Story and Photos by Andy Hudson
Ray pushes a shopping cart, laden with electronics, CDs, a sleeping bag and two pairs of mannequin legs he found in a dumpster behind The Bay, uphill towards Cambie and Hastings.
On top of all his belongings, Ray balances his latest lion—one of maybe 900 he has painted and sold while living on the streets of Vancouver. But with no secure place to store his things, it could all be gone by tomorrow.
“That’s my biggest problem,” says Ray. “You start to get ahead a little and either the city takes it or the police confiscate it or someone rips it off.”
For Ray and other homeless people in Vancouver, the Portland Hotel Society (PHS) may soon have a fix—a set of 50 low-cost storage lockers.
Mark Townsend, director of the PHS, said the lockers would most likely go in what is now a boarded-up, single-story building along Pigeon Park at the corner of Hastings and Carrall.
Built big enough to hold a cart’s worth of belongings, each locker might cost $5 a month, says Townsend. People could access their possessions anytime and PHS staff would supervise all pick-ups and drop-offs.
With hundreds of homeless people trolling through the streets of Vancouver, there is no shortage of need for the service. Most cart-pushing homeless carry everything they own in their shopping carts, which essentially serve as portable homes. Yet as reports surface of police and city workers dumping the contents of abandoned carts into dumpsters, people like Ray need a way to ensure the protection of their belongings.
Kevin Mitchell, who works at Kits Mini-Storage, says he regularly serves homeless tenants as they move between streets and shelters to an apartment and then back to the streets again.
Given that the cheapest storage space goes for about $20 a month, ”they only store the things they really, really don’t want to lose,” says Mitchell.
And while the city struggles to keep the doors of its emergency shelters open to the homeless, there are no plans to build stand-alone storage sites, though the lack of cart-storage is often what keeps homeless people on the streets at night.
“We’re focused on housing people, not just finding space for their possessions,” says Kerry Jang, a city councillor and member of Vancouver’s now disbanded Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT).
Jang also warned that any public-access facility could be quickly misused in a city where so many people have drug addictions.
Jang mentions a downtown shelter that gave out free phone cards, only to see the cards turn up as currency for drug deals.
“He’s bang-on the money with all these things,” says Townsend about Jang’s concerns. “Lots of these things seem quite simple to do, but they are quite complicated.”
One block east of the old Pigeon Park storefront where PHS wants the lockers to go, street sellers regularly crowd a long strip on the sidewalk north of Hastings.
“Some of them are dealing drugs, some of them are legitimately selling stuff that they got in a dumpster,” Townsend explains.
To give sellers a place to swap goods legally, Townsend said the PHS would also like to install a set of tables in front of the storage building. He adds that the PHS has a lot of experience serving people in the Downtown Eastside. Run by the PHS, the New Fountain shelter on East Cordova Street is one of the new low-barrier shelters which are the first to offer homeless people enough space to store a cart.
Behind the freshly-painted black steel bars that block off the breezeway across from Army & Navy, people staying in the shelter can lock away carts, bicycles or large suitcases.
Mya Wolf, who works at the shelter, says the extra storage makes a big difference.
“It’s huge,” she says. “For a lot of people, it’s one of the biggest barriers to getting into a shelter.”
Carrying everything you own in a cart or a huge bag is not just a barrier to shelters,
Wolf says, it also makes it hard to apply for a job, visit a doctor or sign for an apartment.
In Victoria, Reverend Al Tysick lists the same problems when speaking about how hard it is to store things for people staying at Our Place, the shelter and community services centre where he is the director.
What has often happened, he says, is that someone who has just been evicted or sent to jail will quickly ask him to hang on to their things.
“So I put it in my office and I’m speaking to somebody else,” he says, “and an emergency or something breaks out... I leave, I come back in, the backpack’s gone, I don’t notice until he’s gotten out of jail and he hasn’t got his backpack. And everything he owned was in it.”
Rev. Tysick said that he and other shelter workers feel stuck because while they don’t want to refuse to store people’s things, up until now they haven’t had much extra room.
Soon, the Victoria shelters might have two new initiatives to ease the storage crunch.
In April, Our Place set aside $7,000 in leftover funds to build a covered rack beside the shelter, where people can lock carts and bicycles.
At the same time, the provincial government set aside $87,890 for a five-year pilot project that will reserve 10 spaces at two private storage sites for homeless people.
“It’s not an easy, quick solution with the family we have,” says Rev. Tysick. “It’s a concern that I haven’t solved and that none of us have solved—we’ve solved it in what I consider a Band-Aid way.”
