VANCOUVER—A non-profit housing provider says it was not told of the city’s plan to move homeless people out of Oppenheimer Park until the “eleventh hour,” and has refused to take any role inside the park that involves telling people they have to move.

“It’s not that we’re not supporting the process, we just didn’t want to be the evictors,” said Janice Abbott, CEO of Atira Women’s Resource Society.

About 200 homeless campers at Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside were given notice this week that they had to be out of the park by 6 p.m. Wednesday.

That deadline passed without the city moving in to clear away remaining tents. Instead, there with a demonstration, as about 100 people shut down Main and Hastings for roughly 20 minutes to protest the city’s attempt to clear the park.

The Vancouver Park Board is now planning to reassess its options for the site.

That some tents remained disappointed Downtown Eastside residents Stephen Blair Bishop and Shawn Johnson, who say they are regularly physically assaulted in the park because they are gay.

“We wanted to watch it close down,” Blair Bishop said, showing fresh and bloody scratch marks he said were from an assault that had just happened when he moved someone’s belongings to the side so he could sit on a park bench.

The large encampment has been in the park for a year, and deputy city manager Paul Mochrie said the city moved to evict the camp this week because BC Housing had managed to stockpile enough low-income housing to give tent city residents the option of signing up for housing.

According to the city of Vancouver, 75 people from the tent city have accepted housing so far, mostly in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel buildings. The older hotel buildings have shared bathrooms and no kitchens and make up much of the housing stock available to the poorest people in Vancouver.

Blair Bishop and Johnson live in an SRO near the park run by non-profit agency the Lookout Society. Johnson described their home as “a s--hole.”

Blair Bishop said he was angry that the tent city campers seemed to have jumped ahead on BC Housing’s waitlist, although most of the housing offered to the tent city residents were SRO rooms in various buildings run by non-profits.

Abbott said Atira was asked to hold rooms “some time ago” and had 52 housing units available by Monday. While 18 people from Oppenheimer Park have signed up for those rooms, she said the way the camp is being cleared out with just two days’ notice is undermining the trust that housing agencies normally work to build.

“You can’t go into the park and say, ‘I’m packing up your stuff and I’m going to make you move,’” Abbott said. “ ‘But please trust me when you move into my building.’”

Mochrie said the city never asked housing providers to help clear the camp. Abbott said it’s possible there was a misunderstanding, but, “We absolutely believe that we were asked to participate in the decampment.”

After a chaotic scene played out Tuesday when city staff began searching tents, confiscating flammable material and tagging tents with spray paint and duct tape, many in the camp criticized the city for a lack of transparency around the tent removal process.

On Wednesday morning, a number of those tents were gone.

City staff met Wednesday morning at the park with lawyers from Pivot Legal Society and camp leadership to explain what would happen over the course of the day.

After that meeting ended, city staff began taking down some tents that had previously been tagged with red duct tape, saying they considered them to be abandoned.

But when Pivot Legal Society lawyer Anna Cooper asked how they knew which tents were abandoned, she said city staff could not provide a list of names or any other way to verify they weren’t confiscating belongings that people still needed to survive.

“They were taking down a tent saying that no one was living there, but when asked, Carnegie Outreach didn’t actually have a list of names,” Cooper said. “They couldn’t verify whether it was one of the tents that was supposed to be removed.”

“Everyone was pointing at everyone else to explain why this tent was being taken down,” Cooper said. “And again, there was zero system in place to ensure that (the tent’s owner) knew this was happening or how they could get their possessions back.”

After another meeting with Cooper and fellow Pivot Legal Society lawyer Caitlin Shane, city staff agreed to stop taking down tents until they put a process in place to better communicate with campers what was happening. Even so, city workers continued to remove multiple tents throughout the morning.

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“We feel deeply frustrated about what we are seeing here. There is this continual intentional ambiguity from City Parks, and other government actors,” Cooper told Star Vancouver. “They don’t provide people with information, and then literally behind their backs they are taking down tents and removing possessions.”

Cooper accused the city of intentionally creating the chaos as a means of pressuring people to leave the park.

“It is not an accident that there is this level of confusion. It is not an accident that nobody knows what his happening. It’s a strategy,” she said.

A BC Housing spokesperson said no one is being forced to move into housing. “We take into account that it’s stressful, but we don’t force it,” said Brenda Prosken.

Many of the campers Star Vancouver spoke with said they felt the process was needlessly chaotic and stressful, while others said it was working for them.

As city staff made the rounds along Powell Street, a man poked his head out of his tent and shouted to fire department staff.

“Hey, I just wanted to say that I got a place and I’ll be gone in about two hours,” he said. “Can you come and collect this stuff?” he asked, motioning to belongings piled around his tents.

“Yes, we can. Do you need help packing it up?” a city worker asked, adding that city staff could provide storage for up to six months if the man needed it.

On the other side of the park, Chris Charleston spoke with a city crew, telling them he had also gotten a place at the former Biltmore Hotel.

“It’s great,” he said. “After three years I finally got a place. All it took was a bullet,” Charleston said, referring to a recent shooting that happened near the park in July and drew attention to what police have said is a rising problem with crime in the neighbourhood.

Staff agreed to leave his tent and belongings in place, while Charleston pointed them to another tent and belongings that he said had been abandoned by a neighbour.

The city has said it needs to clear the camp because it’s not safe. Vancouver Fire and Rescue has issued multiple fire safety compliance orders, and there have been 17 fires since February.

Abbott said that women especially have been experiencing frequent violence at the tent city. For months, Atira has been assisting women who have been sexually and physically assaulted at the camp. The organization has been providing those women temporary space in several buildings it operates in the Downtown Eastside.

Some tent city residents previously told Star Vancouver that they feel safer living in the park than they would at a single-room occupancy hotel, even one run by a non-profit agency, because of bedbug infestations, open drug use and erratic behaviour by other tenants.

“If someone says they feel safer living in Oppenheimer Park, who am I to say they’re wrong,” Abbott said, acknowledging that pest control is a constant fixture at buildings in the Downtown Eastside and some tenants struggle to comply with pest control procedures.

Because of the deadly opioid overdose crisis that continues to ravage the Downtown Eastside, Abbott said that in some low-barrier buildings Atira operates, tenants are using drugs in the open because they fear that if they use drugs in private in their rooms, they could overdose and die.

Abbott said she would have liked to have seen a more collaborative process between the city, tent city residents and non-profits.

“I don’t know what that looks like exactly and I understand the complications,” Abbott said.

“But I just think it’s hard to build trust and relationships with people when you don’t include them in decisions that are being made about them.”

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