After 41 consecutive months, the homeless encampment at Crab Park on downtown Vancouver’s Central Waterfront will come to a close to enable the space to revert to general park uses for the broader community.
The Vancouver Park Board and the City of Vancouver announced today that they will step up their efforts to end the encampment over the coming weeks. They will start by consulting with each of the seven remaining people — down from about 30 people in February 2024 — who are still camping in the park.
All seven people are camping within Crab Park’s designated area for an encampment within the northwest corner of the park.
The targeted date for the end of the Crab Park encampment is Thursday, November 7, 2024, which comes just ahead of the colder and wetter periods of the year.
In a release today, municipal officials note that five of the seven people have declined the offer of housing that was offered to them, with one individual having declined three housing offers. The other two people, who also previously declined shelter offers, have “additional unique circumstances.”
“Given these individuals have received shelter and housing offers, there is no longer a fair and reasonable rationale for these individuals to have priority and exclusive access to daytime public park space given the other over 600 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness across the city who are required to comply with the Parks Control By-Law,” states the municipal government.
Park Board bylaws permit temporary overnight sheltering in parks for people without housing. However, starting on November 7, the bylaws that forbid daytime sheltering will be enforced at Crab Park.
Municipal staff will continue encouraging the remaining individuals to accept offers for shelter or housing over the next two weeks before the encampment’s closure date. If people refuse to leave, staff may request the assistance of the Vancouver Police Department to escort the individuals out of the area.
The Crab Park homeless encampment on the downtown Vancouver waterfront in November 2021. (Margarita Young/Shutterstock)
Fire at the Crab Park homeless encampment in December 2022. (@craigminielly/Twitter)
The current Crab Park encampment first began in April 2021, upon the conclusion of the Strathcona Park encampment. Some of the remaining campers at the previous Strathcona Park encampment, including those who refused shelter and housing, immediately relocated to Crab Park.
One year later in April 2022, due to the rapid growth in the size of the encampment at Crab Park and safety concerns, the Park Board created a formally designated area for the encampment at the northeast corner, with encampment activities banned in other areas of the park.
Then, in early Spring 2024, the Park Board and City crews forced all campers within the designated area to temporarily relocate to another area of the park to enable a thorough cleanup of the designated area due to the buildup of extremely hazardous conditions. At the time, there was an overwhelming amount of debris and garbage, non-compliant materials, propane tanks, rats, needles, and feces in the area. Crews removed over 90,000 kg (90 tons) of debris and material, which required the use of heavy machinery and equipment.
February 2024 condition of the Crab Park homeless encampment. (Vancouver Park Board)
New sheltering spaces using parking stall concrete blocks at Crab Park’s designated encampment area, April 2024. (Crab Park Tent City)
As part of the 10-day cleanup and ground remediation work, municipal crews used concrete parking stall blocks to divide the designated area into 27 clearly demarcated 10 ft by 10 ft shelter spots — one per person, only for individuals who had been previously sheltering regularly in the designated area and had not been housed. This new orderly configuration for the encampment opened in early April 2024.
However, according to the municipal government, non-compliance with the site’s established encampment guidelines has continued since the post-cleanup reopening in April 2024, and the encampment continues to “pose health and safety risks and are putting unsustainable pressure on Park Board resources.”
Vancouver’s municipal government has emphasized that in recent years, especially since the pandemic, a significant amount of resources have been used to get people off the streets and into shelters and housing. Despite these efforts, homelessness continues to persist, which is greatly compounded by the mental health and opioid crisis.
Between 2018 and 2023, the municipal government committed over 50 City-owned sites to create 1,273 supportive housing units and about 3,900 social housing units, which are now in various stages of the development pipeline.
Furthermore, between 2020 and 2024, the City supported the creation of 469 new shelter spaces, including 382 year-round and 87 seasonal, with a major part of these spaces created to end the previous encampments at Strathcona Park and along Hastings Street sidewalks near Main Street in the Downtown Eastside. The City alone has 201 properties dedicated to shelters.