Osborne Village park turned into 'garbage dump' highlights city's inaction on homelessness, residents say

Needles, shoes, pizza boxes — these are just a handful of items that are littered across the ground, and piled up in  several shopping carts, in Gerald James Lynch Park in Winnipeg's Osborne Village.

The garbage has been mounting in the park — just south of the Osborne Street Bridge, and between Roslyn Road and the Assiniboine River — for nearly a week, residents say, near a homeless encampment under the bridge.

Some neighbours feel the city isn't doing enough to maintain the neighbourhood and help house homeless people.

"It looks like a garbage dump. I know there's a terrible homeless problem, but there's gotta be a better solution than just letting people fend for themselves," said Janet Zelnicek, who lives in the area. "It seems almost hopeless."

The trash has become an "eyesore" in the community, she said, but that's a secondary problem compared to the issue of homelessness, she said.

"There's gotta be a safe place for people who obviously are at the end of their rope … and they have nowhere else to go," she said. "I think as a society we owe them [that]."

In July, the City of Winnipeg changed its approach to dealing with complaints of homeless camps, after public outcry over a proposal to hire a contractor to remove temporary shelters.

The city's 311 service and Winnipeg police now share reports or complaints of temporary shelters directly with Main Street Project — a community group that helps people living on the street — rather than focusing on taking down the tents, tarps and structures, a city spokesperson told CBC News last month.

When contacted by CBC Friday, the Main Street Project said its executive director would not be available for comment until next week, but the agency has previously said its objective in this new role is to help people who are living on the street find stable housing, rather than push them from spot to spot. 

But at least one of the homeless campers living underneath the Osborne Street Bridge told CBC she doesn't want the help of Main Street Project or other shelters, and prefers to live in an encampment.

In an email statement provided to CBC News, the city wrote its current role "is limited in cleaning up vacant encampments once outreach agencies have assisted individuals with finding alternate housing arrangements," and said further inquiries should be directed to the Main Street Project.

While she understands people in the area want the park cleaned up, Zelnicek said just just doing that wouldn't address the real issue.

"Trying to make it pretty isn't going to fix people's problems," she said.

"It's a Band-Aid on the problem. They don't want to look at it and they don't want to deal with the underlying problem of homelessness and addiction."

End Homelessness Winnipeg has estimated that there are about 200 people living outdoors in the city.

Feeling forgotten

Anton Plesca lives across the bridge from Osborne Village. He said the homeless camp under the bridge, which was set up a month ago, is an indication of the city's housing issues.

"You feel a little bit ashamed of the City of Winnipeg, that they don't like clean this up or just don't have appropriate services for people who live under the bridge or live in parks," he said.

Plesca believes that if a park in a different part of the city had been turned into a dumping ground, the city would be moving a lot quicker to deal with the issue.

"I have a feeling that the municipality doesn't truly care as much about downtown … [and the focus is on] new development areas like Sage Creek, Bridgwater," he said.

CBC News spoke to close to a dozen residents who live in the area, all of whom echoed the sense that a similar problem in a different part of the city would have been addressed by now.

"I think they should kind of take care of downtown a little bit more," said Plesca.