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Opinion: The park board shouldn’t be a default mechanism for addressing complicated social points like homelessness
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Within the persevering with debate surrounding homelessness and encampments, one important facet is under-examined: the position of park boards in regulating unhoused populations.
On April 8, Vancouver’s park board unanimously amended a bylaw to additional limit the place and the way unhoused individuals can shelter in metropolis parks. Every week later, park rangers dismantled tents in Crab Park whereas individuals had been away and threw belongings in rubbish cans.
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From each a governance and justice perspective, the ensuing state of affairs is shameful: inhumane therapy of a susceptible group orchestrated by a physique with neither experience nor legitimacy ample for coping with this civic disaster.
The Vancouver space has seen a 32 per cent improve in homelessness prior to now 4 years. Persons are sleeping in parks as a result of they don’t have any different alternate options. Definitely, the query of easy methods to tackle homelessness is complicated and contentious. However what is just not at challenge is that the constitutional rights of the unhoused to shelter in public areas are concerned. B.C. courts have been clear: Below Canada’s Constitution, native governments can not transfer individuals out of parks at night time when there are fewer accessible shelter areas than unhoused people.
In 2020, Vancouver’s elected park board — the one one in all its form in Canada — handed a sequence of guidelines, setting distances for shelters from things like flower beds and playgrounds. Homeless individuals had been restricted to simply over 21 per cent of park house in a single day, a lot of it far-off from the providers they entry day by day. Now, below the most recent amendments, merely 16 per cent of park house is obtainable for nighttime sleeping. As we noticed, park rangers can search and destroy individuals’s houses and belongings with slim restrictions on employees’s discretion to take action.
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Why is our seven-person park board the entrance line for regulating shelter on public civic lands? On one hand, proponents argue the park board is effectively positioned to handle homelessness. Park commissioners are elected by residents, tasked with representing the citizens’s pursuits and priorities. As such, they’re theoretically conscious of the issues of native constituents, together with, maybe, on points associated to homelessness. And encampments are sometimes positioned on park land.
Regardless, in our opinion, the park board shouldn’t be a default mechanism for addressing complicated social points like homelessness. Their experience — and their mandate — is park upkeep, leisure programming, and environmental conservation, not offering housing options, regulating shelter or addressing systemic problems with poverty and inequality. Anticipating them to successfully handle encampments is exterior their coaching, scope and experience. As we’ve got seen, park boards too usually strategy encampments from a really slender perspective targeted solely on the esthetic and practical points of parks. In fact, we would like parks to be clear and extensively accessible, however prioritizing these issues over the human rights and core survival wants of unhoused people is incorrect.
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Managing homeless shelters on park lands shouldn’t be left to the park board. The complexity of homelessness — that the unhoused occupy public land for shelter as a result of they don’t have any personal house — requires a multi-faceted strategy that goes past the scope of park boards’ competency. The combo of things concerned is extensive: inexpensive housing, psychological well being points, the legacies of colonialism. It can’t be decreased to easily guaranteeing that shelters are distanced from varied park options and use solely easy tent supplies.
The park board has itself acknowledged its personal limits. In 2021, it entered into an settlement with the province and the Metropolis of Vancouver in relation to Strathcona Park. The park board dedicated to imposing the related bylaw solely when there have been ample shelter areas in any other case obtainable. The settlement put in place cross-jurisdictional co-ordination. These newest amendments sign a pointy flip from these commitments and recognition of the restrictions of park rules at a time when homelessness is at a file excessive.
Choices made by park boards relating to encampments prioritize short-term options over long-term systemic change. Sweeps and evictions might briefly clear a park however with out entry to ample housing and supportive providers, people experiencing homelessness have few alternate options however to arrange shelter in different public areas. Within the meantime, they’ll have misplaced their survival gear and private belongings, inflicting additional trauma. Displacing the unhoused from one space to a different doesn’t remedy the issue.
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As an alternative of counting on our park board to handle encampments, we want a extra holistic and compassionate strategy to addressing homelessness. This consists of investing in inexpensive housing, psychological well being providers and hurt discount. It means partaking straight with these experiencing homelessness to grasp their wants and preferences and involving them in decision-making processes that have an effect on their lives.
Native governments ought to set up multidisciplinary process forces or advisory panels comprising specialists in homelessness, social work, public well being, and neighborhood engagement to develop complete methods for addressing encampments. These approaches ought to prioritize hurt discount, housing-first initiatives and wraparound assist providers to assist people transition out of homelessness completely.
Entrusting the park board with selections about encampments is a grave mistake. We should acknowledge the restrictions of a park board in addressing complicated social points and, as an alternative, undertake approaches developed by acceptable choice makers that prioritize compassion, fairness, deep session and evidence-based responses.
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Alexandra Flynn is an affiliate professor within the Allard College of Legislation on the College of British Columbia. Margot Younger is a professor within the Allard College of Legislation at UBC.
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