City Service Walk-Along: Encampment Cleaning Team

Written By Salimah Valiani

“If there were an encampment I wish was left, this would’ve been it. [It was] impeccably clean; there was a place for everything, even a stove and oven. Clearly, it’s someone with some serious survival skills.” She told me about a past clean-up. Together, we wondered about what conditions led this person down the path of living in an encampment deep in the woods. “I just don’t know.”

”The work is hard, but every time I look up, I mean, look at this view!” They then pointed at the breathtaking panorama of the North Saskatchewan River with the Tawatinâ bridge in the background.

These were just a few of the stories and comments I heard from members of the City’s Encampment Cleaning team. I joined this crew several months ago on a half-day outing to learn about their work as we cleaned up a site on the banks of the river valley, just below Jasper Avenue. 

The City’s Encampment Cleaning teams were profiled in the media during the December 2023 and January 2024 encampment removals. The role of the cleanup team, only after people have left the camp, is to clean and restore the site to what it was before—as best as possible. Perhaps, the most controversial were the team hazmat suits, which are mandated under Occupational Health & Safety regulations, but felt dehumanizing to many advocates and campers. 

“That period of clean up was rough, to have a microphone blaring in your ears while we tried to do our job.”

Despite the challenges that come with the work, this team has high retention rates and team morale in the City, which is clear from conversations I had with frontline workers and supervisors. I was curious to know why. 

The workers on the team I met that morning came from various backgrounds. Some joined as recently as 3 months ago, while others have been around for 20+ years. 

I asked them what lights them up every day when they come to work, despite difficult multi-day cleanups in some of the most hard to reach places in the city. Some talked about working outdoors and having the best view in the city. Some talked about the instant gratification of making a tangible contribution to helping the city look nice and be safe, and seeing the before and after effects of a clean-up which is highly impactful and rewarding. 

One staff member told me that sifting through what is left behind at each encampment site can tell you so much about the lived experience of whoever was there before. It makes you wonder about that person’s story, what were the life milestones that led to this point of living in a shack or a tent on the edge of the river bank, and reflect on what supports are or are not there in his or her life.

The site we were at that day felt like an impossible task to clean up, with left-behind items and garbage stretched out and covering all of the banks within my sightline. Even though temperatures were increasing in late March, much of the clothing, mattresses, metal pots and pans were still frozen to the ground in the shade. The team would have to return another day to finish the project. “This site will likely take about 5 days to clean up,” a team lead said. 

The site also experienced a recent fire, the smell of burnt plastic still lingering in the air. We speculated that perhaps the makeshift oven dug into the river bank got a little too heated. The flame caught a branch that spread quickly.

The river bank is a difficult place to get to, with its steep slope and thick vegetation. The sleeping area at the campsite was carved into the bank, with a clear indication of time and effort spent. 

I asked what happens when the site is cleaned up? How long will it take for the vegetation to be restored? What kind of efforts are we putting into the conservation and preservation of natural areas like this? Unfortunately, there currently are limited resources for restoration and preservation. River bank natural areas like this don't automatically restore themselves. It requires dedicated resources, which keep getting bumped in light of more urgent crises, such as augmenting the capacity of the encampment cleanup crew itself which has been largely underfunded over the years despite a growth in demand. The team is now staffed 7 days a week and has increased from 17 people a year ago to 56 today. This increase in team capacity allows them to quickly reduce the backlog of requests for clean-up that come from residents through 311 across Edmonton. 

At the time of my visit, the crew had, in the first 3 months of the year: 

  • Cleaned 804 sites;

  • Removed 364,460 kg of material (last year set the record of 1 million kg);

  • Collected 1207 propane tanks; and,

  • 1047 shopping carts (which I’m now exploring with administration for hopefully a win-win-win solution to take the burden off of the cleanup team). 

We all can agree that encampments are complex issues with no clear solution at hand, impacted by a myriad of factors such as a housing shortage and affordability crisis, mental health, addiction, poverty trauma, grief, lack of social and family support, and much more—few of these are properly within the control of a municipality. 

The Encampment Cleaning teams are instrumental in cleaning sites in the River Valley, the ravine system, on the sidewalk or streets, or in neighbourhoods. They operate only after the sites have been vacated. Other pieces of the response include housing support (which the City coordinates with other levels of government, and sets policy direction to maintain housing affordability), and most recently, the Navigation Support Centre that the province opened, despite my own skepticism about the outcomes achieved. These are all pieces the team shared that help make their job easier. 

Working alongside this crew gave me a deep appreciation and insights on the work itself, the humanity behind the scenes, and the interconnectedness of City core services within the broader social support ecosystem. 

To learn more about City’s encampment and housing efforts, please visit: https://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/initiatives_innovation/homeless-on-public-lands 

You can read one of my past blogs on the topic of Housing, Houselessness, and Encampment Response here: 


To read what I learned from other City service ride-alongs and walk-alongs, check out these blogs: 

Salimah Valiani
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