The Current - What should cities do about people living in RVs?

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Police in Calgary ticketed and towed a street full of RVs — vehicles that people priced out of the housing market had been living in. While a local politician says the motorhome dwellers must move along, an Oregon city facing similar issues took a different approach. Could Canada learn from them?

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. As the cost of housing soars across this country, many people are turning to inventive solutions for shelter. Maybe you've seen them parked in your town along the side of residential streets. Camper vans, RVs, motorhomes that people are now using as permanent shelter. The CBC's Alison Dempster paid a visit

to a group of people parked at the edge of a big box shopping area in Calgary known as Deerfoot City. It's classified as a cargo trailer. People use it for many different things. When they move they use it. A lot of people use them for storage. My sister and I use it as a tiny home. My name's Karen and I look after my sister Donna. This is my street. This is my home. I have a community here that

knows my sister and as you see the lady had just walked by, waved to us and there's safety here where if I went someplace else there wouldn't be. How long have you been living here? Too long. Over three years. How do you manage in the winters? It's tough. It's very tough. I have to do a lot more. Summer's a breeze. Anybody can do it in the summer, but in the winter it takes a lot more. For me I've got a diesel heater so I have to use diesel. I also use propane. As you see everybody has them vented to the outside and then you leave your roof vents open which kind of is kind of productive to keeping heat in but you

got to keep the airflow circulating. Are you on some kind of wait list for housing in Calgary? Yes. I have been on a wait list for quite some time. Everything from senior housing, because both Donna and I are seniors, to subsidized housing. And there's nothing available. Still looking, and we're way down on the bottom of the list. What's your reaction to the news that folks who were in RVs on Moraine Road here in the northeast were just cleared out? It's affecting the poorest of the poor.

It puts people into despair. And when you don't know what to do and where to go, it makes you in the fight or flight. My name is Monty Rush. Where are you guys from originally? We're from Calgary here, but then rent prices got high back in last year so we ended up buying a trailer truck so since then we've just been doing trailer life. How's it going? Yeah it's pretty good the kids love it. We have five kids and two dogs so they all enjoy seeing different areas being out in the open in certain places where like

it feels like there's like no rules where you could run free and do what you want to do and have fun without the restrictions of oh you can't do that or you can't be here stuff like that what's it like trying to find places where you can stay. Yeah, see, that's the hard part, because, like, there's certain apps that'll tell you, like, where all the, like, the free spots are, but it's a hit or miss, because they say, like, go there, you can spend overnight. Yeah, that's great.

I'm not looking for overnight, though. I'm looking for a few days or more than a month or so, somewhere where we could be permanently without getting harassed or bothered. Like, everywhere we move, we have to plan for our next move like okay since this doesn't work out we have to have a list of backup places to go to in case if this one doesn't work out then okay we'll go try the next one we'll go try the next one and are you um like what about school and work what's it like trying to do that stuff my wife does homeschooling inside four of

the kids are in school so she does that it's all registered through the government and stuff and then she owns her own clothing business and then i also work online doing customer service technician and stuff for an online place so what do you want calgarians to understand about the people they're seeing on their streets and their neighbourhoods living in RVs? Well, that doesn't mean we're homeless or we're up to no good or stuff like that. I mean, we're just random, normal people. I mean, this is our first year doing trailer life. We never thought we'd actually ever do that.

I think the city should have more options of a place where we can go or something, like make a big parking lot available to us. So other than that, yeah, I mean, it doesn't mean we're troublemakers or anything. We're just normal people trying to get by. We probably heard there that the city officials this week forced a group of motorhome dwellers in Calgary to move along. For years, they'd been parked along Moraine Road in the northeast of the city. Victor Laroque is one of those residents. He describes what happened on Monday.

An army came at us. We had like seven or eight police cars, three and four peace officers and parking authority show up, two or three tow trucks show up. They wanted us out. The city said it had received dozens of complaints and sent social service workers from the charitable agency Alpha House along to provide support. The day that we're fighting and running around trying to get everything organized to get out of there, Alpha House is there saying, well, we can't put you in a house today, but we can put you on a list. I'm a single white male with no dependents. I'm at the very bottom of that list. Single mothers are going to be on there. People living in tents are going to be on there.

I live in a motorhome. There are no other options. Andre Chabot is a Calgary city councillor, and that motorhome settlement falls within his ward. Councillor, good morning. Good morning. What goes through your mind when you hear the voices of people who say they have no other options but to live in motorhomes parked on streets in your city?

Well, for those folks who've been on the street for a, which is the case with one of those residents on Moraine Road, I question, you know, the validity of their statement that there's no other options for them. We do have a housing affordability issue in Calgary, and we're looking at doing whatever we can to mitigate that. But of course, we have more people moving in than we have houses being built. So it's an ever increasing list. So we prioritize the highest needs folks get to the top of the list. Do you have a sense as to how many people in your city are living in circumstances like Victor or Karen or Monty that we heard from? Oh, it's it's quite a few, actually, I would say in the hundreds for sure.

We do receive about a thousand complaints a year about RVs on the street. And, of course, the Highway Traffic Act has provisions in it that says you can't park on the street for more than 72 consecutive hours. Now, we only respond on a complaints basis. And in Moraine Road specifically, we've had about 70 complaints registered there, not a dozen. A lot of them stem from waste being left on public right-of-ways, the inability for the city to clear the streets, challenges with accessing property. The list goes on on a number of complaints that we've had, but ultimately the city's inability to actually maintain its roadways is part of the reason with why we had to move them. You probably heard there were several abandoned vehicles on that road that would not have otherwise been removed so that

we could actually clear the snow. And that's why you say that this is not an appropriate use of the streets. I'm saying there's a number of different reasons, and most of them have to do with quality of life, like, you know, no sanitary facilities, no ability to dispose, proper disposal of wastewater, no access to potable water, no electricity. You know, there's so many reasons why the streets, especially in the winter, is not the ideal situation for those folks. Obviously, the best thing would be to have a purpose-built site. But this is not something that can just happen overnight. It has to go through regulatory process. There's a number of different pieces that have to fall into place before this can be implemented. And yet we just heard from somebody who said that that building,

the motor home that she's in, she feels like she's part of a community and she feels, as she said, this is my home. I just wonder how you square that with what you're saying. Oh, I fully understand the concept of community. I lived in a mobile home park, so I truly do understand their perspective. But their home, their community is not as a result of the preferred choice. It's a result of necessity because there is no other place for them. I get that. I get that. Now, to try and provide them with a purpose-built facility to accommodate them with much of those needed pieces of infrastructure, first of all, there's a cost to building it.

Can the community get on side with it? Because it's going to be adjacent to some community, so we have to do public consultation. And then we have to go through a land use change, which, again, requires a public hearing. So, again, when people say, well, just give us a parking lot, it's not that simple. Parking lots don't have the appropriate land use and the community has a right, a right to be heard when it comes to a land use change. Victor LaRock, who we just heard from, he was part of that community of people who were cleared out from Moraine Road earlier this week. He was on our local Calgary Morning Show, and he was saying that he has good relationships with local businesses and didn't think

that there were safety concerns that the complaint about garbage in particular was really down to one specific motorhome, which is the kind of thing, to his point, that could happen in any neighborhood. What do you make of that? Well, he may think he has a good relationship with the businesses. The businesses would suggest otherwise.

And hence the reason with why we've had 70 complaints. That's seven zero complaints for the RVs on Moraine Road, a thousand citywide. So the idea that these businesses have no issue with him, well, they're the ones who are adjacent to him. They're the ones who are registering these complaints. This isn't the general public. the ones who are adjacent to them. They're the ones who are registering these complaints. This isn't the general public. I mean, again, this is something that we see coast to coast to coast, where people, because of a housing crisis, are living in parks, in encampments, in tents, now in RVs, in their cars, in their trucks. How should your city, do you think, deal with this?

Similar to what we have for our low-income transit pass and any other subsidized facilities by going through some sort of an entry-level screening process to make sure that we're not just offering a free-for-all, but it's truly provided to those folks in need, obviously based on income, and then also making sure that we tie in third-party social service providers to connect them up with other options, as in housing options, like Mr. Laroque's point. He may be low on the totem pole as far as, you know, the priority. And there are other higher priority needs for, you know, a single mother with kids, as an example,

and they should not be, you know, pushed down on the list. But we have a shortage of housing, especially on social housing. And we need other orders of government to help us as well, because social housing is not a municipal responsibility, but rather provincial and or federal responsibility. And we're not seeing enough participation from other orders of government to meet the needs of citizens. I guess, I mean, I'll let you go. But just finally on this, is there the opportunity, if you could work with neighborhoods, is there the opportunity to create some sort of spot where those who are in those motor homes could park them, perhaps have access to services, sewage, electricity, what have you, and have a designated spot where they could end up while you're waiting for that additional housing to be built? where they could end up while you're waiting for that additional housing to be built.

Yeah. And so, like I said previously, there's a cost associated with creating a site that's suitable for this type of use. So there's capital costs associated with it. There's land use changes that are associated with it. There's public engagement that's associated with it. So I'm working right now with my administration to draft a notice of motion to address all of those issues so that council can deal with them on the basis of how do we administer the program and how do we ensure that it's equitable and that there's some sort of cost recovery associated with it. Do you know where the folks who were on that road, on Moraine Road, do you know where they've ended up after the police and the bylaw officers cleared them out? My understanding is they may have moved to another road nearby that doesn't have as much traffic.

The idea that somehow there's like 20-some feet still remaining. I mean, when you put two semi-trailers side by side, they take up about 20 feet. But they may have just moved further down the road, for example. Yeah, to a less traveled road, yes. Councillor, we'll leave it there. It's good to talk to you. Thank you very much. My pleasure.

Thanks for having me. Andre Chabot is a city councillor for Ward 10 in the city of Calgary. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal.

I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. There isn't really any good quality data about the number of people who are living in motorhomes in Canada. We do know the situation, as we were saying, in Calgary is not unique. In recent years, there have been similar disputes in communities from British Columbia to Nova Scotia. The pattern is often the same. Motorhomes settle in, neighbors complain, the city cracks down, the motorhomes are forced to move on. My next guest leads an organization that has decided to take a different

approach. Bethany Cartlidge is the executive director at St. Vincent de Paul of Lane County. She is in Eugene, Oregon. Bethany, good morning to you. Good morning. So we just heard the situation in Calgary. How big of an issue were RVs parking on streets in your community? Oh, it was a tremendous issue. So we operate a safe sleep site on Garfield now, but previous to that, there were a variety of cars, RVs, campers that would park in a variety of places in our area. And it was really prevalent even before the pandemic. So we heard from Calgary, a range of different people. There were people who were single men, senior women, families with children. How does that compare to what you were seeing?

It's pretty similar. We have seen an increase in single women head of household seniors who are accessing our shelter services. However, we definitely see families. We see single individuals. The greatest percentage of the folks that we're serving right now are 55 and older. That's about a third of the people that we're serving. But we do see people who are between the ages of 18 and 24. And what were the issues? I mean, again, I want to talk about how you've tried to address them.

But what were the issues that were coming up from people who were, because they had nowhere else to live, living in their cars and their RVs and what have you, and parking on the streets? What were the issues that you heard from neighbors around? They felt that there was potential roadway blockage or where one would go, another one would park nearby. Because as the woman had shared earlier, people want to live in community. No one wants to be alone and isolated. They want to have that support system. And as the counselor had shared, without access to electricity or water, it could present other challenges. So those were some of the typical complaints that we would hear. Do you understand those complaints coming from neighbors?

I understand the complaints coming from neighbors, but the larger issue is what are we as a community going to do to support these folks? to support these folks. So the individuals that we're serving who are in campers, cars, RVs, they didn't wake up one day and decide, I just want to live on the street and be moved from place to place. People want stability. They want an opportunity to thrive. So the larger issue is what can we do to support these folks? But What have you done to give those people a safe place to be? We're really fortunate because we have an amazing city and homeless shelter program that works in partnership with us. And our local transportation district donated land for us to use. So we have a five-acre lot where we have

44 RVs and 10 cars. And so we gave them a legal place to exist. So that way they're not relocated, they're not moved around, they can have that opportunity to really go to the next level. So what we've seen what happened from that is people who maybe they would even be employed, but they have no way to have a legal space because a lot of the RV parks will require that your RV is 10 years or newer, which that can be a significant barrier to someone if they don't have access to the funds to secure a newer RV. So we've been able to provide a space that has community rooms. We staff at 24-7. We have access to case managers who are doing front door assessments. What really the goal is to connect with each individual, recognize that every story is different, and see how can we help them on their journey to move out of homelessness and into stability. What do you do about the need that people have for, for example, electricity, for waste disposal, what have you?

Because one of the things that we've heard in Canadian municipalities is there are safety concerns, but there are also concerns around people who are running a generator, which is loud, people burning diesel for the generator, which can create fumes coming out of it. There's a lack of water that's there. There's not proper waste disposal. So what are you offering so that people have those essential services? Yeah. So one of the things that we do before we open a site or before we operate a program is we want to make sure that we're going to be able to take care of the full person. So we have an industrial kitchen, so we're able to provide access to meals. We provide showers. We provide either laundry on site, or if there's not a laundry on site, we provide laundry vouchers. And then with our safe parking program, where we partner with

businesses and RVs park outside, we provide a port-a-potty. The business agrees to provide access to electricity. At the safe sleep site, we have a way to dispose of the waste. We have water on site. And then individuals, if they use generators for other things, it's in an industrial area. And the businesses there have really welcomed the program because it's managed. I think there's a difference between an unmanaged program and one where people have the wraparound supports to really be successful. So is the fear that if this was not a managed program, people would just roll their RVs in and it could be not uncontrollable, but that there's not that sense of management that you have there? Yeah, I think that we've seen with tent camping and with RVs, there's a big difference between

providing a space with the wraparound supports for someone versus just designating a plot of earth for people to legally park. Because that's where you have individuals who are the families adjacent to someone who may be around kids, right? So we really strive to make sure that we're providing a safe and separate place for families, as well as provide a space that's completely low barrier for everyone else. So for example, we don't require sobriety. Someone may be using off-site or becoming intoxicated and they can come in and receive shelter still. So they don't use on-site, but they're able to come in under the influence. We work with a lot of people who have

criminal backgrounds and that could be a barrier to receiving housing. 52% of the people that we're working with are employed, and there's a variety of reasons why they're not able to access housing. It can be that the housing prices in our area have gone up so dramatically, but also if you have a previous eviction or a criminal background, that can be a barrier to securing housing, even with a job. Who pays for those services? In our area, our county pays for it. But if we didn't have this safe parking program, they were paying for it anyway. So they're sending out people from public works or the police department, community resource officers to engage with these folks, largely with the idea of just moving people. So instead of taking that approach of

we're just going to move someone from point A to point B, which really disables their ability to have stability and to have a healthy path forward, they decided to instead invest in a space that's going to really help people progress. You've said that RVs and motorhomes need to be recognized as housing. Why is that important to you? In our area, there's simply not enough shelter beds for everyone who's unhoused. So I think it's not fair to not recognize a vehicle as a safe sleeping space when that may be all you have. And if you're unhoused, a vehicle may be the last asset you own, right? People deserve to live with dignity and respect and that if that's the resource they have at their disposal to sleep in and to maintain safety or warmth outside of the elements,

that it should be recognized as a safe place to sleep. Just finally, this is an issue, as I've said, that people are dealing with across your country, across our country, beyond a housing crisis that has forced people to look for shelter in unconventional and unexpected places. What advice would you have for other communities who are dealing with this issue where people are looking for that shelter and perhaps that's in a car or an RV and it's parked in a residential neighborhood, and that's leading to conflict? Be creative. So before we even had access to funding for the safe sleep site, we saw the need. We saw how many people were out in the street, and we didn't have bottomless resources as an agency ourselves. We have, you know, put majority into programs as only 7% to admin. So

we were thinking, gosh, what can we do? So we partnered with businesses. We said, if we commit to providing a staff member who's going to go and check in with these folks and make sure that they're being a good neighbor, will you please give them access to electricity and we'll cover the cost of a porta potty. And a lot of the businesses welcomed it. And to be honest with some of the businesses, they said that it became a theft deterrent, that having someone on site prevented other people from engaging in illegal activity. And so even before we had the funding from the county

to set up this larger five acre program, we looked at who are our allies in this area and who can we engage with who can just help one person at a time. So it started off with just 10 RVs and then we grew the safe parking program to 30. So I would say be creative. Bethany, I'm really glad to talk to you about this. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. Bethany Cartilage is the executive director of St. Vincent de Paul of Lane County in Oregon. As I mentioned, this is a familiar scene right across this country. Have you noticed more people living in motorhomes and RVs in your community?

Maybe you are living in an RV yourself. We'd love to hear your story in terms of how you ended up there. And what we heard from some of those folks in Calgary is that this is their home and they have nowhere else to go to. How do you think communities should respond to the concerns about safety and sanitation? What do you think of the idea of those folks in Calgary, is that this is their home and they have nowhere else to go to. How do you think communities should respond to the concerns about safety and sanitation? What do you think of the idea of those kind of safe parking spots that they have down in Oregon? Let us know how you see this story playing out in your community. You can write to us, thecurrentatcbc.ca. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.