Worries include traffic safety and waste management
A group living in RVs on a tiny patch of land off Highway 1 in North Vancouver has neighbours concerned about road safety and sanitation.
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Known as Bowser Island, the enclave was once home to pleasant, suburban houses — a beautiful fieldstone wall and spired gate testify to that — but the buildings were long ago torn down to their foundations and the sewer line decommissioned when the Upper Levels Highway was widened.
As Bowser’s name suggests, it’s very much like an island, surrounded by a moat of asphalt lanes.
It’s also at the western entrance/exit to Pemberton Heights, a secluded North Vancouver neighbourhood nestled below the Upper Levels highway between two river ravines that has only one other entrance to the east.
“We are very sympathetic to this issue as far as homelessness is concerned,” Colin Metcalfe, president of the Pemberton Heights Community Association, said. “But this is an issue of safety.”
Following Metcalfe’s advice, Postmedia did not engage with campers and only entered the area a few metres. To enter the grounds one must cross solid double yellow lines, or drive to West Van, head eastbound on the highway and take the exit at Capilano Road.
The entrance is just around a blind curve on the highway exit and you take your luck your engine doesn’t conk out as traffic zips your way.
Then there’s the matter of the waste piling up at the encampment, and the question of just where the raw sewage is going.
Into the nearby Capilano River by a storm sewer is Metcalfe’s worry.
As well, on Thursday thick smoke lay over part of the island, the result of an open fire with the hot, dry season not far away.
The problem, Lisa Muri, a district councillor, said on Thursday is that the B.C. Ministry of Transportation owns the land and it has so far ignored district requests to do something about the campers.
The district sent a detailed letter to the ministry in early February with inspection reports from environment, fire, and utilities officers, the councillor said.
That letter was on the heels of three previous letters pleading that something be done.
“The only response we got back from the province is ‘we are dealing with it,’” Muri said. “Brutal.”
The ministry on Thursday said it is working with the Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs and the district, and the province recently provided the campers with a blue Super Save Disposal bin that sits just inside the treed entrance.
“The Ministry of Transportation and Transit is aware of the use of a provincial highway right-of-way near Capilano Road as a camping site,” the ministry said in an emailed response to questions.
“The ministry continues to monitor the situation to ensure there are no safety concerns for the travelling public or members of the encampment,” the statements said. “Everyone deserves a safe place to live, with access to the services they need.
“The province knows more shelters and supportive homes are needed. Without these spaces, that means more people living on the street or in encampments — and this doesn’t work for anyone.”
B.C. Housing, the statement added, is paying for more than 6,700 shelter spaces in 59 communities around the province this winter, including 65 spaces in North Vancouver.
The number of people living in vehicles in North Vancouver seems to be growing, or at least a lot of residents feel that’s the case.
There have been RVs, camper vans and converted buses all around the long-closed ICBC centre on Lloyd Avenue for at least five years. Same with the area around the Real Canadian Superstore off Mt. Seymour Parkway.
But those are light industrial and commercial areas, and access does not mean crossing a double yellow line with cars coming around a freeway exit’s blind curve.
Several people have told Metcalfe of close calls when taking the Capilano exit, coming around the bend and seeing an RV pull into or out of Bowser Island.
“What if you’ve got some soccer mom bringing her kids back from practice one day, coming off that ramp at a fairly high rate of speed, and there’s an RV broken down in the middle of the road,” he said.
“We’re very sympathetic to this issue, the homeless issue and affordability issue and the plight that we know so many people are in relating to this.
“But this is a safety issue.”