Randy Scrivner, a code enforcement officer with the city of Vancouver, was trying to help Alex Graham scale down.
“Tell me what’s garbage, Alex,” Scrivner said to Graham.
“None of it is,” said Graham, 43. He’s been homeless for a couple of years off and on, and was surrounded by mounds of clothes, water bottles and stuffed plastic garbage bags.
The truth is, Scrivner gets it, he said; it’s hard living on the streets.
On Wednesday, Vancouver Police Department officers and public works employees cleaned the streets around Share House, the men’s homeless shelter in west Vancouver. It was part of ongoing enforcement of the city’s ordinances addressing unlawful camping and storage of personal property in public places.
There were about 25 individual camps set up when police arrived around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, said Vancouver police Lt. Greg Raquer. Although police and public works employees try to regularly patrol and clean the blocks surrounding Share House, Raquer said, stuff had been allowed to accumulate.
“You don’t need the baby walker,” Scrivner said to Colleen Sayers, who was standing next to Graham.
Actually, Sayers responded, that’s for a small dog with a hurt leg.
She paused.
“We apologize,” she told Scrivner. “We have lost everything so when we get something we like, we keep it.”
Sayers acknowledged Scrivner was trying to help.
Wednesday’s cleanup was two days before the one-year anniversary of the revised camping ordinance, which makes it legal to camp on most publicly owned land in the city between 9:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. Vancouver changed the ordinance last year in response to the federal Department of Justice saying that it was cruel and unusual punishment to make camping a crime in all places at all times when there isn’t enough shelter space.
Vancouver police began enforcing the ordinance on Nov. 3, 2015, cracking down on campers who remained after 6:30 a.m.
Raquer said officers would hand out tickets on Wednesday only to people who refused to move or clean up their belongings. No one received a ticket.
“Technically we could arrest these people every day. But that wouldn’t do any good,” said Tyler Chavers, a neighborhood police officer.
Officers talked with people who agreed to make arrangements to move belongings that they couldn’t carry. Some people were storing bikes and bike parts along West 12th Street.
“If somebody’s got all their worldly possessions, we know they can’t move them in a day,” Raquer said.
Part of the problem, Chavers said, is that well-intentioned people drop off bikes, mattresses and bags of clothes for the homeless. But there’s no organization, and much of it simply overwhelms the people living on the street. Much of it they have no use for.
“Then folks feel ownership over it, but they have nowhere to put it,” Chavers said.
The city recently put a dumpster next to Share House that is unlocked during certain hours of the day for clients to dispose of trash.
Raquer said people need to pare down their belongings if they plan to go to the Winter Hospitality Overflow shelters opening Nov. 2. The shelters are set up during the colder months at St. Paul Lutheran Church, St. Andrew Lutheran Church and the cafeteria at Share House.
The day shelter operated by Share at Friends of the Carpenter has lockers for storing belongings. They’re about the size of school lockers.
Some items collected Wednesday were put in bins that were taken to the city’s operations center on Fourth Plain Boulevard.
