Dan Fumano: Strathcona Park deadline brings both sadness and hope

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On the gravel April 30, in what was recently Canada’s largest homeless encampment, there was an atmosphere of tension, relief, a little sadness, and, for some, elation.

Standing amid the mostly empty tents, assorted detritus and former residents of the Strathcona Park tent city, Kim Berg, 51, was all smiles — the previous night, she slept in her own room with a locked door, for the first time in 21 years.

“I slept like a dream,” she said. “The bed was like heaven.”

Before moving Thursday into social housing in the nearby Downtown Eastside, Berg spent most of the past year sleeping in Strathcona Park. She won’t miss it.

The order issued earlier this month by Vancouver park board general manager Donnie Rosa listed Friday at 10 a.m. as the deadline for all tents and structures to be removed from Strathcona. But none of the people involved expected anything dramatic to happen at 10:01 a.m. No court injunction is currently in place, but that is a future possibility if people refuse offers of housing and remain in the park.

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As the deadline passed, a circle of drummers performed in the park, flanked by a few dozen observers, a group that appeared to include more media, government and non-profit workers than park residents.

“You know, it’s, ‘The Day,’ ” Rosa said, making air quotes, Friday at the park. “I couldn’t sleep last night, and I sleep well all the time. Everybody’s on hyper-alert. I think for some folks, this is really sad because there’s a community here. But for some folks, they’re going to get to lock their door tonight. It’s a mixed bag.”

Brent Corkum was one of those with mixed feelings.

He’s thrilled with his comfortable new apartment in a nearby social housing building, where he moved last week, after sleeping in Strathcona since the camp first formed last June. In the park, his nights were punctuated by the noise of shouts, fights and occasional propane tank explosions. But one afternoon this week, while sitting in his new apartment, he heard children laughing outside his window as they walked home from the neighbourhood elementary school. The sound, he said, had a profoundly calming effect on him.

“It just rushed me,” Corkum said. “It was like, ‘I’m home now.’ ”

But Corkum, who said he worked in various roles to help the Strathcona encampment, including overseeing security, is also sad because the camp’s dissolution represents the loss of a community that meant a lot to him.

“The other day, I was sitting here and watching this all being ripped down, and I just broke down,” Corkum said. “It’s very sad. But there’s a very good side to it.”

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Corkum and a few other park residents said they believed the vast majority of the tents still standing there were no longer lived in full-time, left behind by people who have since moved indoors. He, and others in the park, estimated fewer than 20 people were still living in the park Friday, down from an estimated height of 300 residents in the fall.

Outreach workers have been in Strathcona for weeks, trying to connect park residents with suitable housing. The city issued a statement Friday saying that, along with B.C. Housing, they had moved 184 people from the park into housing in the last three weeks.

But Strathcona’s recent homeless encampment is far from Vancouver’s first or B.C.’s only one.

And it’s unlikely to be the last, acknowledged B.C. Attorney-General David Eby, the minister responsible for housing. But he hopes the recent expansion of social housing will make a real impact on street homelessness.

“I think we’re going to see encampments show up still in Vancouver and Victoria,” Eby said this week. “But what’s different this time is, we have enough space coming online in both cities that we’re going to be able to say to folks: ‘You can come inside, we have a dignified, appropriate inside space for you, with supports and food. Or you can leave the park, but you can’t stay in the park, and you can’t create a new encampment here.’ ”

New shelter spaces are opening next month, Eby said, and longer-term, another 1,500 social housing units are being built in the next two years in Vancouver alone.

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“People are still going to see folks outside, from time-to-time, they’re still going to see homelessness. But my expectation is that, post-COVID and with all these units and all of our other services operating at 100 per cent, again, that there’s going to be a really dramatic improvement in terms of visible street poverty and in our major centres like Victoria and Vancouver.”

The encampment contributed to much tension over the past year between Strathcona’s unhoused residents and area homeowners.

Although Vancouver police neighbourhood statistics showed most categories of crime decreased between 2019 and ’20 in Strathcona, there have been frightening stories — the vice-president of the Strathcona Residents Association reported being attacked by a stranger outside her home in October, hit in the head with a metal pipe. A few months earlier, Vancouver city Coun. Pete Fry, who has lived in and around Strathcona for about 30 years, was walking his dog near the park when a man threatened to stab him, an altercation caught on film.

On Friday, Fry said that recent weeks have brought an even more “heightened tension” for the community living near Strathcona Park, with the end-of-the-month deadline looming and the uncertainty of what could happen.

But after Friday afternoon rolled round with no major incidents, Fry said: “I think it’s going — touch wood — to be better than most have expected … People are feeling pretty hopeful.”

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Park board chairman Camil Dumont echoed that sentiment, saying: “We haven’t seen an investment like this in supportive housing in my lifetime that I can recall in Vancouver … I’m hopeful, which honestly, I haven’t been able to say that I was hopeful much, over the last 18 months.”

Corkum said he plans to start a front-desk job soon at the Patricia Hotel, one of several former hotels purchased during the pandemic by all three levels of government for conversion into low-income housing.

Atira, the non-profit operating the Patricia, has hired 15 recent Strathcona Park residents since CEO Janice Abbott put out a call online this week. Atira has long hired from within the DTES, Abbott said, “but what’s new for us here is that we’re hiring them straight out of the park.”

The response has been encouraging, Abbott said, and she hopes the work will provide not only income and benefits, but also “a sense of purpose.”

Corkum’s friend, Doug Ehret, who has also been working at the Patricia, told the story of a woman in the hotel one night this week, who started crying.

“I asked her what was the problem,” Ehret said. “She couldn’t remember the last time she had a f—ing sheet on her bed. A simple f—ing sheet.”

dfumano@postmedia.com

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