‘Give them a spot and leave them alone’: Saskatoon homeless encampment cleared amid safety concerns

WATCH: Homeless encampments in Saskatoon are growing in number and size and becoming a bigger priority and concern for the fire department.

Rowanda Smith looked on as a homeless encampment in Saskatoon’s Pleasant Hill neighbourhood was being torn down Friday.

Encampments present a number of worrying concerns for city officials, but for Smith, who chooses to live on the streets, they’re home.

“We get the boot from everywhere, even if it’s not in anyone’s way,” she said.

The encampment was positioned along railway tracks directly next to the temporary public washroom trailers the city placed behind the Central Urban Métis Federation Inc. on Avenue M, just off 20th Street.

With few places to use public facilities, the area has become a congregating ground for Saskatoon’s growing homeless population.

Smith says she used to live at that encampment, but after being cleared out multiple times, she left to a different area of town.

“Give them a spot and leave them alone,” she said. “Quit making them move their homes. Their lives are hard enough. Our lives are hard.”

Unfortunately for Smith, that’s exactly what the Saskatoon Fire Department (SFD) wants to avoid.

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Friday’s clean-up was displacing roughly 30 to 40 people, which deputy fire chief Yvonne Raymer says is a large encampment in Saskatoon. Most encampments in Saskatoon are groups of four or five people.

The fire department typically likes to make contact and clear the area within the first 48 hours. After that, encampments can become dangerous for the people who live there and the surrounding community as they grow.

“Just this week, we know of two violent assaults within encampments. So, that’s a big concern,” she said.

With more advocates and people living on the street calling for a centralized encampment space, Raymer says historically across Canada, they prove to be unsafe spaces.

“There’s people who will start selling drugs within them, there’s human trafficking happening within them, there’s violence within them, there’s a lot of drug use in them, and everybody’s at a different stage,” she said.

“This isn’t an understanding of one another. This is just surviving, and sometimes the unpredictable behavior becomes very unsafe.”

Fire crews, joined by Saskatoon police, outreach workers and volunteers, first told people at the encampment they needed to clear out Friday morning with roughly two hours of notice. By 11 a.m., contractors quickly moved in to clear the area of all remaining items and debris.

Clifford Semchyshyn was on his way to using the public washroom trailer and says the area has not only become an eyesore, but a dangerous area for anyone walking by.

“If you walk by the path, people are after you, trying to rob you, trying and take whatever you have on you,” he said. So, I’m very happy that this is all gone."

Encampments have become a larger priority for SFD since the COVID-19 pandemic displaced more people and contributed to the city’s homeless rate becoming one of the highest in Canada.

Last fall’s point in time homelessness count found 1,499 individuals experiencing homelessness in Saskatoon – nearly triple the number recorded in 2022.

Data from the fire department shows the number of encampments has nearly tripled in that time as well. The fire department has counted 1,248 as of Sept. 1 across 70 different neighbourhoods, and has cleaned up 357 of them. All of last year, crews cleaned up 218.

“I feel like if we don’t do something and we don’t turn things around, we’ll never getting out of this,” Raymer said.

Raymer says homelessness wasn’t much of a conversation among the fire department when she was an inspector. Now, the department has four fire inspectors working every day with unhoused people, and some days more resources are needed. It also spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year responding to these events, which doesn’t include the cost of police or paramedics.

“It just continues to grow without some hard solutions coming,” Raymer said.