MAPLE RIDGE, B.C.—Joseph Stickney pushes his bicycle through the front door of the temporary shelter, past two RCMP officers and into the morning sunshine.

He darts back inside to retrieve a shopping cart filled with his only belongings. Not long ago, he had more to his name. He had a tent. He had camping supplies. He had a community.

He lost most of that the last week of February, when the City of Maple Ridge and local RCMP enforced a court injunction against Anita’s Place, the long-standing tent city in this suburban community an hour east of Vancouver.

Authorities removed everyone from the camp and confiscated propane heaters, cooking stoves, anything they deemed could be a fire risk — even cigarette lighters, according to anti-poverty advocates who were there at the time.

Private security guards now enforce a pass system, allowing only “verified” residents of the camp in. Stickney, 33, isn’t one of them.

“Two days after we were evicted, we were able to go back for five minutes and grab a few items,” he says.

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“I spent probably half an hour just moving my stuff out the back fence. And that still wasn’t enough time to move all of my stuff,” he says.

Stickney, and dozens of people like him who were displaced from the camp, may no longer live in the tent city but they still call Maple Ridge home — and it’s a more hostile environment than most. So-called “ridge-ilantes” hurl profanities and worse toward people experiencing homelessness and even at well-meaning attempts to keep them warm and dry.

In March, the provincial government announced it was going to install a 51-unit modular housing project in Maple Ridge — the second of its kind — despite city council’s refusal to accept it.

Maple Ridge Mayor Mike Morden has since been criticized for his comments on the issue, particularly when he told The Star earlier this month that homeless people and people who use drugs are “raping and pillaging” his community. He later apologized but still insists modular housing isn’t an appropriate, nuanced solution to the challenges faced by his community.

But as the politicians squabble, people experiencing homelessness in Maple Ridge feel abandoned by the city they call home.

Sitting in a borrowed wheelchair outside a box store in the city’s downtown core, Aaron McNee, who is in his 30s, unfolds a pair of expensive jeans he got from a friend.

“They still got the tags on them,” he tells a group of friends, holding them up with pride.

A woman wearing a red handbag and a look of disdain on her face approaches.

“You know the problem, right? This is an addiction problem, not a housing problem,” she says to the group, loud enough for people walking past to hear.

“I didn’t even use the first two weeks I was homeless,” one of McNee’s friends shouts back. “It was people like you who made me start using.”

The woman with the handbag begins arguing with the others, lecturing them about personal responsibility.

“We’ll give you a hand up but not any more handouts,” she says. “I don’t want my tax dollars going to that.”

The friends mostly stare at the ground, shaking their heads in frustration. They encounter this every day.

“She’s judging us on how we look,” McNee says. “She could have come and talked to us instead of just pointing fingers.”

The woman walks away, replaced a few minutes later by a security guard who fidgets with his radio. He tells McNee and his friends they have to leave.

The group did not instigate the confrontation, but they know the game. After a few choice words, they leave, not sure where they’re headed, knowing only that they aren’t welcome.

The city’s actions have made that abundantly clear to them.

In his Feb. 8 decision allowing Maple Ridge to remove potential fire hazards from the tent city, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Christopher Grauer wrote: “(This) is an order permitting Maple Ridge to take steps to ensure fire safety, not to clear the camp.”

But two months later, the tent city that once housed 50 people is quiet. Fewer than 10 residents remain. Every time another tent is removed or a resident leaves, the blue metal fence encircling the camp constricts a little more. Security guards in yellow jackets patrol the perimeter.

While the mayor says his “passionate” rhetoric is born of frustration with systemic failures to help the vulnerable, anti-poverty advocates argue his inflammatory language risks inciting violence. Affidavits from former tent city residents collected by Pivot Legal Society in 2017 and filed in B.C. Supreme Court recount multiple instances of violence and harassment at the hands of “ridge-ilantes.”

As a former resident of Anita’s Place, Attila Devasarhelyi — known as AJ Senior — says he experienced the violence first hand.

“People throwing fire bombs at us, starting fires, setting fires, waiting for us to leave so they could beat us up. They were throwing garbage over the fence at us,” he says.

Other tent-city residents shared similar experiences. But there were also instances of violence within the camp community itself.

The end of McNee’s left elbow is blunted and scarred — shattered, he said, in a fight with someone living at Anita’s Place. On a different day, he says, he was chased through the camp by someone wielding a knife.

There were also fires at the camp over the winter. One in February, captured on video, sparked an explosion that sent a fireball dozens of feet into the sky.

Former residents say the fires were started by saboteurs intent on giving the city the justification it needed to close the camp. But the fires are not the only problem, and the debate is larger than who set them.

The mayor and his supporters argue the camp became a gathering place, concentrating homeless people, drug dealers and other criminals not just from Maple Ridge but from across the Lower Mainland. He says the problem is worse in his city compared to its neighbours.

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Homelessness rose 48 per cent in the Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows area from 2014 to 2017, according to Metro Vancouver’s most recent homelessness count. In contrast, neighbouring Langley and the Tri-Cities saw a 124 per cent and 113 per cent increase, respectively.

Whatever the cause, Maple Ridge is experiencing an unprecedented level of polarization. Jason Payne, who oversees social housing projects throughout the Fraser Valley for Coast Mental Health, says the level of opposition to housing solutions in Maple Ridge is unique.

“It’s quite different here,” he says. “Even in Abbotsford where I live, I haven’t had as much of that feedback, or fight back.”

Online comment forums about Maple Ridge’s modular housing are littered with posts that suggest the recent surge of homelessness comes from other cities — that the temporary housing attracts struggling people to the city.

That’s “completely a myth,” says Donna McKenna, the manager at Maple Ridge’s first modular housing project, which includes 53 units on Royal Cres.

Every tenant at the Royal Cres. site is a Maple Ridge resident, and the new modular housing site set to open this fall on Burnett St. will have the same requirement, she tells the Star.

“Some of the people we house have grandchildren in this community,” says McKenna. “Maple Ridge has been home for a long time for them.”

McKenna also tries to house as many women as she can; she says Maple Ridge has a disproportionate percentage of homeless women compared to the national average. Some at the Royal Cres. site are exiting the sex trade. Others are fleeing domestic violence.

Councillor Kiersten Duncan is the lone voice on city council in support of the modular-housing projects. Even so, she insists the mayor and his supporters don’t speak for the majority of Maple Ridge.

“There is a very loud minority of people in the community that I feel use very aggressive tactics to bully supporters of the (modular housing) project into silence,” Duncan says. “I’ve had a lot of residents reach out to me and express their support ... and (they) even apologized to me for not speaking out and not sharing their support, because they are fearful of retaliation from their neighbours, coworkers, from their classmates.”

Duncan says many people in Maple Ridge go out of their way to support marginalized neighbours, from church groups that provide temporary shelter or grassroots efforts to provide free haircuts and meals.

At Royal Cres., some residents are working to change their neighbours’ minds. Since getting his one-room unit in October, AJ has joined the “clean team” as an employee of Coast Mental Health, tidying up the neighbourhood.

When he wears the crew’s yellow safety vest, AJ says, people treat him with kindness. Locals will stop to chat with him. But AJ did cleanup work at Anita’s Place, too. He was the same person, but people looked at him with disdain.

When the modular units opened in October, AJ jumped at the chance to get in out of the cold.

The change was nothing short of revolutionary, AJ says.

“My life has totally changed around. I no longer have depression, anxiety. I know where I’m staying. My self-esteem — I’ve got work here. A hundred things have changed.”

At Anita’s Place, AJ was elected to the camp’s governance committee to help keep order and act as a representative. Now at the modular units, he wants to create a tenants’ committee to address concerns.

And there are concerns. Two of AJ’s bicycles have been stolen. Some tenants bring in disruptive guests, and drugs are still easy to come by.

“We’re going to have growing pains,” AJ says. “But we have to set an example.”

Outside, McNee and two friends sit in the shade with their backs against a fence that partially blocks the view of the modular housing from the sidewalk. They pass around a pinch of blue powder McNee says is fentanyl.

Glancing around briefly, he sparks a lighter and hovers a sliver of tinfoil over the flame. Like many, McNee says his addiction started when he was prescribed opioids for an injury years ago.

“I don’t want anyone to live this life,” he says before taking a hit, inhaling the smoke through the shell of an old Sharpie marker. “This isn’t living. This is a horror show.”

While the modular units work for many people, McNee says living there is not for him.

“I’ve done a lot of time (in jail) and I don’t want to be around all those cameras, all those rules,” he says.

It doesn’t appeal to Stickney either, because he makes his living collecting bottles and other recyclables. There’s nowhere to store them at the modular units.

And, it turns out, he doesn’t need the modular units anyway. In early April, he rented a room in a shared house for $400 a month. It’s the first time in years he has found a place where he can afford the rent. It’s a “stepping stone” toward more stability, he says.

Stickney acknowledges the discrimination he faces in this town but says it won’t keep him from living in the city he considers home. He attended elementary and high school here.

“I like Maple Ridge,” he says. “To me, people who are bigots and prejudiced and whatever … are set in their ways. There’s not much to do about it. I just say, let me be and I’ll let them be.”

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