posted on social media Saturday showed rangers attempting to evict someone tenting during the day outside of the designated area, in the middle of the same atmospheric river that caused flooding across the region, and left multiple people dead. 

Prior to the storm, Fiona York, an advocate for CRAB Park residents, asked the Vancouver Park Board for an exemption to another bylaw requiring campers to use no more than one tarp, but said the city declined.

“This was a potentially life-threatening weather event,” said York. “Obviously they have discretion about whether to enforce the bylaws… I think there’s a test of reasonableness, and what a regular person would find reasonable under these circumstances is not what’s being applied here.”

The park board faced similar criticism after rangers were sent into Oppenheimer Park last winter to seize blankets and tents ahead of an anticipated cold snap.

Officials said they are currently spending around $21,000 per week enforcing bylaws in CRAB Park, and have spent approximately $1 million so far this year alone.

York argued that level of attention – sometimes involving upwards of a dozen rangers and police at a time – is unnecessary, and said that much of their work involves issuing citations for minor bylaw infractions.

During Wednesday’s news conference, the city also attempted to lay some of the blame for the ongoing encampment at CRAB Park on the people who have been fighting for residents’ rights. Singh suggested unnamed advocates have “influenced” some homeless campers not to accept offers of housing.

CTV News asked the city for clarification on what she meant, and was given a statement from Singh detailing an alleged incident involving an elderly former encampment resident from Strathcona Park who accepted a housing offer, but later came back to the camp.

An advocate “advised him that he should return to demonstrate that elderly people were staying there,” Singh said.

“Our partners are aware of similar accounts of influence within CRAB Park,” her statement added, without detailing any specific incidents from that location.

“It has never happened,” York said of the deputy city manager’s claim. “When people accept housing, that’s something to rejoice.”

With files from CTV News Vancouver’s Ben Miljure