Vancouver tent city residents pack up and move to new site

Residents of Vancouver's "Ten Year Tent City" packed up their belongings and began setting up camp at a new location Tuesday evening.

The move followed an injunction granted earlier this week by a B.C. Supreme Court justice, who ordered the campers to abandon the site at 950 Main Street by Wednesday at noon.

About 50 residents packed their belongings in a U-Haul truck and marched behind it to their new encampment, in an empty lot near Franklin Street and Glen Drive.

"They're trying to put us in shelters and we don't want that," resident Crystal Cardinal explained.

"We just want to stay as a group. If we do separate then nobody's going to be able to look after the other person. We don't want to just end up on the street again because it's not safe."

The campers had been living at the Main Street tent city since April in protest of the city's ongoing housing crisis, taking their name from a previous tent city on the same site in 2007.

Justice Joel Groves issued the injunction Monday in favour of Lu'ma Native Housing, a group that holds a lease from the city and plans to build a 26-unit building on the site for low-income Indigenous tenants.

Vancouver had previously sought a similar injunction, but that was denied in May.