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Advocates warn a lack of warming and emergency weather shelters across the region could have dire consequences.
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As Ward Draper parked at the Cole Road rest area on Abbotsford’s eastern edge Friday morning, the rumble of generators was louder than the wind beating at more than a dozen RVs huddled next to the frozen Sumas River.
“People have nowhere else to sleep,” said the chain-smoking street pastor who took Postmedia on a tour of the city where he has worked with the homeless population for two decades. “I don’t know what to do anymore.”
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Draper is among Lower Mainland homeless advocates who are concerned a lack of warming and emergency weather shelters could have dire consequences for the region’s growing homeless population.
While warming centres have been activated in North Vancouver, Vancouver, New Westminster and Abbotsford during the day, cities such as Port Coquitlam do not have warming spaces open through the night.
“It’s 20 years of the same thing. Some of the reasons are familiar — mental health, addictions — but there’s also this new narrative of unaffordability,” said Draper, the founder and executive director of The 5 and 2 Ministries in Abbotsford. “It’s an ongoing nightmare.”
A few kilometres away from the Cole Road rest area is the former Lonzo Road park and ride, the site of a notoriously dangerous encampment until it was dismantled in June. The province promised a 50-bed shelter, with construction to begin as soon as the site was cleared, but apart from some piles of gravel, not much has visibly changed since last summer.
Draper lamented the lack of shelter spaces in the Fraser Valley, comparing the amount of money spent in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to the suburbs, where the number of homeless people is rapidly rising and there aren’t enough services to support them.
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Meanwhile, representatives from more than a dozen non-profit organizations are calling on the City of Vancouver and provincial government to “rapidly fund and open 24-hour warming spaces in the city.”
In an open letter Friday, the group demanded a moratorium on the removal of tent-like structures belonging to people sleeping outside this winter.
“With overloaded and unsuitable shelters and virtually no vacant affordable housing, tent cities are part of the housing continuum,” read the letter.
Amid sub-zero temperatures Friday, city park rangers, backed by Vancouver police officers, returned to Oppenheimer Park in the Downtown Eastside to conduct wellness checks on homeless residents living there.
A few days earlier, authorities hauled away more than 10 residents’ makeshift homes, placing the tents in city trucks, against the vocal objections of homeless advocates. Now just a few structures remain.
Stephen D’Souza, executive-director of the Homelessness Services Association of B.C., said it is not just Vancouver that needs warming centres or emergency weather shelters 24 hours a day, but also communities across the province.
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“Service providers are doing the best they can right now, but they are limited in resources of staffing, training and equipment,” said D’Souza. “During this cold weather, it is a priority that we push senior levels of government for permanent solutions, not just temporary bandaids.”
D’Souza first released information detailing the extent of homelessness in Metro Vancouver this fall with a report by the Homelessness Services Association that showed a 32-per-cent uptick in unhoused residents.
A total of 4,821 people were identified as homeless, up from 3,634 in 2020, with the largest spikes occurring in Delta, Richmond and the Tri-Cities where count-over-count increases were 159 per cent, 91 per cent and 86 per cent, respectively.
Four out of every five people said they were homeless in the community where they used to be housed, meaning people want services in their hometowns and do not gravitate to other cities, the report said.
“This weather is a wake-up call for all of us,” said D’Souza. “It’s not hard to imagine, with current housing affordability, how easily it would be for someone who is now barely getting by to slip just that little bit further and suddenly become homeless.”
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As the weather gets colder, the risks for those living outdoors increase.
B.C. Emergency Health Services said over the last week, paramedics across the province responded to 38 calls regarding hypothermia or frostbite.
While hospital visits were lower in Fraser Health following Thursday’s snowfall than in recent years, spokesperson Nick Eagland attributed it to “challenges caused by the winter weather, such as difficult road conditions.”
This week, Eagland said the health region, which spans from Burnaby to White Rock to Hope, is seeing more people than usual making trips to the ER after falling or slipping on ice.
In Abbotsford’s downtown core, Drug War Survivors Abbotsford is running a shelter in an old auto dealership. The so-called Nomad shelter was busy on Friday morning, with people sitting on couches and sprawled on the floor.
Behind a desk at the front door was Harvey Clause, who works at the shelter and has also been sleeping there since he lost his room in a supportive housing complex a month ago.
On Thursday night, the 20-bed shelter was over capacity with not enough mats for all the people seeking shelter, he said. “When people say that we’re out here by choice, that we want to be out here, that’s bullshit. I hate living on the street. No one wants to live on the street.”
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The Nomad shelter is set to close in February as the building’s owner plans to redevelop the land.
Terena Tait, who lives in a tent across from the Mennonite Central Committee thrift store, said she stays warm by continuing to move.
“I don’t sit in one spot except to sleep,” she said.
Her bed is a sheet of plywood suspended between two milk crates, topped with foam and blankets. A single-burner propane camp stove helps to keep her warm at night.
“I’m careful. You just keep it turned on low,” she said.
As Draper was leaving the Nomad shelter, a woman asked him for a ride to another cluster of tents beside the railway tracks adjacent to the Salvation Army. City staff spread chicken manure on the camp to clear it in 2013, but more than a dozen people are living there again.
The woman jumped in the back of Draper’s vehicle.
“Is anyone dead?” she asked him.
“I haven’t heard of anyone,” he replied.
Arriving at camp, she thinks she sees a person lying on the ground before realizing there is nothing there.
“I know this is a show to everyone, but not to me,” she said before getting out of the vehicle.
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Driving away, Draper said he feels defeated. “I just don’t know how to keep going.”
He remembers when there were 100 homeless people on the streets and he knew many of them. Now he estimates there are 800, and everything he does feels inadequate. Friends have died as a result of overdoses, and several fellow outreach workers have burned out or relapsed into drug addiction.
“When we started, we tried to do a lot more, but now it’s just food and blankets, food and blankets.”
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sgrochowski@postmedia.com
gluymes@postmedia.com
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