The numbers of homeless people sleeping in Victoria parks and the costs of picking up after them continue to climb.
City staff are seeking $362,000 in ongoing supplementary funding in next year’s budget to cover cleanup and other anticipated costs associated with homeless camping in city parks. That’s an increase of $62,000 over 2018.
As of October, the city is receiving an average of 304 calls for service per month, related to sheltering in parks compared to 267 in 2017 and 238 in 2016.
City bylaws state that overnight shelter must be temporary. Shelter can be erected only from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. from March to October, and 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. from November to February.
City staff clean up after campers seven days a week. Police and bylaw officers conduct early morning patrols, waking tenters each morning.
Victoria has about 285 emergency shelter beds and mats, of which 175 operate year round. That number expands by 165 beds in the event of extreme weather conditions.
Mayor Lisa Helps calls the numbers “troubling,” noting one of the problems is that seasonal shelters are open for only five or six months, closing their doors either March 31 or April 15.
“People are in those shelters and then they close and people have to go back into parks,” Helps said. “If we could keep the shelters open in the summer, we wouldn’t have so much cleanup in parks.”
The budget allocation is needed not only for cleanup of trash, abandoned goods and needles but also to keep some park washrooms into the evening, provide port-a-potties in others and provide extra security, staff say.
Last January when staff recommended about $300,000 for park cleanup, councillors initially reduced the number to $200,000 in the hope that hundreds of units of new social housing would reduce pressure on parks. But that proved too optimistic and later in the year they returned the $100,000 they had cut from the budget.
“I don’t have any good answer except to say that obviously there are vulnerable people still sleeping outside. In Canada in the 21st Century, it’s a shame we are having to spend resources cleaning up after people living in parks when presumably most people want to be living in homes,” Helps said.
She said the challenge is exacerbated by the fact the federal government all but abandoned the housing file 30 years ago.
“We’re making up for 30 years of deficit. When the federal government got out of housing in a meaningful way in the 1990s at that point they were spending $114 per Canadian on affordable housing. By 2014, that number had dropped to $58 per Canadian.
“We’re literally seeing on every street and park in our city and our country 30 years of disinvestment. It’s going to take a long time to make up for that, In fact I don’t even know if it’s even possible,” she said.
Victoria has been trying to manage camping in parks since 2008 when a B.C. Supreme Court judge deemed it unconstitutional to deny a person the right to erect shelter in the absence of available shelter beds.
