Tent city is gone but homeless issues remain for All Saints’ church

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This article was published 27/06/2018 (3025 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The efforts of All Saints’ Anglican Church to clear the sizable tent city from its front lawn at the end of May were successful – for the most part.

While the makeshift shelters are gone, some former members of the encampment are back sleeping on the downtown Winnipeg church lawn at night.

“We’ve had a few tents come back, but we told everybody they can’t stay up. If they arrive here at night and sleep then move out, it’s no big deal. If the tent is still up the next morning, we put a note on it saying we have to have them clear out by noon,” Rev. Brent Neumann said Wednesday.

Last month, a sizable tent city popped up on the West Broadway church’s front lawn — located in the shadow of the Manitoba legislature — with around 40 people staying there each night, at the peak of the encampment.

Neumann and his congregation, who admitted the situation had gotten “out of hand” and had to pay to have a portable toilet brought in, struggled with how best to address the matter in a manner consistent with their faith.

On May 29, they made the call to evict, as the space had to be cleared and cleaned before an upcoming wedding ceremony. In recent weeks, however, people have started trickling back, with some five to 10 sleeping on the lawn each night, according to one person staying at the site.

On Tuesday morning, a woman could be seen packing up a makeshift tent fashioned out of a tarp, while a man was sleeping on the ground near the church doorway. The woman, who did not want to be named, said at least two men didn’t move out at all in the lead up to the wedding, continuing to sleep there at night. She said there are at least two things that keep people coming back to the church grounds: it is safe, and a free breakfast in the morning. (Agape Table, a non-profit offering up free breakfast weekday mornings for those in need, will soon leave All Saints’ for a new home at Wave Church on Furby Street.)

“For someone like me, it’s safer to come here and sleep at night than it is to be out in the streets somewhere… It’s not bad,” she said.

When told some people reportedly hadn’t heeded the church’s request to leave prior to the wedding, Neumann said: “That’s possible. I don’t know if they did that. And now, of course, there have been some people setting up.

“I think the key thing is that people understand you can sleep here at night, but then you have to move out during the day.”

Neumann said there are costs associated with letting even a handful of people stay on church grounds, including paying for the portable toilet that remains on site, as well as requiring members of the congregation to volunteer time to help keep the area as clean as possible.

In addition, he said the church has been in touch with other social service organizations in West Broadway to see what can be done to address the growing needs of the neighbourhood’s homeless population.

“It’s a couple hundred dollars each month to keep the (portable toilet) in there and clean. Volunteers come in and sweep the gardens, making sure there are no needles, picking up garbage when they see it, things like that,” Neumann said.

“This is a meagre response compared to the need we’re seeing. We’re just a volunteer organization. Our resources are limited. But we can at least do this much. We can at least provide them with a safe place to sleep at night.”

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @rk_thorpe