Vancouver, renowned for its natural beauty and laid back lifestyle, has a human waste problem so bad that businesses have hired “poop fairies” to speed the cleanup on city sidewalks.
Dodging human and dog waste has become a real problem for pedestrians navigating the city’s sidewalks, and it’s not just a problem plaguing the Downtown Eastside. The city’s own feces removal response program can’t seem to keep up so business improvement districts have hired the “poop fairies.”
“Everybody down here feels that you end up walking in stuff no matter where you go. So, basically, it’s getting tracked around,” said Dave Hamm, vice president of the Vancouver Network of Drug Users, which counts about 3,000 people in its membership.
He’s encountered people defecating in public on the city’s Downtown Eastside.
“What are you going to do? You give them their privacy,” Hamm said. “It’s in the alleys more than the sidewalk.”
He’s been lobbying the city for more public toilets for over a decade.
“It’s one of the worst things down here that we have to put up with,” Hamm said of poop littering the ground.
Vancouver launched its feces removal program four years ago “to address feces complaints submitted through 311 and to proactively patrol and collect feces in the Downtown and Downtown Eastside areas of Vancouver,” Doug Thomas, who speaks for the city, said in an email.
“The program is run by Mission Possible under the city’s street cleaning grant program,” Thomas said.
“Mission Possible staff collect feces for proper disposal and sanitize affected areas with a disinfectant spray. Collection takes place weekdays across five Business Improvement Areas: Chinatown, Downtown east of Burrard, Strathcona, Gastown, and Hastings Crossing.”
“The issue is something we see throughout the downtown area,” said Walley Wargolet, executive director of the Gastown Business Improvement Society.
Wargolet pegs a lot of the problem on “folks not picking up after their dogs.”
His business improvement area and the neighbouring one in Hastings Crossing are both providing free bags for dog poop as a trial.
But he’d like to be able to test the collected feces to determine whether it came from a canine or human source. “We’re hoping someone will come up with an idea about that, because I’m sure that there’s analysis that could be done.”
There are some public restrooms available in his area for people struggling with homelessness. “But maybe not enough,” Wargolet said. “We also know that some folks are just really severely mentally ill who cannot take care of themselves even if there’s washrooms close by. In some cases, we’ve seen this, where there are (public toilets) but they’re still not using them.”
The businesses have also hired Clean Start B.C., a non-profit social enterprise, which provides people, known as “poop fairies,” to clean up the feces. “We were Monday through Friday, but we moved that to Monday, Wednesday, Friday, just from a cost perspective,” Wargolet said, noting he’s budgeted between $30,000 and $40,000 this year for the service.
“It’s not cheap work because it’s not a fun job and they also are sanitizing the areas as well.”
The city’s feces removal program “is not reactive enough,” Wargolet said, noting that it can take up to 72 hours for a response. “One, it doesn’t look great in the area,” he said. “But it also creates messes for folks as people step in it and walk into stores and things. It’s not a good situation so we’re trying to tackle it the best that we can.”
About 98 per cent of the feces collected by the city are discovered through regular patrols, “even before a complaint is filed,” Thomas said, noting residents or businesses can report feces through 311 or the Van311 app.
In 2022, the city’s feces program logged 1,311 complaints and collected 20,800 poops. Complaints dropped to 753 the next year, with 19,900 feces collected. Last year, the program fielded 761 complaints and collected 17,670 feces. In the first three months of this year, it logged 232 complaints and collected 3,370 poops.
Hepatitis A outbreaks have been linked to public defecation, said Lezlie Lowe, author of No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs.
“There are many diseases that are carried in feces, and we don’t necessarily think it’s going to affect us, but we step in feces accidentally and we bring that, and the pathogens in it, into our homes,” Lowe said.
“If you’re out on a nice patio enjoying a beer and some nachos and a fly lands on some human s–t and then comes and lands on the cheese on your nachos, it’s serious.”
Landon Hoyt, executive director of the Hastings Crossing Business Improvement Association, has “poop fairies” operating five days a week, with a two-hour shift each day.
“They’ll clean, at the latest, within 24 hours (of a complaint), but ideally it’s usually sooner than that.”
The poop problem “has been getting worse over the years,” Hoyt said, because of higher rates of drug use, homelessness and the closure of drop-in centres and “affordable businesses where people could go in and get a $1 coffee” and use the bathroom.
His area has a 30 per cent business vacancy rate on the ground level. “Safety and cleanliness issues” play a role in that, as does “general neglect” Hoyt said, noting many businesses and social enterprises that once offered bathrooms have left or closed.
“No one wants to poop on the sidewalk,” he said. “It’s embarrassing; it’s terrible.”
But when people are using drugs “they may not have control, or they may not have the dignity or care” to use a public bathroom, he said.
There are some public toilets in his area. Three are supervised 24/7; one is currently broken. “I’d love to have one on every other corner.”
He’s hoping to see the city add a new public toilet to his area and replace the broken one by the end of this year. Both will be Portland Loos, which cost about $135,000 each, with another $40,000 to get them installed.
“The Portland Loo was created by the City of Portland, Oregon, which had this problem with open defecation and public urination, and they also had a significant homeless population,” Lowe said.
“A lot of public bathrooms are created either like, ‘We’ve got to keep these homeless people out,’ or, ‘We’re going to build it for the homeless people.’ But the Portland Loo was designed for everybody.”
The public toilets — built by Madden Fabrication — are large enough to take a baby stroller or a bicycle inside, she said.
“It’s got potable water on the outside so everybody can use it to wash their hands or get drinking water,” Lowe said. “And the bottom is open, so you can see if somebody is in distress in there.”
But she cautioned that more public toilets alone won’t solve the problem of open defecation.
“It’s one part of the puzzle,” she said. “You have more bathrooms. That gives more people more opportunities to, I’m not going to say make good choices, because there is no person who would be like, ‘There’s a bathroom, but I think I’ll just go between these two parked cars.’ Nobody is thinking that.”
It’s “highly simplistic” to think adding more public toilets is going to solve the problem, “but that is the core first step,” Lowe said. “Obviously if somebody is having a difficult reaction to a drug or even food poisoning, it’s not always going to go the way we hope it would go.”
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