Forest Lawn encampment cleared, but bigger problems suggest fix only temporary

A large homeless encampment causing concern among Forest Lawn residents and business owners has been taken down. 

Officers and city workers cleared out an alleyway along 17 Ave. and 39 St. S.E. Thursday morning, following months of neighbourhood complaints and a CTV News report on Wednesday. 

"I'm going to say two dozen workers were here loading it all up in trucks," Alicia Mayers said. "It was nice to finally see."

Mayers caught the clean up on camera. Just hours later, standing in a space she hadn't been since July, she spoke about a new problem. 

"(Those in the encampment) will probably go somewhere else and it'll be another issue for security and bylaw," she said. "It's a never ending story."

Area residents are growing more and more concerned about an encampment in Forest Lawn.

For many that were there, there is nowhere to go. And with affordability issues only being amplified in recent months, the area councillor believes more encampments are just a matter of time. 

"It's definitely being driven by the mental health and addictions crisis and it's exacerbated as we rebound from the downturn caused by the affordability crisis," Gian-Carlo Carra said. "It is going to get worse before it gets better, so we need to tackle it at the large system level and at the local level."

Those who provide support resources in the city agree. 

Cliff Wiebe with the Salvation Army says there's reasons some people don't want to go to shelters -- and there's no point in judging the decisions of another. 

"If we think about it through that lens, it gives us a compassionate response to say 'if I was in that situation, how would I want to be treated?'"

Wiebe also says homelessness shouldn't be a foreign idea to any Canadian.

"I think we are all just a few degrees away from that place ourselves," he said. "I always say I could be driving down Deerfoot, get in an accident and end up in a hospital on a morphine drip. I don't know how my body is going to react to opioids."