Moccasin Flats 'is pretty much the bottom-line scariest place'

Long before Moccasin Flats became notorious as the centre of Prince George's homeless community, Bell was there, stoking his fire to keep warm.

He was the first one to pound down stakes in a place that’s since become a lightning rod for the troubles of drug abuse, poverty and violence that continue to plague the downtown core.

Before it came to that, Bell had a full-time job as a jack-of-all-trades handyman for Pace Realty, a job that ended in 2020 during the pandemic, when nobody wanted anyone to get close to them in their apartments.

Bell didn’t want to live in a shelter and for seven months he set up camp in the bush on the north side of the Nechako River until the following spring, when a city bylaw officer came by and told him he had to leave. Bell asked where he would suggest moving to and was told he could go up the hill near the airport or to the strip of land at the end of Patricia Boulevard. That’s where he settled and he’s been there ever since.

With rents in the city rising quickly, the homeless population grew and eventually Bell had neighbours in the Flats. When somebody new arrives, he’s usually at the head of the welcome wagon. Some come directly from jail up the hill at the Prince George Regional Correctional Centre and Bell lets them stay in one of the shelters he has on the site until they can find their own space.

“I see a lot of people with just a sense of loss, they’re right at the bitter end and they usually wind up at my place, and I try to help as best I can,” said Bell, who declined to give his surname. “They don’t have a place, they’re just cut loose and a lot of them are from other communities. For whatever reason they hear about who I am and they just show up and introduce themselves and I just try to set them up. A lot of folks just need to be heard.”

Bell, 58, grew up on the north coast in Dease Lake and Telegraph Creek, and he’s never been on the wrong side of the law. But he's been a target twice at his camp - once with a steel rod that just missed his friend Terry as it ricocheted off his belongings, once with an arrow shot from the top of the berm overlooking the camp that hit a cooking pot. He also had someone toss rocks at his shelter in the middle of the night.

In January, a man was shot in the face in the camp's warming centre and later died in hospital.

Bell knows the dark side of street life and has met people from families who have lived that lifestyle for as much as five generations.

“I’ve helped out mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, that were on the street together and it’s just normal for them, but it’s weird for me,” he said. “There’s still hope for this place as far as giving people a place to go to. If I can, I’ll try to provide that.”

Angel F. came to Moccasin Flats in July to be close to her “street daughter," who also lives in the camp with her husband. They started out sheltering in the building at the west end of the Flats that now serves as the Association Advocating for Women and Community (AWAC) warming/feeding centre and eventually moved to one of the donated tiny homes on the site.

Angel says the people of the Flats like having space that separates them from their neighbours and most have high anxiety thinking about a move to BC Housing’s adjacent 46-unit Third Avenue transitional housing complex. After three months living in the encampment with her boyfriend she’s not sure how she would react to having all her belongings packed into a single one-room unit next to 45 other shelter spaces.

“Everybody wants their own space, we’re all human and we need to feel we’re treated as human and not as animals,” said Angel. “Some people do want to go to a place like that and they want that structure. But there are some people who think like Bell and he doesn’t need that harsh structure. He has his structure and it’s working for him.

“For us, this is a stepping stone. We want a permanent place where we can have a back yard again and I can have a kitchen and bathroom and won’t have to pee outside. Just safety is what I want.”

Angel, 47, grew up in McBride and spent much of her adult life working in restaurants serving food. She’s well-educated and likes to engage in conversation, but now feels like an outcast as a result of her own drug dependency.

“I’m a people person, I love helping people and when I was a server I was really good at my job and got paid very well and I miss doing it,” she said. “I would go back to it in a heartbeat, absolutely, but I’ve been blackballed from working in this town, right from when I moved here in 2015, and I’ve been going downhill ever since.

“People now have prejudgment of me, they know who I am when I walk into a store,” she said. “I don’t have a problem with authority, I’ve never been to jail, I’m not a criminal of any sort, which doesn’t mean that I feel any better than anybody else, I never have.”

The Third Avenue housing complex is fenced and will have somebody there at all hours of the day at the site providing security. Although each resident will have a private room, Angel and her best friend Colin are concerned about the Big Brother factor if that's where they end up living.

“I want to not feel like I’m being watched 24-7 by everyone around me – that’s an indignity I’ve already felt, for a long time,” she said.

“I want to feel like I’m safe and I can have maybe a bigger space and a cooking facility so I can cook for the two of us. I can’t cook for this guy (in the camp). He’s dealing with the after-effects of cancer and he’s doing amazing, but he’s losing weight and he‘s losing trust and a lot of faith in our environment.”

At 61, years of fighting his disease and dealing with addiction to “the down” have taken a toll on Colin. He and Angel were living with a friend on Victoria Street until they were suddenly told to pack their belongings and leave and they had nowhere safe to go. Nobody wants to rent a room to people with drug habits.

“To find a place to live beyond this place is next to impossible,” said Angel. “Look at how we look. We can clean up, but you can’t really hide the fact of what we do. People take one look at us and go 'Yup, welfare bum.’ And they won’t rent to us.

“We can’t hide our addictions because we have the face of it. It really makes me feel I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want people to look at me and to feel uncomfortable around me. I’ve never thought of myself as unapproachable but lately I have been feeling that I need to stay here because I smell.”

Her daughter Shae’s connections in the Flats led Angel and Colin to one of the 17 tiny homes that have been donated to Moccasin Flats. More than half of them have been burned, most in what are alleged to be targeted arsons. Angel and Colin have so far avoided that kind of trouble and feel fortunate to have a roof over their heads, small as it is.

But as a woman living in a place frequented by drug dealers and unsavoury characters, safety is always a concern.

“If I didn’t have him I would not be able to be down here, I’d be way too scared,” she said.

“We’ve been through many different situations and this is pretty much the bottom-line scariest place. I don’t get a lot of sleep down here. I sometimes don’t sleep for days.”

As much as Moccasin Flats and its residents are the target of scorn from city residents who see it as a den of drug-crazed criminals who steal to support their habits and should be locked up, there are people who look beyond the stereotypes and show they care about them when they bring them food or a hot cup of coffee.

“Lots of people drive through here and on hot days they offer Freezies and Popsicles and water," said April. "The people of Prince George are amazing."

At Monday’s council meeting, the city announced it intends to go back to the BC Supreme Court by the end of the year to request the end of the ban on evictions from the site, now that the majority of Flats residents have moved on.

Shelter spaces have been made available in the Victoria Street shelter at 15th Avenue and the former Knight’s Inn on Dominion Street. BC Housing’s Third Avenue transitional camp project is nearly ready and the Flats is expected to be fenced off and declared off-limits as a permanent campsite.

Moccasin Flats and how it was handled by the city was the subject of a precedent-setting court ruling in October 2021 that’s protected the rights of its residents to live there ever since.

In late November 2021, the City of Prince George applied for a court order to have the encampment permanently shut down, which would have given occupants 10 days notice to remove all structures and belongings and vacate the site. After that, city workers would be allowed to move in and clean up what’s left and RCMP would have authority to arrest anyone who remains there.

The petition seeking the order was to be served to Bell and two other residents of the Flats who were being represented by Darlene Kavka and Melanie Begaika, two lawyers from the Indigenous Justice Centre who defended their rights in October 2021 when the BC Supreme Court denied the city’s application to shut down the camp.

The city appealed on Feb. 23, 2022 and lost when Justice Simon Coval ruled against a second request to close the encampment, citing insufficient shelter space and a lack of daytime facilities for people without permanent homes.

By demolishing much of the encampment on Nov. 17, 2021, Coval said the city was in breach of Justice Christopher Hinkson’s October 2021 ruling which allowed Moccasin Flats to remain open until sufficient housing and daytime facilities were available.

In March 2022, a month after losing its appeal, the city apologized for the trauma it caused residents who lost their shelter, clothing, and irreplaceable personal items like the ashes of loved ones when the camp was dismantled.

At its height, in the summer 2021, there were more than 100 people living at Moccasin Flats and it was often a violent place as competing drug dealers fought for control of the illicit drug traffic.

Former lawyer Mary MacDonald was a social worker with Northern Health at that time and recalls how difficult it was during the pandemic to find places for her clients to live.

 “In 2021 people were scattered across the city, we had a lot of people because of COVID because BC Housing stopped accepting applications; they said it was too dangerous for people to move in, and a whole bunch of other apartments didn’t take applicants,” said MacDonald.

“I just saw there were more and more homeless people on the streets all the time during COVID.”

A year later, the Millennium Park camp at First Avenue and George Street was also full, until September 2022 when that camp was dismantled by the city.

This past summer there were between 30 and 40 Flats residents, but many camp structures and tiny homes have been destroyed by suspicious fires that have reduced the numbers. A fire Sept. 19 burned three tiny homes and a trailer and there are now about 20 people living at the Flats. City crews have been busy removing the debris left behind by the fires.

The pending closure of the site is not sitting well with some of the residents, who say they don’t like the idea of becoming forced to move to a shelter. As harsh as it is to be living in a rough campsite in third-world conditions under tents or tarps without electricity, running water or sanitary services, where they bear the brunt of cold and wet Prince George weather, they choose to live in the Flats because they do not want to give up the freedom it brings.

MacDonald, a former College of New Caledonia sociology instructor who now works for the B.C. First Nations Health Authority, has gotten to know Moccasin Flats residents and says many of them don’t trust the authorities. They fear the change of living in a place where they will be forced to follow house rules.

“Some of them are survivors of inter-generational trauma from residential school situations and anything to do with institutions is going to be very traumatizing,” said MacDonald. “If they don’t feel safe they’re not going to heal from their trauma, and they’re not going to heal from their addictions if they can’t work through the trauma. To have something imposed on you that feels very controlling is going to retraumatize people who already feel unsafe.”

MacDonald said managers from BC Housing and Northern are making decisions on where to send Moccasin Flats residents for housing without actually speaking to them and that is breeding mistrust of the authorities, one of the reasons many are reluctant to move into shelter spaces. 

“They have never had these people’s lived experiences, and this is an intelligent group of people here, and that’s my concern,” said MacDonald. “You get these top-down decisions made by people who don’t have a clue at the top. They throw lots of money at these things and waste a lot of money because they don’t know what the actual needs are.

“I’ve worked with a top-down organization (Northern Health) and they don’t even listen to the frontline workers, so you have all these people who don’t have a clue and they’re making the big bucks and big decisions that are going to have direct implication on these people’s lives. A lot of money is wasted because some of the ideas that come up that are not grounded in what’s actually needed and what’s actually going to support the people in an effective manner.”

Drug addictions are prevalent in homeless communities and one of the most pressing concerns is the lack of treatment centres for people who decide they want to stop using substances. MacDonald says there’s a dire shortage of detox beds in the city and she says it’s next to impossible to get into the chronically short-staffed detox centre on Second Avenue.

“I do believe people are told to phone there to ask for a bed and they’re usually told there isn’t, so call back,” said MacDonald.

“Detox is the first step that people need to go to before they can be medically stabilized to then be able to access treatment. A lot of these services are pretty fragmented, so the person could potentially go to detox and land back on the street waiting for treatment. You don’t get that continuity of support. You have to go in to detox on your own, deal with it on your own, and it’s all on you, and you’re already in survival mode.”