In Vancouver, a small portside green space called CRAB Park has a unique claim to fame: it is home to the city’s only legal tent encampment community. It has semi-permanent infrastructure, including a kitchen tent. The city is allowed to clean the area up but not evict the residents, who each occupy 10-by-10-foot plots.
For Maclean’s, Sarah Berman and Jesse Winter co-authored a fascinating feature called “The Encampment Wars,” about how the tent city became protected. They describe the way one young lawyer, just four months out of law school, brought a challenge to the province’s Supreme Court on behalf of the residents and changed the face of Vancouver.
Increasingly, courts are ruling along similar lines, prohibiting municipalities from clearing encampments. The CRAB Park story is playing out across the country, wherever unhoused people are pitching tents, between highrises, under bridges, along riverbanks and in parks.
–Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief
