Kelowna’s tent city policies ‘make people want to give up’
Members of Kelowna’s unhoused population and local housing advocates are warning that a new city strategy is putting the health and safety of unhoused people at risk.
For almost a decade Kelowna has had a dedicated temporary sheltering site just to the north of its downtown core where unhoused people could legally set up a tent and stay awhile. Locals call this place the “tent city,” while city officials refer to it as Outdoor Sheltering 4, or OS4.
The area is a stretch of the Okanagan Rail bike trail in an industrial area, with a creek on one side and a fence on the other. It has portable toilets and, as of last fall, potable water. According to counts done by the Unhoused Solidarity Collective Okanagan, or USCO, it housed about 160 people in the average summer and 100 in the winter.
Advocates and unhoused people say bylaw officers recently told residents, with little to no warning, that they had to pack up their entire campsite and move to a different part of the tent city. To stay in the restructured tent city residents were required to sign a new document that limits how they can shelter. Local housing advocates say this is the first time Kelowna has decamped the tent city.
Decamping people like this severs vulnerable people from the few resources they had access to and makes people feel hopeless and isolated, which can push them towards using substances, they say.
Research has shown decampments increase the risk of a fatal overdose or medical emergency.
The way bylaw and police officers treat unhoused people “degrades us, which is a big mental health issue for a lot of people,” Whynter Jones, a tent city resident, told The Tyee.
“It makes people want to give up. Like what’s the point of fighting if they keep treating us like this, talking to us like this, treating us like crap? People give up and turn to drugs they wish they could quit.”
Another woman who asked to be identified by only her first name, Samantha, said people are “exhausted” and “feel defeated.”
“People are coping the best they can. For a lot of people that means an increase in substance use,” she said.
An estimated 50 to 70 unhoused people are now sheltering in dispersed spots across the city where bylaw officers can tell them to pack up and move along at any time, Tony Baxter told The Tyee.
Baxter is a member of USCO, which is largely made up of unhoused tent city residents and other community members.
Baxter said at least two tent city residents have died since being decamped in late March.
The Tyee asked the BC Coroners Service if it had seen a spike in overdose fatalities within the Kelowna area since March but did not hear back. As of early June, the most up-to-date data released on overdose deaths was for March 2025.
“This is when people start taking their lives,” Jones said. “They have no one around and can’t handle it.”
Kevin Mead, acting community safety director for the City of Kelowna, told The Tyee he disagrees that a “decampment” happened. He said people were moved from their spots at OS4 for cleaning and infrastructure purposes. The city has maintained a dedicated public space where unhoused people can camp, Mead added.
Videos appear to show alarming incidents
Before the decampment and restructuring in March, the tent city, or OS4, was a space where an unhoused person could set up camp and meet service provider outreach teams who would come through the area, Cassie Van Camp, a community organizer with USCO, told The Tyee.
Residents could have visitors, make their camp comfortable and feel a sense of autonomy, Jones said. The downsides included some danger and the risk that, if you left to go to work, bylaw officers could come and take all of your things, she added.
The tent city used to foster a sense of community where people would share what little they had, Samantha told The Tyee. Samantha was previously unhoused and spent a lot of time in the tent city.
“If you had two blankets, you gave one away,” she said. “People were taking care of each other. We were separate but together.”
USCO members said the City of Kelowna’s attitude toward its tent city has been shifting over the last year. That came to a head the morning of March 26, they said.
On that day bylaw and RCMP officers set up fences around the tent city and told all campers they had 30 minutes to pack up and move to a different section of the tent city, USCO members said.
Anything that couldn’t be packed up in time was loaded into the back of a truck and taken away to be impounded at the owner’s expense until they could pay the city to get it back, Van Camp said. People were not told where their things were impounded, and if bylaw judges the item to be of low value it’s just thrown out, Van Camp added.
“It created absolute chaos and hell for everyone who was living there,” Van Camp said.
Members of the press, USCO, legal counsel, legal observers and Indigenous organizations offering cultural support were prohibited from entering the fenced-off area, Baxter said.
“In the next 24 hours they slashed open tents, forced people to move and threw out people’s belongings,” he added. The decampment ran from March 26 to April 2.
Videos published to Instagram by USCO appear to show several incidents from the decampment. In one video, bylaw officers appear to tell a woman, “You don’t have any rights down here.”
In another video a man is surrounded by 11 bylaw or police officers and two sanitation workers. When he tries to grab a bag, a police officer pushes him and says, “Hey Calvin, if you touch stuff you’re going to be arrested for mischief.” The man replies, “This is my shit.” “And it’s being cleaned up,” the officer says. “I’m moving it,” the man replies, as sanitation workers continue to throw bags in the truck.
People raced to pack up their lives but often weren’t quick enough and had things like family ashes, their beds and sources of heat taken from them, Jones said.
Mead said the actions taken by city staff amounted to “seasonal cleaning” so “equipment could be brought in to clean the space and make the necessary adjustments to infrastructure.”
Mead said the day had “been socialized for a number of weeks prior, although a specific date had not been identified.”
The Tyee contacted the Kelowna RCMP to ask how many officers were involved in the decampment and how much the weeklong initiative cost but did not hear back.
New tent city rules brought in by city
The “seasonal cleaning” permanently restructured the tent city.
The area is now fenced in and divided into two sections for full-time sheltering and for overnight sheltering. The full-time zone has 60 sites “and replicate[s] much of how an indoor shelter operates,” with on-site security but no curfew, Mead told The Tyee in an email. Around nine-tenths of the full-time spots have filled up, he added.
Outreach workers can still come to the tent city, and “outreach services remain available to all those sheltering outside, whether they are at OS4 or elsewhere around the city,” Mead said.
To stay in the tent city unhoused people are asked to sign a “good neighbour agreement” and an OS4 code of conduct, which lays out 14 rules.
Samantha said she finds some rules fair and others unreasonable, like the one that says a person can have only one tent and one tarp per site. The rule forces you to decide if you want to put a tarp under your tent or over your tent to protect you from the rain, she said.
Other rules prohibit fire or prohibit any items that are not “deemed necessary for outdoor sheltering,” which Samantha said will impact people in the freezing winter months.
“Sometimes you don’t care about a rule because you just have to try to exist the next day,” she said.
Visitors are also prohibited.
“The vast majority of tent city residents have decided not to sign,” Baxter said.
On April 16 Stop the Sweeps Victoria sent an open letter to the Kelowna mayor and city council in support of USCO and the tent city residents, asking them to revoke the good neighbour agreement and to let the tent city govern itself using a peer-led model without fences or limits on when or how a person can stay.
‘People can’t afford to live in this town’
“Where do you want us to go?” has become a common refrain for unhoused people in Kelowna, Baxter said.
The living wage is about $26.77 an hour in Kelowna but the minimum wage in B.C. is $17.85, according to reporting by Kelowna Capital News.
“It’s simple arithmetic. People can’t afford to live in this town, or they have to choose between food and rent,” he said.
“Many [unhoused people] just lost a job, had a health emergency or there was a fire. And all of a sudden you’re in a spot without a safety net and you’re unhoused.”
There are a handful of shelter spots that occasionally turn over, Baxter said, “but not nearly enough shelter spots to house all of the residents at the tent city, so it’s a non-starter.”
Jones said she’s been kicked out of two of the city’s shelters and prefers to live on the streets rather than at the remaining shelters.
She also doesn’t want to live at the restructured tent city.
“The entire place is gated off and security guards stop you,” she said. “There’s three layers of gates. It’s a prison, or worse than. There’s no visitors, you’re not allowed to make the place feel comfortable, no heat at night.”
Jones said she wishes the City of Kelowna would let unhoused people have their autonomy.
Samantha said she’d like to see the city invest in housing and social programs and improve access to substance-use treatment programs.
Not all unhoused people use substances, she added. But if they do and they want to access treatment, there are a lot of barriers. If you don’t have photo ID, for example, you’re not allowed in treatment, she said.
There’s also a lack of comprehensive supports for a person going through voluntary treatment, such as helping a person get into housing or find employment, Samantha said. Without these supports a person might graduate and “end up back on the same street with the same people, but without their vice or coping strategy,” she said.
Van Camp said she’d like to see the city invest in housing and social programs instead of resources to surveil and criminalize unhoused people. That just “erases people who are unhoused and criminalizes poverty,” Van Camp said.
The city could save money by restructuring the tent city to be a peer-led and self-managed space, with city support to provide resources to maintain the site, such as cleaning supplies, brooms and fire extinguishers, Baxter said.
“When you give people autonomy to manage their own affairs and support them to do so, people rise to the occasion,” he added.
Bylaw could still visit the site but on a set schedule, so people could go to work without worrying of a surprise inspection where their things are confiscated, he said.
This would help reduce daily police interactions and create space for social services to move in and support residents’ mental health or help them access voluntary treatment.
Jones and Samantha said kindness, from city officials or their Kelowna neighbours, would go a long way.
The other day Jones was given a mouldy peanut butter and jam sandwich by city officials, she said. When she asked if she could have a different sandwich, she said, a bylaw officer told her to “pick around it,” adding, “Isn’t that what you guys do?”
“It shouldn’t be this way,” she told The Tyee. “That’s just wrong.”
Samantha agreed. “It takes an immense amount of strength to get through what a lot of people here go through,” she said.
— This article was originally published by The Tyee
