Business association asks council for help with public toilet problem

The Chinatown and Little Italy Business Association says it has run out of solutions to deal with homeless people using downtown streets, alleys and backyards as toilets.

The topic of toilets came up during Tuesday’s Executive Committee meeting at city hall.

Two porta-potties were set up last year near Hope Mission and Mary Burlie Park as part of a pilot project designed to mitigate the problem.

However, Ratan Lawrence with the association says people instead used the porta-potties as a discrete place to take drugs, leaving behind syringes and paraphernalia that posed an obvious health risk and also cost money to clean up.

The porta-potties have since been removed, but the problem remains, says Lawrence.

She thinks building permanent washroom facilities – like those on Whyte Avenue – in the area would be an improvement, but could also introduce new problems to an already frustrating situation.

“This is a very special, delicate area that we put a public washroom – you don’t know what kind of activities they can create inside the washroom,” she said, noting that the neighbourhood’s high concentration of people with mental health problems further complicates the matter.

She said many local business owners worry that having a permanent washroom built near their property could lead to groups of homeless people congregating there.

“[If} you have a permanent washroom next to a business, you create a crowd,” Lawrence said. “They may be using that area as a hiding place, sitting area – they congregate there.

“These are the challenges that we have. It's not that the businesses ... don't want to find a solution – we've been working on it for a number of years – we don't know what's the next step, what we’re going to do.”

Prevention is only solution

Speaking Tuesday, Mayor Don Iveson was hesitant to completely discard the idea of porta-potties, suggesting there may be a way to design and manage porta-potties in a way that could prevent their use as drug shelters.

However, Iveson said that would only act as a Band-Aid – and that prevention is the only solution with staying power.

“It’s reducing the number of people who are homeless through continued attention to the 10-year plan to end homelessness – not just the city’s, but the province’s,” he said.

“That involves creating a lot more permanent supportive housing for people with really complex addictions and mental health problems – those are the people who are defecating on the streets of our city.”

In the meantime, Iveson said the discussion merits further investigation.