Vancouver Park Board plans to temporarily shut CRAB Park

Unhoused people living in Vancouver’s CRAB Park may be looking for a new place to live sometime soon.

The Vancouver Park Board says it’s planning to temporarily shut down the area of the waterfront to clean it up.

“The situation in CRAB Park is unsafe for the residents there,” Park Board Chair Brennan Bastyovanszky told CityNews.

Bastyovanszky says the proposed clean up, for which a date has not yet been set, is aimed at improving health and safety conditions for the people living in the area.

He adds that the plan is to move people over to a different area of the park in the short-term, while the clean-up process takes place.

“It’s not a decampment, I want to be clear about that,” he said.

Bastyovanszky highlights a substantial accumulation of debris and increasing health hazards have been building for months.

“The clean up would allow the city to remove a number of the debris that is in there and better organize the space,” he noted, also pointing out many of the residents living there are on board with the idea.

“A number of the community partners have been involved with this as well, because they agree it’s not a good situation for the people that are sheltering there,” he explained.

“I think they started talking about it in December, they had plans in January — the inclement weather prevented that, so it was rescheduled.”

To Bastyovanszky’s understanding, both the province and city would be present during the clean-up process to coordinate housing alternatives for individuals seeking to relocate from the park setting.

But, not everybody is sold on the idea.

Advocate raises concerns

Fiona York, a CRAB Park advocate, says the lack of information is concerning.

“There’s a lot of grey areas, like where would people stay in the interim? Would they actually be allowed to go back?” York asked.

She also points to alleged “bad-faith discussions” with the Park Board in the past.

“The timeline is also very, very short,” she told CityNews.

It’s estimated around 30 residents are living at CRAB Park at any given time.

An outstanding human rights complaint around sanitation, service, and habitability conditions is also weighing on York.

“That should be allowed to proceed before any of these other discussions are happening. It should be one process and then the other,” she said.

“While many residents and people embrace the idea of having a cleaner site and making it a bit more leveled, it means basically removing around everything that’s in the camp, and there’s been a lot of discussions around what’s considered a temporary structure, which our reading and our belief is that the bylaw’s actually allow temporary structures for people who are homeless. The camp at CRAB Park is now almost three years old, so people have been able to put up something stronger to protect themselves, but they are temporary, of course, because they are not built with foundations.”

Early Thursday afternoon, the Vancouver Park Board agreed to extend discussions around the proposed clean up for at least another week.

Unhoused people have been residing in makeshift structures in CRAB Park since May 2021.

In January 2022, a B.C. Supreme Court decision, citing insufficient indoor shelter space, stripped the Park Board of legal authority to clear the tents, making CRAB Park a designated area for those experiencing homelessness to live in 24/7.