Petition created to ban downtown homeless encampment and offer more alternative housing

A group of concerned Prince George residents have started a petition advocating for the closure of Tent City downtown on Fifth Avenue near Patricia Boulevard.

The petition titled “Safety for all: remove the tent city on Fifth Avenue and provide alternative housing” was started by a group by the name of “Millar Addition Connaught Concerned Citizens Committee”, and garnered 350 signatures from online and from canvassing the neighborhood.

According to the group’s spokesperson, who would like to remain anonymous for safety concerns, the decision to start up this petition was the result of an increase in criminal activity in their neighborhood, which is located right beside the encampment.

“The petition was created in July of this year, basically a group of concerned citizens from the Millar Addition met together to discuss the issues in the neighborhood and decided to create a petition because of the safety issues that we were seeing,” she explained.

She said they’ve seen increasing amounts of theft, sexual assaults, home invasions, and open drug abuse since the tent city was put up, and it’s gotten to the point where many women in the area have simply stopped going for walks alone.

“I would say in the last 2-3 months since the tent city came to be it’s been a huge increase, obviously there’s always been stuff like this happening but not to this extent, and suddenly it just started ramping up,” she noted.

According to the group’s spokesperson, they’ve witnessed trespassing and theft in the middle of the day and recently had to call the police because a man, who was later determined to be a Tent City resident, was chasing a neighbor with his pants down.

However, they say that a lot of the time when they contact the RCMP for arising issues, there isn’t a whole lot they can do.

“So when the incident where the man who was chasing my neighbor with his pants down, and I had reported him earlier in the day for observing women with his hands in his pants, when I called police to follow up after he had chased my neighbor, I was told that he was probably going to be released in the next day and we knew that he lived down in the tent city,” she explained.

Prince George RCMP Constable Jennifer Cooper confirmed that this incident did occur, and the man was arrested for being intoxicated in public and was released once he was able to take care of himself.

But the group isn’t placing blame on the police, according to the group spokesperson, police are doing all they can really do at this point, and bylaw and RCMP patrols have been increasing.

Instead, they are using the petition to advocate for more accessible housing options for homeless Prince George residents.

The group spokesperson says allowing human beings to live like this is completely unacceptable, and it is time for the city to come up with more resources for them.

“I know they were going to the washroom behind a cardboard screen now they’ve put Port-a-potties in there, they put dumpsters there, and that to me is not solving the problem, it’s not a safe environment for any person to live upon, this is not good for anybody so why is it okay for them to have to go to that extreme of living in tent city. It’s not one of those not-in-my-backyard type scenarios, it’s the whole thing, in today’s modern society why do we have that there? There’s a baby living there, there are children there,” she explained.

She adds that she is aware of a mother raising a newborn baby in the encampment, which the group believes is heartbreaking.

She says that while the city is working towards a court injunction to remove tent city, their decision to put off the Safe Streets bylaw showed a reluctance to really address the issue.

The group is now hoping that the government agencies will use their authority, funding, expertise, and resources to find a solution, rather than allowing Prince George residents to live like this.

“It’s not for a group of people living in an unsafe situation to come up with a solution, we don’t have that expertise but they do and we’re asking them to start acting on it,” she added.

The group says residents in the neighborhood are becoming increasingly concerned, especially because school is starting soon and many of their children walk to and from schools and bus stops in the area.

Additionally, since the weather is cooling off, members of the homeless population have started relying on fires to keep warm in the tent city structures and in the Patricia boul bank.

“We were informed that there was no fire management plan from the fire chief. Now that the weather is cooling off this is an increased concern,” she explained.

She wants residents to know that the group does recognize that this is a multifaceted issue that stems from underlying issues of mental health, addiction, income inequality, and systemic oppression, and finding a solution isn’t going to be easy.