For the better part of four years, Bel has been one of the go-to guys newcomers seek out when they arrive looking at the city’s most notorious homeless encampment.
The operator of the Moccasin Flats "welcome wagon" provided protection and slice of stability for another lost soul late Wednesday night — a woman in her 20s who came looking for a safe place to sleep. At midday Thursday she was still zonked out on a couch near the entrance to Bel’s camp.
“She made it back last night, I hadn’t seen her in a couple of weeks,” said Bel. “She didn’t have any blankets or anything. She just needs help, really. She came (originally) here with a group of young people, at least five of them, and they just kind of dispersed and lost each other.”
Bel is one of the last of the original residents of the place otherwise known as the Lower Patricia Boulevard encampment, and he knows he likely won’t be calling that place home much longer.
In a Prince George court hearing set for July 2-4, a BC Supreme Court judge is expected to decide the fate of Moccasin Flats and whether the City of Prince George will be granted the authority to evict Bel (named on the civil claim as Johnny Edward Belvery) and every other long-term Moccasin Flats resident.
If that court ruling goes the city’s way, there will no longer be any permanent campsites at Moccasin Flats. Only overnight camping will be allowed and only in a smaller designated area at the site with access open only from 7 p.m. – 9 a.m. each day. City bylaw officers will then have authority to tell campers to take down their tents and move along.
Where those people will go, nobody really knows.
Most are young adults. The arrive pushing carts, hauling backpacks, tents, tarps — all they can carry themselves behind the locked gates that keep vehicles off the road through camp. About 20 newcomers have come there over the past two months and the Flats is now home to about 25 people.
There is shelter space available in the city but the rule requirements act as barriers and some people would rather camp than conform.
Most of the new people Bel meets at the Flats come from smaller communities close to Prince George. Some have aged out of the social welfare system that pays monthly cheques to their parents or guardians of kids, which ends when they’re 18.
“A lot of them aren’t trained in anything and sad to say it, they don’t have any life skills, they were just cut loose, and that’s where a lot of young folks get in trouble with outside influences, ” said Bel. “It’s like a trend, like there’s a script for it. You see one fall into that that trap and it’s an ongoing thing, it seems like down here, it’s vicious cycle over and over and it’s not being addressed.”
Bel turned 60 on Wednesday and didn’t know it was his birthday until the following day. He grew up in Dease Lake and was in his 20s before he saw or heard about anybody living out on the streets. He’d see the odd drunk downtown in PG but that was it. It’s not like that anymore.
“A lot of people wind up here because they can’t get jobs,” he said. “It’s just untapped talent and they don’t anywhere to use it take it. A lot of these people you see downtown are going to be here again (sheltering outdoors) next year. They’ve become OK with their future and they’re just riding along with it. They’re so used to just going through the motions day to day. Nobody’s got no plan for nothing, it’s just become a way of life for a lot of folks.
“Soon as they wake up they wonder, am I going to be safe today. I always feel bad for those folks that just don’t have any drive, and they just accept it. To see that loss of hope in people, it’s pretty bad.”
Bel spent the afternoon Thursday putting up a gazebo he plans to enclose to give the women of Moccasin Flats a private place where they can change their clothes, wash themselves and use a five-gallon bucket that serves as their toilet.
“I’m just trying to give them a bit of their dignity back, I guess,” Bel said.
His friend Ken came around for a visit and they were going to hang up a water tank for all camp residents filled with water supplied by Carrier Sekani Family Services.
Assuming the court upholds the city’s civil claim and the authorities have the power to close Moccasin Flats, Ken says he wonders where everybody will go. He suggests maybe they should move their camp shelters to the grass lawn in front of city hall and start camping there and then somebody might come up with a better solution.
“A lot of these young people were raised on the streets or their parents were on the streets or they were raised by parents who were drug addicts, so they have no sense or responsibility, no sense of morals, no sense of anything, and it’s not necessarily their fault,” said Ken, a former Moccasin Flats resident who now lives at the 96-unit BC Housing supportive housing complex at 1550 Victoria St., the former North Star Inn.
“They were never told, never shown how to live a productive life. They’ve got two strikes against them before they’ve gotten anywhere and the third strike to them is, so what, because they’ve been swinging at the ball forever.”
Ken says he knows dozens of people he’s met at Moccasin Flats he’ll never see again.
“I’ll bet you in the last three or four or five years I’ve been around here there’s at least 100 people under 30 that I knew who are dead, and didn’t deserve it, and they keep coming,” she said. “There was a girl I think 17 years old in front of the North Star the other day that OD’d. I don’t know if she died.
“You can’t convince any of this people to get off dope. They all say, ‘Oh I’d love to get off dope,’ but give them the opportunity and see if they do. I’m an alcoholic and it took me until I was 45 to quit drinking. It was either that or kill myself I was so (messed) up in the head about everything, I didn’t have much of a choice.”
Moccasin Flats is one of at least eight unofficial campgrounds in Prince George and now that the weather is warmer, campers are occupying sites in parks, green spaces and river banks.
Ken has been around Moccasin Flats long enough to know the encampment earned its reputation as a dangerous place that attracted a violent criminal element who stabbed, shot and beat people and burned them out of their campsites and how they preyed on the vulnerabilities of residents who weren’t bothering anybody.
“There’s five people who are responsible for 99 per cent of the headaches down here, and most of them are not around here anymore,” said Ken, 56, who did not want to reveal his surname. “But as soon as you get rid of some of the sharks, some bigger ones are going to move in.
“All they’re interested in doing is coming down here and stealing everything that people have, that they’ve worked for to get, and they just take it for no other reason than they’re greedy pieces of (crap).”
Of the 17 tiny homes set up at Moccasin Flats, only four of five are still standing, including the one Ken lived in for about a year. The rest, he said, were set on fire purposely and destroyed.
“Every one of them was burnt for no good reason whatsoever, other than people were jealous or pissed off at somebody else, and 22 of them were set by one person,” he said.
“These politician idiots have their heads shoved up their asses so far, they can’t see the light of day anymore and they don’t talk to anybody around here. They sit in their offices and make their own decisions and that’s a fact. It’s really quite disturbing.”
Bel has talked about going back to work in construction and finding a place to rent. He’s hoping he’ll have a place to go where he won’t feel threatened by someone pointing a gun at his face or where he’s a target of someone on the adjacent ridge shooting arrow shafts or golf balls at his camp.
“It’s not normal," he said. "I know that, but it’s become that."
