Constantly on the move, homeless camps difficult to track in Metro Vancouver
Credit to Author: Jennifer Saltman| Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2019 17:00:59 +0000
If you ask Metro Vancouver municipalities, there are fewer known homeless encampments in the region than there were three years ago.
However, those who work with and advocate for Metro’s homeless say keeping track of the camps and their residents is difficult and any counts are likely not accurate and are always changing.
“It’s very difficult to nail down exactly how many camps there are at one given time because often people move or people are asked to leave and then it’s almost like whack-a-mole — one camp pops up, another one shuts down or moves,” said Jeremy Hunka, spokesman for Union Gospel Mission.
According to a 2017 position paper written by Metro Vancouver’s homelessness task force, there were 15 encampments in the region with four or more people living in them — three in Vancouver, two to three in the Township of Langley, two each in Maple Ridge, North Vancouver and Delta, and one each in Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam and the City of Langley. It also recorded 70 encampments with up to four people, but did not break that number down by municipality.
In an attempt to update the number of homeless camps in Metro Vancouver, Postmedia asked each of the region’s 21 municipalities how many they have within their borders. The final tally was nine.
The number of camps in Vancouver remains steady, while Surrey’s camp moved further west.
The Township of Langley has no camps with more than four people, down from two to three. Maple Ridge’s count also decreased from two to one. Delta, Burnaby, City of Langley and Coquitlam have no known homeless camps, though a spokesperson for the city of Coquitlam said there may be camps “in the bush.” North Vancouver’s count went up, from two to four. In Richmond, tents are consistently set up in the Hamilton area.
Other municipalities in Metro Vancouver have said that they don’t have any encampments of four or more people that they are aware of, but virtually all said they have people living outdoors.
“That’s the transient nature of the population,” said Bailey Mumford, director of operations for the Fraser region for Lookout Housing and Health Society. “You could go to talk to somebody one day at their camp and come back the next day and find that that camp is gone and then you have to find out where that person’s gone to and sometimes that can be really tough.”
Other municipalities in Metro Vancouver have said that they don’t have any encampments of four or more people that they are aware of, but virtually all said they have people living outdoors.
Union Gospel Mission has two mobile missions that visit people who are living on the margins to make connections and offer support. One of those vehicles covers most of Metro Vancouver, and an informal count turned up somewhere in the neighbourhood of 25 camps.
“We would say, from our perspective, that we see encampments slowly growing in number despite many of the really positive moves that have come from some governments working to build housing,” Hunka said.
Hunka said a simple reason for the uptick in camps is the growing number of people who are homeless.
Metro Vancouver’s last homeless count, which was conducted in 2017, showed 3,605 people were homeless in the region, a 30 per cent increase from three years earlier, and the highest number of homeless counted to date.
Vancouver conducted its annual one-day homeless count earlier this year, and found 2,223 people were homeless, 614 of whom were unsheltered. It was an overall increase from previous years.
An increase in camps can also be seasonal — when the weather is better, more people choose to sleep outside rather than in their car or on a friend’s couch, Mumford said.
Hunka said the number of camps found by mission workers and the number reported by a municipality can differ because workers seek people out and often go deep into the bush to find them, while municipalities generally respond to complaints.
“Some of them can be quite private,” he said. “A lot of people are looking for a place where they can feel safe, where they don’t have that fishbowl effect, where they don’t feel exposed to the rest of society,” Hunka said.
Mumford said it boils down to a need for housing — of all types — in communities across the region. When housing designed for people who had been homeless is full, shelters end up at capacity, and those who cannot get shelter space end up camping.
“I really do think that’s the catalyst. I we can provide housing opportunities for people to get inside we can get them stabilized and move forward,” Mumford said.
— with files from Cassidy Olivier