VANCOUVER—Vancouver’s mayor says he will ask the city’s park board to temporarily relinquish jurisdiction over Oppenheimer Park in an effort to remove an encampment of homeless people who live there.

The tent city has endured at the Downtown Eastside park for around a year and had grown to around 200 tents. On Aug. 19, the park board issued a notice ordering the campers to leave. Over a weeklong period, outreach workers matched 127 of the original residents with housing.

However, in order to force people to leave the park, the park board would have to apply for a court injunction.

Mayor Kennedy Stewart said that following the effort to house people, around 40 people still live at the park full-time, but safety concerns mean the city can no longer let the situation continue.

“Things are not safe in Oppenheimer. We know that large encampments are dangerous places, and this is the largest encampment we’ve ever had in Oppenheimer and the most active,” Stewart told reporters during a press conference at city hall.

“We’ve had over 500 police called, double what we had in the same period last year. We’ve had 20 tent fires, including recent arson.”

A particularly disturbing incident involved a 15-year-old girl who was allegedly assaulted by a 29-year-old man, Stewart said. The man was arrested and is now facing charges.

That incident was first reported by Janice Abbott, the head of non-profit housing agency Atira, on Twitter on Aug. 21, during an intense two-day effort to get people to leave.

“No one seemed to know she was there, (and) she wasn’t captured on lists we were made aware of,” Abbott wrote in her Twitter post.

Speaking to reporters at city hall after the mayor’s press conference, park board commissioner John Coupar called the mayor’s move surprising and inappropriate. Coupar said he favours applying for a court injunction but refused to say whether he and his fellow commissioners had discussed or started the process, citing the confidentiality of in-camera meetings.

“I think it’s a shocking development,” Coupar said. “I didn’t hear anything from the mayor about what the plan was.”

The jurisdictional separation between Vancouver City Council and the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation — a governing body made up of seven elected commissioners — is unique among Canadian cities. Although Oppenheimer Park was previously the site of a tent city in 2014, city council has never before moved to take control of an area under park board jurisdiction.

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“He’s asking about jurisdiction in Oppenheimer Park. I would like to ask him what he’s doing about the situation on Main St.,” Coupar said, referring to Main and Hastings, the heart of the Downtown Eastside where homelessness and drugs have been part of street life for decades.

While BC Housing and non-profit housing agencies worked to identify more than 100 units for park residents, those have now been used up and the remaining people are being urged to go to homeless shelters. Many residents of the park have said they prefer to live in a tent than a shelter.

Vancouver City Council next meets on Sept. 10. The park board’s next meeting is Sept. 16. According to the Vancouver Charter, both city council and the park board would need a two-thirds majority vote to agree to suspend the park board’s jurisdiction over Oppenheimer Park.

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