City staff will work with B.C. Housing for a lease or licence of occupation. The city wants to see occupation of the homes by March 31, a target date for getting people out of parks and other areas and into their own places. The goal is to have about 200 “indoor sheltering solutions,” a city report said. Public comment is planned during the process, and Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps said the North Park Neighbourhood Association has already indicated it is supportive. Helps said there has been a “state of emergency” for too long for people in the community needing homes. “This is 30 of approximately 200 or so units that will be needed,” she said of the Aryze project. “It’s I think a small part that the city can do through the contribution of land.”
Central Park will be closed to 24/7 camping as of Jan. 4, the City of Victoria announced Tuesday, following last week’s decision to move dozens of people without homes from the flooded park to the. . .
Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps said the long-term future of the park, including whether to allow camping, will be decided by council. About 31 tents have been erected on wooden platforms inside a fenced area of the Royal Athletic Park parking lot. Since Dec. 23, volunteers with the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, the Greater Victoria Extreme Weather Protocol and the North Park Neighbourhood Association have been helping people without homes move to Royal Athletic Park, providing them with new sleeping bags, cots, tents and tarps. Jen Wilde, co-ordinator with the Extreme Weather Protocol, said B.C. Housing staff have been on site checking people’s housing applications and have found housing for one person.
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Darrin Murphy, who has been living in a tent in the park with his partner since July, said everything inside their tent is wet and covered in mould. “I don’t know what warmth is anymore,” he said.
Murphy said in low-lying areas of the park, closer to Crystal Pool, three to four inches of water seeped into his neighbours’ tents. On Wednesday morning, he was preparing to move to the parking lot and into a dry tent. “It will be nice to get out of this wet, mouldy tent.”
People living in the park were given sleeping bags and cots Tuesday, but some lost everything to the flooding, said Jen Wilde, regional co-ordinator for the Greater Victoria Extreme Weather Protocol. “Their personal gear, their clothing is all soaked, so they’re all running to the laundromat to get it cleaned and dried. It’s a mess. It’s a total mess out here. They are living in a mud puddle,” she said.