VANCOUVER—A heavy rain beats a staccato rhythm on the overdose prevention site’s tented roof. Inside, Reece Draayers sparks up a cigarette and chats with a friend loading a tiny rock into a glass pipe.

The conversation ranges from family and friendship, to Draayers’ Indigenous Wuikinuxv ancestry on B.C.’s central coast, before finally settling on the issue that’s been taking up space in everyone’s minds here at Oppenheimer Park: the impending closure of the long-standing homeless encampment.

It’s Wednesday morning, and a deadline looms. The city said an increase in fires, violence and drug dealing at the site has forced it to close the tent city. On Monday, Vancouver’s parks board told the roughly 200 campers here they had three days to pack up and leave.

“The city needs to handle this with love, with open arms,” Draayers says. “Everyone here is somebody’s someone.”

Draayers spends hours every day at the overdose prevention site, which everyone here simply calls the OPS tent. He leaves only to get some food, pick up his social assistance check or sleep.

His only home at the moment is a space in a tent a few feet away that he shares with local activist Chrissy Brett. The two are among a handful of people who staff the OPS tent 24 hours a day, keeping watch as their friends and neighbours use drugs amid the worst overdose crisis in Vancouver’s history.

Star Vancouver followed Draayers as he joined the many campers vying for space in one of the 140 units of subsidized housing and shelter beds the city said are available through non-profit providers.

The day before, on Tuesday morning, the scene across the street at the Atira Women’s Resource Society intake office is tense. Nerves are frayed. Intake workers sit with prospective clients, trying to help people find a place to go after the camp closes.

Atira’s director Janice Abbott told Star Vancouver her organization was in the dark about the city’s plans until “the eleventh hour.” Ultimately, Atira refused to help inform campers they had to leave, opting only to work around the park’s edges trying to find housing for people who wanted somewhere else to go.

Outside the intake office, Draayers meets with Fiona York, an advocate with the Carnegie Community Action Project. She’s helping him navigate the paperwork required to hopefully get a space in one of Atira’s buildings.

After a brief meeting, Draayers is told there is a space available at the historic Gastown Hotel. It’s a single-room-occupancy building, meaning tenants get one small room to themselves and must share bathrooms and kitchens with others on their floor. SROs constitute the lowest rung on the social housing ladder, providing minimal space to some of the city’s most marginalized and vulnerable people.

Word also comes in through York that a space might be available at a different SRO run by the Lookout Housing and Health Society. It’s closer to the Downtown Eastside and it caters to queer and trans clients. For Draayers, who identifies as two-spirited, it sounds like a promising location.

“How can you say no to that?” he asks. “It’s closer to my friends. I wouldn’t have to hike from Gastown every day to get food. It sounds great.”

After finding someone to cover his shift at the OPS tent, Draayers gets a tour of both buildings.

At the Lookout building, Draayers meets with the on-site manager, who shows him around. Safe-space posters and rainbow flags hang on the walls and in the common kitchen area. Draayers likes the atmosphere immediately.

On the top floor, the manager shoos away two young men who are using drugs in a stairwell. The building is low-barrier, which means drugs are allowed. Harm-reduction supplies like clean needles and pipes are available for free, but tenants are asked not to use in shared spaces, the manager explains before showing Draayers the building’s rooftop garden.

“What a view!” he shouts, spinning around on the patio. “It’s like Sex and the City!”

Back downstairs, the door to the common laundry room is locked from the inside. The manager bangs on it, shouting at whoever is inside that she is calling the police. She suspects it’s someone who isn’t a tenant.

“People are always sneaking in here,” she says.

Later, at the Atira building in Gastown, a man is hunched over in the entranceway with a needle in his arm. Others congregate around the first-floor elevator.

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Draayers is told to wait by the reception desk while an Atira staff member double-checks that the available room has indeed been vacated.

On the 5th floor, the doorway to one unit is open, with a man splayed out unconscious on the floor. A woman next to him prepares a syringe of her own, surrounded by piles of belongings and trash.

Many of the SROs in Vancouver are notorious for bedbug infestations. Earlier that day at Oppenheimer Park, a man who said he was a resident of a different Atira building spread out white glue traps on the ground. They were caked with dead cockroaches, bedbugs and other pests.

The man — who would not give his name — said he brought the traps from his room to the park so campers would better understand the kind of buildings they were being asked to move into.

Abbott confirmed that Atira often uses glue traps to try to control the spread of pests at some of its buildings. All Atira buildings have constant pest-control responses in place, but larger buildings often present the biggest challenges, she said.

She also said Atira staff have since late 2016 encouraged tenants to use drugs in shared spaces rather than behind closed doors because it is safer.

“The priority is keeping everyone alive, and to do that, people must use where they can be seen” in case they overdose, Abbott said.

The drug use in the buildings doesn’t bother Draayers; he’s seen as bad or worse at Oppenheimer Park. It’s why he’s so committed to his work at the OPS tent.

Having seen the two options, Draayers says he’d still definitely prefer the Lookout building.

Draayers says he moved to Vancouver from Chilliwack, where he was working as a road construction flagger. He says he had to leave because he couldn’t find a landlord who would rent to an Indigenous person.

In the four months that he’s lived at Oppenheimer Park, he says, all his possessions were stolen, including the steel-toed boots he needs for work.

But late Tuesday afternoon, he discovers there isn’t a space available at the Lookout building after all. Frustrated, Draayers returns to the OPS tent, set on staying in the park rather than moving into the Gastown building.

“The place is full of bedbugs,” he said. “Did you see the toilet? It doesn’t even work. The sink was hanging off the wall.”

The day of the deadline arrived, bringing with it heavy rains. City workers dragged away soaking tents they believed to be abandoned.

It was also “cheque day”: when social-assistance payments are handed out across the city, sparking a rise in overdoses. Draayers spent most of the day at the OPS tent, keeping vigil while other campers used.

As the 6 p.m. deadline neared, Fiona York arrived with news. Atira workers had identified a new unit at the Gastown SRO, one near the top floor with a view of the harbour. She urged Draayers to reconsider.

Meanwhile, dozens of campers and activists gathered near the tent Draayers shares with Chrissy Brett. They were planning a protest march along Vancouver’s Hastings St., into the heart of the Downtown Eastside — pushback, they said, against the city’s plans to evict campers from the park.

Draayers weighs his options and comes up with a compromise. He’ll agree to move into the Gastown SRO — bedbugs and broken sinks be damned — but he wants to maintain a tent at Oppenheimer Park in protest and keep working at the overdose prevention site.

As the clock ticked down Wednesday evening, TV news crews began setting up on the edges of the park. While journalists were preparing to document a mass eviction that never came — 6 p.m. passed without incident — Draayers was leading around 100 demonstrators through Vancouver’s streets.

They blocked the busy intersection at Main and Hastings streets for 20 minutes, shouting demands like “House keys, not handcuffs!” and “Hands off Oppenheimer!” Draayers bellowed the anthems until his voice gave out.

The procession ended with a prayer circle back at the camp. Linking arms with fellow campers and activists, Draayers made a vow.

“I’ll be down here until every last one of these people is housed,” he said.

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