Campers at Oppenheimer Park in the heart of Vancouver’s gritty Downtown Eastside have a longhouse, a firepit and no intention of taking down their shelters until the issue of homelessness has been addressed.
They were given notices by the Vancouver Parks Board to leave Thursday and again on Sunday because camping is against bylaws.
The campers issued their retort in a press release.
“This land is still First Nations land and is under treaty negotiations,” said Saturday’s release. “Until that’s settled, people camping there can stay as long as they need, during the housing crisis created by the three levels of Colonial Government.”
One of approximately 30 campers on the site is Audrey Siegl, a member of the Musqueam Nation that asserted aboriginal title along with the Haida Nation in the Oppenheimer occupation.
“The intention is to find homes but also to raise awareness of the issue that is underneath why all these people are here,” said Siegl.
“I’m here because my people have been on this land for more than 10,000 years and we have been displaced for over 500 years,” she said. “I’m not going to stand by and watch and not use my voice while it (displacement) is happening to other people.
“We will stay here until people have homes,” she said. “Nobody wants to be here. People want to have homes.”
Vision Vancouver city councillor Kerry Jang, who has housing among his responsibilities, said Sunday that staff are working on dealing with the people in the camp.
“I think the issue is really, do we have homeless people in that encampment?” said Jang. “If so, our No. 1 priority has always been to get these guys into something safe.
“That’s what our staff are trying to do,” he said.
The campers said in their release that the city’s homeless count in March indicated there were 1,798 homeless people, “the highest number ever counted.”
The city counts the homeless differently, identifying 538 people — up from 154 in 2011 — as having no shelter during the March count. But a further 1,260 people were identified as “sheltered homeless” that were living in shelters, safe houses for youth or transition houses for women.
The Oppenheimer occupiers believe the sheltered homeless are still homeless, and they added their total to those with no shelter at all to get their own homeless total of 1,798.
While city staff were reported to have been in attendance Sunday, they were not available to the media and the police presence was limited to one car across the street.
The officer inside promised to forward a request for an interview, but there was no response by deadline.
Parks board chairman Aaron Jasper also declined to comment because he said he had not been informed about the occupation at Oppenheimer.
A call to Mayor Gregor Robertson’s office about the situation was not returned, although his office did issue a release that he was sending letters to residents along the Arbutus corridor restating his opposition to putting cargo trains back on the CPR line.
