After two years bordering on the city’s most notorious homeless encampment at Moccasin Flats, automotive repair shop owners Mike and Sherrie Gunther are enjoying the peace and quiet that’s returned to their workplace.
Most of the makeshift shelters, tarps, tents and heaps of belongings have been cleared and the people who brought all that stuff to their Lower Patricia Boulevard campsites have moved on or found temporary housing alternatives in BC Housing projects, like the 43-unit ATCO trailer complex that now sits across the street from the Gunther’s BST Performance Automotive repair shop at 300 Third Ave.
Built by BC Housing as part of the province’s HEARTH (Homeless Encampment Action Response Temporary Housing) initiative, the $4.5 million facility offers housing and wraparound support services for as many as 43 individuals experiencing or at risk of homelessness.
The facility, at 397 Third Ave., opened to the first residents on Dec. 31 and as of Friday, Jan. 17, six people had moved in, with another 10 offered a room there this week.
“Since they started building this it’s been very quiet, especially now that all the burnt things have been cleaned up,” said Sherrie. “I don’t know what happens at night.
“I’m not that happy that it got put right here – there’s so many of them around town and it doesn’t seem there’s that many people. In the central part of downtown when you walk around you see a lot of (homeless) people but down here, as soon as they started building this, it’s honestly been quiet.
“I have a front-window view and before there would be people in here causing trouble, walking around out of it and it was pretty quiet this summer.”
Work began April 23 to prepare the site and the Third Avenue facility took nearly eight months to complete.
“We’ve had some of our customers, ex-loggers, and they said, “We go in to put a logging camp and it’s done in a weekend,” said Mike Gunther.
The Gunthers share the building with Summit Power Tools and the Drug Awareness Recovery Team (DART) Society headquarters. Summit was hard-hit by criminals who cut holes in the chain-link fence over the years to steal items, prompting owner Steve Taylor to invest in an elaborate security system, steel gates and razor-top wire on the fence.
The Gunthers opened their shop nearly 20 years ago and they never had many problems with theft or vagrancy until Moccasin Flats grew from the odd camp on the site 2 ½ years ago to an encampment where more than 100 people lived.
“It didn’t really affect us that much but there was always people walking around and we can’t leave a customer’s car outside because they’ll probably come back to broken windows or whatever,” said Mike. “If there’s not room in the shop we say don’t park it down here. We can’t leave anything outside, they’ll steal our waste oil jugs.”
Before the transitional housing complex was built, the area at the extreme east end of downtown was suffering, located right next to a corridor that was a haven for drug dealers, thieves, arsonists and violent offenders who made it an unsafe place for camp residents just trying to stay alive.
BC Housing also has 58 residents living at the former North Star Inn at 15th Avenue and Victoria Street and the provincial organization also oversees other supportive housing sites at the former National Hotel on First Avenue and the First Avenue Rapid Modular project at the north end of Ottawa Street. Those two facilities have a combined 62 residents.
Rooms in the Third Avenue facility are reserved for those who have been living outdoors in the Lower Patricia encampment, for an extended period in a community shelters or are making the transition to independent living from another supportive housing site.
Connective is the service provider operating the facility and each occupant will have their own room, with shared washroom, laundry and amenities.
Residents will receive two meals per day, along with wellness checks, healthcare/community service referrals, outreach, life skills training and help to transition to long-term supportive housing or independent living.
Each resident is required to sign a six-month contract to live at the Third Avenue building. The Gunthers only recently were provided any information about the new facility when a Connective representative dropped off some pamphlets.
Now that Moccasin Flats residents have temporary housing alternatives, the city plans to close the camp permanently once it proves its case in court. The city tried several times to close the site until a precedent-setting BC Supreme Court ruling Jan. 23, 2022 forced the city to back off on its plan.
The Gunthers both say city staff and council have kept them in the dark about the how they plan to deal with downtown encampments.
“Something that has been really discouraging is we’ve had nobody from (city) council come down here and tell us, this is what they’re doing, this is what our plan is,” said Mike Gunther.
“They proclaim they’ve kept us in the all loop and all that kind of stuff. As far as I’m concerned those guys just do what they want to do and we’ve got no input whatsoever. It would have been nice to be consulted.
“Even when they moved the guys from Millennium Park over here and, all of a sudden, they came with U-Haul trailers dumping piles of garbage right in front of us. We had guys camped in tents right in front of us and they were allowed to be here. I don’t think that was fair to us.”
