The seven remaining residents of Vancouver’s CRAB Park encampment are set to be moved Thursday after more than three years of living there.
The residents have survived numerous city-issued eviction notices since setting up their tents in the waterfront park in 2021, with a B.C. Supreme Court judge voiding the orders and drawing attention to the lack of indoor shelter options.
But two weeks ago, Vancouver’s park board said the final residents had been offered alternative living arrangements and that there was no longer a justification for the encampment to continue in its current form.
City officials said the park poses an “unsustainable” strain on the park board’s resources to the tune of $21,000 per week.
Residents and advocates say that the closure will shatter a friendly and tight-knit community built up over the years, though, and leave precariously housed people with very few options.
“We’re more than just drug addicts. We’re more than just degenerates,” resident Sasha Christiano told CBC News. “There’s a lot of really, really intelligent, capable people that are just hard on their luck.”
Christiano, 38, said he’s been offered indoor shelter options, but will likely find himself sleeping rough instead, because many single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings can be dangerous.
“We have so many people at the precipice, just at the edge of a going over, because the city and and the system and everything else is pushing us that close,” he said. “And then, just when we’re at the edge, we could tip over.”
The handful of remaining residents at Vancouver’s CRAB Park are being evicted Thursday. City staff say they have to remove their belongings by 8 a.m., and the section of waterfront park they’re occupying will be returned to general community use. Rafferty Baker spoke with one of the seven residents to see what the encampment closure means for him.
Christiano said he expects park rangers to be more aggressive than they’ve been in the past with encampment residents as they enforce the closure order beginning at 8 a.m. PT on Thursday.
Overnight sheltering will still be permitted at CRAB Park, but shelters will have to be taken down by morning, the park board says.
‘Sham’ consultations
The Vancouver Park Board did not provide an interview on Wednesday. However, in an Oct. 23 news conference, it said it would only proceed with clearing the camp once consultations had taken place with residents.
Officials said at the time that there was “no longer a fair and reasonable rationale” for the individuals at the camp to have priority and exclusive access to daytime public park space, with over 6,000 people living nearby who have little access to other green spaces.
But Fiona York, a longtime advocate for CRAB Park residents, said residents were not appropriately consulted with, and are now looking at much worse housing options than what they had in the encampment.
“We just want to be really clear — this is a forced eviction,” she said. “There [were] no consultations. Any kind of consultation that happened was a sham.”
York said the city is spending significant resources on removing the encampment residents, when there are larger crises that deserved more attention, in her opinion.
“Nothing has been done to really address the fact that we have almost 5,000 people in the Lower Mainland who are homeless. None of this is helping,” she said.
Long history
The CRAB Park encampment has been around for three and a half years, and was first set up as homelessness spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It survived several attempted eviction notices by the City of Vancouver in January 2022, as a B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled that residents in the camp could stay.
Over the years, the camp has seen cleanup efforts by the city and a removal of tents as the city reduced the “designated area” accessible to campers.
Residents of the encampment at Vancouver’s CRAB Park marked its three-year anniversary with a barbecue. Liam Britten stopped by the park to hear residents talk about what has changed and what more needs to be done.
York said the camp has been studied by housing experts from around the world for its “precedent-setting nature” as a sanctioned homeless encampment, and that its community members took care of and celebrated one another.
Christiano called the Thursday closure an “ending of an era” for a unique place.
“All of this environment that you’ve been creating for yourself, trying to get things together. Right when you think you’ve got it — boom — taken away because of where you are and the position you’re in,” he said.
