In pre-pandemic times, the lineup to get into the St. Vincent de Paul drop-in centre on Second Avenue at meal time resulted in a hot breakfast or lunch served at a table in warm dry surroundings protected from the elements of winter weather.
That doesn’t happen anymore while the threat of COVID still exists.
Since May, it’s takeout food service only at the city’s largest soup kitchen. Meals are served in Styrofoam containers or on paper plates and the only seats provided are the cold concrete sidewalk.
St. Vinny’s feeds on average 140 people for breakfast and 180 for lunch. When the food is gone the evidence gets left behind in piles of discarded trays, plates and napkins. It’s Andrew Scott’s job as a city parks employee to handle the cleanup duties.
“All that stuff they feed them ends up on our streets,” Scott said.
It’s a never-ending battle picking up garbage tossed to the ground in a concentrated area bordered by Queensway to Victoria Street and Second Avenue to Fourth Avenue. With sit-down dinners discouraged, the pandemic has had a noticeable effect on the amount of litter that collects on the sidewalks and street gutters.
“In the pandemic a lot of people aren’t gathering,” said Scott. “Even in the campsites they build and the houses where they gather and rent, they’re not eating inside. They all loiter out on the streets.”
It’s an area of downtown notorious for attracting street people and the homeless crowd who leave behind dirty needles, used condoms, feces, urine and vomit for city workers like Scott to clean up. His workday starts with emptying sidewalk waste containers, and for the first part of every shift he and his work partner dismantle temporary shelters made of cardboard, plastic sheets and wood pallets set up in alleys and greenspaces or blocking entranceways to city businesses.
“They build little forts with cardboard and stuff and they have to be knocked down every day and cleaned up and they do it all over again the next night,” said Scott. “The first four hours of my day is pretty much downtown. I could be down there eight hours. There’s not enough people right now to handle it. We do an early-morning sweep down there and we have a sidewalk sweeper in the spring and summer that goes down as well.”
Spurred by public pressure to clean up the streets and address some of the social issues that plague the downtown core, city council formed a task force committee that came up with the list of recommendations in the Downtown Safe, Clean and Inclusive Package unveiled in June. Beefing up daily litter patrols and an increased police foot patrol presence downtown were among the recommendations of the task force implemented over the summer. Teams of two now work together to keep streets and sidewalks clean.
“We have two people down there together now because of safety issues and we’re working seven days a week right now because of COVID and the homeless getting fed outside,” said city park foreman Mike Dimassimo. “It’s constant every day trying to keep it clean.”
The city doubled RCMP staffing for its two-member downtown daily patrols and increased bylaw staff from two to four. Downtown civic facilities are now monitored by contracted security staff. The package also renewed funding for two downtown homeless service hubs, which provide washrooms, storage and other critical services. Improved lighting and security and daily cleaning protocols are now in city-owned parkades. Equipment and staff from the public works department assist in dismantling the marginalized camps and are available for cleanup duties and spray sanitizer of surfaces.
Scott says he likes to give the people huddled in their shelters a warning/wakeup call before the RCMP, backed by bylaw enforcement officers, come down to issue more stern instructions to vacate the area while shelters are taken down. Not everybody leaves their temporary homes willingly.
“They get just infuriated by it,” said Scott. “They have guys carrying around sticks, pellet guns, blades and axes and they have them on them all the time. I’ve had a few interactions with pellet guns and little hatchets and a couple people trying to break into our vehicle and I’ve had to scare them off. I haven’t been actually approached and threatened with weapons.”
It’s an everyday exercise taking down the shelters and it’s only a temporary fix.
“Basically the streets are somewhat empty and we come back first thing in the morning and it’s back to Square 1 again,” said Scott. “It’s very frustrating. I get asked that question all the time, ‘how can you put up with this?’ But I’m hired to do it. I’ll always be nice to the people down there because everybody has their issues and it’s not going to change any time soon.”
The shelters provide protection from thieves who try to rob the occupants of money, drugs or possessions. Sometimes the residents forcibly attempt to hang on to the building material they’ve collected out of wastebins, and that’s why a police presence is needed. Scott can empathize with business owners who want the city to come up with a more permanent solution to rid the area of vagrants to encourage more potential customers to come downtown.
“(If the shelters were not dismantled every day) no one would be down there,” said Scott. “It would be a ghost town.
“The businesses are very frustrated, they help cleaning their own businesses. There are a few that don’t, and get really ticked off, but the majority of the business owners and renters are doing the same thing at the same time, kicking them out of the doorways. They have (human waste) to deal with and that’s not fun to deal with at 6 in the morning.”
Scott estimates he sees about two dozen regulars in downtown Prince George who are considered homeless. Many of the street people he sees rent houses together in groups to give them a place to sleep and they come to the soup kitchens to get fed. Sometimes they pick up a broom to help him clean the sidewalks.
”They’re out all night collecting bottles (for recycling) or stealing stuff and they hang out downtown,” said Scott. “I know probably a dozen people by name.
“The drugs out there aren’t doing anybody any favours, they’re terrible and getting worse. There’s no help for them. COVID has shut down the borders and the drugs these people are using are like the infamous bath salts and stuff - people are making the stuff because they’re not getting it provided through the borders. They’re using garbage that’s just killing their whole body and you can see it. It’s an ugly mess down there.”
Scott stays informed on how bigger cities are dealing with homeless issues and says while permanent housing would help, the rules against drug and alcohol use and possession of stolen property would be too much of an obstacle for many of them and they would not be able to live by those rules.
Before he became a foreman, Dimassimo was on the front line doing Scott’s job, working alone. He said the problems associated with street people downtown worsened after the summer forest fires of 2017 and 2018, which displaced hundreds of people from smaller communities with addiction/poverty problems who are dependent on social services. Many of them now live permanently in Prince George.
“The fires brought a lot of it up here,” he said. “It’s changed a lot over the last few years. Before the fires, when I was down there you wouldn’t run into near as many people. It’s gone up a lot.”
