CRAB Park homeless encampment cost City of Vancouver $3 million

The long-running stateless encampment successful Vancouver’s CRAB Park outgo the City of Vancouver $3 million.

Those costs went to screen sanitation, engineering, attraction and repairs, parkland rangers, police, firefighters and stateless outreach betwixt 2021 and 2024, erstwhile the encampment was yet unopen down.

“It’s an bonzer magnitude of wealth and it truly shows wherefore these municipality encampments are not due places for radical to beryllium sheltering,” ABC Vancouver City Councillor Peter Meiszner told Global News.

The $3 cardinal fig does not see the costs of rehabilitating the parkland aft the metropolis ended the encampment successful November.

Between 2018 and 2021 akin stateless encampments astatine Vancouver’s Oppenheimer and Strathcona parks outgo taxpayers much than $6 million,

Councillors hold the wealth could person been amended spent addressing homelessness.

“This a outgo that’s borne by the province, it’s a outgo borne by the city, it’s a outgo borne by the parkland committee and surely we could enactment that wealth to amended usage and code the needs of folks,” Green City Councillor Pete Fry said.

Trending Now

One enactment Fry wants the metropolis to look astatine is tiny shelters. At astir $15,000 each, $3 cardinal would person funded 200 of them.

Vancouver’s erstwhile metropolis assembly approved a pilot project for the 100-square-foot units successful February 2022.

Each is meant to travel equipped with vigor and aerial conditioning, power, abstraction for 2 radical and a fastener connected the door.

Former politician Kennedy Stewart did not respond to an interrogation petition from Global News portion neither lawman metropolis manager Sandra Singh nor Vancouver Park Board wide manager Steve Jackson were disposable for interviews Wednesday astir the CRAB Park encampment.

While fencing astir the erstwhile encampment tract was precocious knocked down, the overnight sheltering country remains disconnected limits 3 months aft it was closed to support the recently seeded ungraded from bedewed upwind and acold temperatures.

The metropolis says it hopes to reopen the abstraction this spring.