Calls rise to kick out homeless from Edmonton river valley

Calls rise to kick out homeless from river valley
-Andrew Hanon, sunmedia
City park rangers are getting increasing calls to evict homeless people who’ve set up tents in areas outside the river valley.
“We’re responding to more and more complaints in neighbourhood and district parks,” said Darren Grove, who supervises the parks department’s 12 rangers. These cases are usually turned over to the police, he said.

At the same time, Grove said, the number of squatters in the river valley has remained pretty much the same.

In the past few years rangers have evicted or torn down about 500 camps annually, although the average number of people in each camp has increased.

“We don’t have a really good handle on specific numbers of people, but I’d say that typically there used to be one or two people in a camp and now it’s three or four,” he said.

Today the rangers filled a dumpster in Dawson Park with garbage left behind over the winter by squatters.

He added that it’s “not unusual” for the squatters to be recently-released convicts.

When the rangers encounter squatters, they routinely ask for ID and Grove said “once a week or so one will produce their release papers.”

Despite this, Grove said, homeless in the river valley pose no threat to the general public.

“For the most part, they just want to be left alone,” he said.

City cop Const. Ryan Lawley agreed.

“Most people who live in tents in the city know they can be ghosts in the machine as long as they’re not bothering anyone,” said Lawley, who runs the derelict housing program and often has to evict squatters from bushy areas of the city.

“They don’t want to bother anyone and they don’t want to be bothered.”

Lawley said last summer’s tent city by the Bissell Centre, which reportedly had a lot of drugs and prostitution, was “not an example of the situations and people that I deal with on a regular basis.”

He said for the most part, when he shows up at a squatters’ camp and tells them they must move, the squatters are very cooperative.