From one Hamilton encampment to another, homeless fall through the cracks

Sean Arnold was one of the first to pitch a tent on Ferguson Avenue North in downtown Hamilton, about a year ago.

The encampment outside the Wesley Day Centre grew to about 60 tents before the city and police enforced bylaws to clear people out in October.

We were the ones who created Tent City," says Arnold on a sweltering Sunday afternoon at J.C. Beemer Park.

His tent is among a small group of others that line the fence of the park at Wellington Street North and Wilson Street East.

I've been here all winter," says Arnold, noting a social worker is trying to find him a place to live. They're working on it."

The big encampment on Ferguson is gone, but 20 known smaller clusters of tents remain scattered across Hamilton, the city says.

Some are off the beaten track, while others like Arnold's are in city parks, serving as a conspicuous reminder of an ongoing homelessness crisis amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Homelessness can be a product of many factors, including shifting family dynamics, job loss, mental illness, addiction and the availability of affordable housing, an escalating problem in Hamilton's skyrocketing rental market.

To add to the complexity, not everyone who loses housing opts to stay in emergency shelters for a variety of reasons, including wariness of theft, drug use, and in the pandemic, concern about sharing close quarters with others.

I'm trying to stay clean, so I try to stay away from certain people," says Arnold, 51.

Talal Abdulwid notes he wound up at J.C. Beemer Park two weeks ago after his motorhome was torched.

I have a dog," Abdulwid, 49, says, pointing to Kilo, a pit bull cross he can't take to a shelter with him. It's complicated."

How to approach encampments has been the subject of intense debate and heated politics over the past year.

A group of doctors, street outreach workers and lawyers clashed with the city in court over the municipality's will to force the Ferguson Avenue residents to move on.

The legal struggle ended with a settlement that involved a protocol establishing parameters to clear tents, including a 14-day time limit, a cap of five tents per group and considerations for mental health.

From an outreach perspective, the protocol has allowed staff to be clear with expectations when engaging with unsheltered individuals and recognizes the separate challenges experienced by those with higher acuity," Edward John, the city's housing services director, said in an email.

The city's encampment response team helps people in tents transition to safer, more humane accommodations, support the move with their belongings, and then ensures abandoned belongings are cleared and the site is cleaned."

Since the pandemic struck in March 2020, the city has directed roughly 600 people to shelters, hotels or housing, although not everyone stayed there, John wrote.

Marcie McIlveen, a street outreach worker with Keeping Six, questions the practices of the city and police, noting some people have been cleared from tents without notice and their belongings have been tossed.

In the process, they're pushed from one park to another, and no closer to housing, said McIlveen, noting she was not speaking on behalf of Keeping Six, a small harm-reduction group.

So people are getting moved. There's not less people. There's probably more, but spread out, which has no benefit."

John said the city makes every effort to ensure folks have the ability to move and potentially store their belongings in advance of vacating a site."

The Social Navigator, a partnership between police and paramedics, does some good things," but criminal law enforcement shouldn't be part of the equation, McIlveen said.

Social-service agencies are best suited to handle homelessness and mental-health issues, but are starved for dollars, unlike local police, which ran a $2.1-million budget surplus last year, she said.

Two million dollars could probably house some people."

Last week, Hamilton police announced plans to bolster the hours of the Social Navigator program and Mobile Crisis Rapid Response Team (MCRRT), which pairs police officers with mental-health workers on emergency calls.

Those expansions involve reallocating positions that had been dedicated to a long-running police school liaison program trustees ended last year amid an advocacy campaign students mounted.

Chief Frank Bergen also noted a fresh multi-sector plan to create a Rapid Intervention and Support Team (RIST) that involves the participation of several health and social-work organizations.

Instead of competing and touching clients in many, many ways, the collective can sit down and say, OK, Frank Bergen needs addiction services. Frank Bergen needs stable housing, what are we going to do?' "

Bergen said the collaboration, a pilot project Wesley Urban Ministries is to lead, will allow police to take a step back.

It's allowing us to do crime prevention through social development - not just crime prevention on the heels of a police officer attending."

The pilot will see four Wesley case workers carry out assertive outreach," executive director Don Seymour said.

You're developing relationships, and you're working with folks who have been chronically homeless for a long time and most likely are very ill," Seymour said.

A lot of these folks run a cycle of jail, hospital, street," he noted. So this could be an opportunity to break that cycle."

But advocates with the Hamilton Encampment Support Network argue police should have no role in handling homelessness and mental illness.

People in encampments do not deserve to be policed. They don't deserve to be evicted," volunteer Gachi Issa said.

Network colleague Cameron Kroetsch referred to how last week Toronto police descended on an encampment at Trinity Bellwoods Park en masse amid pitched protests.

In Hamilton, it's just done a lot more subtly. You're pushing people out in the night. You're pushing them out in smaller groups."

Seymour also refers to the Trinity Bellwoods dismantlement, but says the RIST pilot is a way to avoid such a traumatic episode.

And you can stop criminalizing homelessness and addiction and mental health. Isn't that the goal?"

Teviah Moro is a Hamilton-based reporter at The Spectator. Reach him via email: tmoro@thespec.com f