Edmonton took down 9,500 homeless camps last year — 40% more than in 2023
CBC
Edmonton police and city crews removed nearly 9,500 homeless encampments in 2024 — up more than 40 per cent from the 6,700 they took down the year before, city data shows.
Costs to clean up sites went up by more than 240 per cent.
The city spent about $5.8 million last year to clean up about 5,300 encampment sites compared to $1.7 million to clean up 2,400 sites in 2023, according to its website. The city states that not every removal required the site to be cleaned up.
The Alberta government contributed $4.5 million in a one-time grant to help clean up camps in 2024, the city's website says.
Marta-Marika Urbanik, a criminology and sociology professor at the University of Alberta, has been studying the homelessness situation in 12 Canadian cities.
Simply removing encampments isn't working, nor is letting them proliferate, she said.
"We need to find ways to provide alternate housing and help solutions for our unhoused apart from just closing down encampments," Urbanik said in an interview Thursday.
More investment is needed in supportive housing to make sure those needs are met.
"Without meaningful funding allocated at all levels of government, there will be no meaningful massive improvements to our unhoused community members' lives."
The city and police started a ramped-up approach to closing encampments at the end of 2023.
Some advocates have called the crackdown inhumane, especially when crews force people to move in the coldest weather.
Jim Gurnett, a spokesperson for the Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness, calls the approach an attack on the most vulnerable.
"It's a disaster that's making life more unsafe and more unhealthy for people. It's a catastrophe that's really putting lives even in danger," Gurnett said in an interview this week.
"The ridiculous nature of it is that we know it's not working because we have seen the biggest increase in people who are living in homelessness over this past year that I've seen in 25 years of being around this issue."
