Edmonton inner-city encampment cleared out amid ongoing court challenge
CBC
Police, paramedics, cleanup crews and trucks arrived Friday morning to dismantle an encampment the City of Edmonton says is too high risk to stay in place.
The encampment, near 105th Avenue and 95th Street, is one of eight at the centre of a court battle over how police and the city handle the removal of camps built by people without homes.
The police have identified eight encampments in central Edmonton that they say are too high risk, and four of them will be removed during the next four days.
Police arrived at the site around 8:30 a.m. Joining them were paramedics, outreach workers, personnel dressed in white protective suits, a garbage truck and a tow truck. The tow truck was positioned to tow a camper van from the site.
After police woke residents, outreach workers offered them coffee and food.
People living at the site received a 48-hour notice on Tuesday that the city intended to dismantle the camp.
Among them was Kevin McArthur, who said he has lived there for about a year with his wife.
On Friday, his wife was in hospital, sick with pneumonia, and McArthur said he was recovering from an infection.
McArthur, who makes money by collecting bicycle parts, repairing and rebuilding them and selling them, had insulated his tent with styrofoam. He had shelving units lined with belongings inside and outside his tents, along with a generator he used to heat the tent and power a hotplate for food and drinks.
On Friday morning, he was loading some of his possessions into a cart, but he said he worried he was going to lose other items.
"A bunch of old bikes, and you get them for free and you fix them up. And you ride them around, or you get $40 bucks for that," he said in an interview. "And you take all that away, where's someone going to get the $40 bucks you need a day?"
Although McArthur said that garbage accumulated on the encampment site was a "huge issue," he said there are other ways to resolve that concern than displacing people.
McArthur said he is likely to return to the same site after the cleanup is complete. Although he has rented apartments, he says he is frequently evicted because the landlords don't like his friends, or the noise.
Jim Gurnett, a spokesperson for the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, was on-site Friday morning, Gurnett said it's a waste of public money to tear apart structures when people will ultimately rebuild temporary homes somewhere else.
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