Vancouver again removes homeless camp near Share House

“After a while, the solid waste just gets built up so much that move-outs are necessary in order to actually sanitize the space,” Spinelli said. “Because the longer you leave it there, the more it acquires.”

A larger camp

The encampment by the Share House Men’s Shelter is one of Vancouver’s largest and most visible homeless camps. It’s a place many people have called home for months and even years — and people living in the camp said new faces appear every day.

People experiencing homelessness congregate in the area because of its accessibility to bus lines, FISH, St. Paul Lutheran Church, Open House Ministries and Share House Men’s Shelter.

Although the city gives more than a week’s notice before each cleanup, many people don’t — or can’t — move their camps in time. They can lose everything.

“Abandoned sites and any property left behind will be considered solid waste for removal,” the notices said. “Persons failing to comply may be cited or arrested.”

The city of Vancouver does offer to store people’s items during camp removals for up to 60 days, but people can get their stored items back only if they have somewhere legal to store them, such as a storage unit or housing.

“If they’ve been cited for having basically too much more than they can manage, we can’t then just go get it right back to them and have them immediately be, again, out of compliance,” Spinelli said.

It’s difficult to say how many people lived at the camp, because some people use additional tents to store their items, Spinelli said. The area is also used to unlawfully dump. About a month ago, someone left more than a dozen mattresses by the camp in the middle of the night, Spinelli said.

People living in the camp say the area had grown over the last month.

Toll on campers

Around the corner from Share House, six people from the dispersed camp huddled around a makeshift table. Many of them said what they had on them was all they had left.

William Rivera said he had been living near the Share House for a few months.

“I was out here 3½ weeks by myself before another person moved next to me,” Rivera said. “And in the last four weeks, it went from me and one other person to about 17 or 18 people in one stretch.”

Rivera and the others living in the camp said they believe people moved to the camp after getting swept in other parts of the city. Spinelli said the city intentionally cleans up only one area at a time in neighborhoods so people can find other places nearby.

“For example, the whole downtown area, there are other places nearby that they can potentially go,” Spinelli said. “We’re trying not to leave them with no place to go.”

People often return to the sites the city cleans, and the city tries to make the process cause as little trauma as possible, Spinelli said.

“My team does really lead with a focus on health, safety and sanitation for literally everyone — the people who live in those spaces, as well as the people who live and work around them,” she said. “It is much more challenging than one might think to strike that balance. … It’s not intended to be a punitive thing.”

Rivera said he had too much at his camp to move in time before the city workers came. He lost his phone, the paperwork he had filled out for an ID, his clothes and the tools that he used to make money fixing appliances.

He also said some people jeopardize the camp more than others do.

“There are certain people in the area that leave their garbage out. They leave their human feces everywhere,” he said. “They don’t care about their animals. They don’t care about what they look like.

“The rest of us get accosted, too.”