What I Learned Reporting Homeless Camp Evictions — ProPublica

On a May afternoon, Teresa Stratton sat in her walker near a freeway in Portland, Oregon, talking about what she wanted to live in. He misses sleeping without interruption in bed and having running water.

When you live outside, “dirt gets under your skin,” the 61-year-old said. “You have to pick it, because it’s not coming out.”

Living inside also meant that his belongings would no longer be repeatedly confiscated by crews hired by the city to clear the camps. These encounters, commonly known as “sweeps,” are “the biggest failure in the world,” she said, noting that her late husband’s ashes were lost in a sweep.

Last year, my colleagues Ruth Talbot, Asia Fields, Maya Miller and I investigated how cities sometimes ignore their own policies and court orders, resulting in their taking of the things that the people did not have a place to live in during the clearing of the camp. We also found that some cities failed to preserve the property so that it could be returned. People told us Local governments have removed everything from tents and sleeping bags in journals, pictures and mementos. Even when cities are ordered to stop seizing things and to provide storage for the property they take, we find that people are rarely reunited with their possessions.

Losses can be traumatic, worsen health outcomes, and make it difficult for people like Stratton to find strength and turn within.

Our reporting is especially relevant because cities have recently passed new camping bans or begun enforcing those already on the books following the Supreme Court’s June ruling that allows local officials to punish people for sleeping outsideeven without shelter.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to ban urban camping and “take the homeless off our streets,” by creating “tent cities” and by accelerating institutionalization in people with severe mental illness. “Our once great cities have become uninhabitable, bad nightmares, given over to the homeless, the drug addicts, and the violent and dangerously insane. We hurt many because of the whims of some who are not so good, and they are not good,” he said in a campaign video.

But our reporting shows that there are more effective and compassionate ways for cities to deal with these issues.

The US Interagency Council on Homelessness earlier this year released an update strategies for resolving camps “Humane and effective,” advises communities to treat camp responses with the same urgency as other crises – such as tornadoes or wildfires. The council recommends giving 30 days notice before evictions and giving people two days to pack, unless there is an urgent public health and safety issue. (Most cities don’t give any notice if the camps are considered dangerous or a threat to public safety.)

The council also recommends that cities store only as much as is usually needed for a person to obtain permanent housing. We have found that the longest any city has held a property is 90 days. But the wait for permanent housing can be even longer.

When officers, along with case managers and health care professionals, work with the homeless for weeks, instead of days, before sweeping into a camp to help they can get in, they can’t be separated from their possessions and their possessions don’t have to be stored in warehouses, said Marc Dones, the policy director for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing initiative, a research group that no housing developed. recommendations for resolving the camps.

This approach will put case workers and service providers on the front lines of camp evacuations. However, usually taken care of by sanitation workers these traumatic displacements, research shows. And in America’s 100 largest cities, police often work alongside sanitation workers to not only conduct camp closures, but also run warrant checks and cite people for camping or violation.

People are often forced to move with no – or little – connection to housing or support. We’ve heard from people that shelter providers sometimes just have a piece of paper with phone numbers for shelters or city workers who refer to a shelter.

In many American cities, this perpetuates a cycle by pushing people into surrounding neighborhoods, causing residents to complain more, leading to more sweeps.

“We’ve done everything with sweeps, and we haven’t really explored other options,” said Megan Welsh Carroll, co-founder and director of San Diego State University’s Project for Sanitation Justice, which advocates for the spaces. where people experience homelessness. able to shower and use the toilet. “And I wonder if we can bring back some compassion and some empathy if our sidewalks feel cleaner and safer to walk on.”

Punitive policies, whether they come from Trump or local governments, make the homeless increasingly invisible, which will continue to erode public compassion, said Sara Rankin, a professor of law at Seattle University studying the criminalization of homelessness. “All these methods are designed to create the illusion that the problems are getting better, when in fact they are sweeping people under the rug without regard for their humanity, without regard for what that’s exactly what will happen to them,” he said.

Those who have experienced homelessness tell us that they now feel like they are seen as problems to be solved, not people to be helped. In reporting the issue, we wanted to help ProPublica readers recognize the humanity of the people we met and spoke with, so we gave them notecards and asked them to describe their sweeping experiences in their own words.

We want our readers to better understand people like Kyra Gonzales, a woman I met in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He told me that city officials had just taken the photos he had taken of his daughter. While talking, we discovered that his daughter and my 4-year-old son share the same birthday. Making that connection helped me understand how emotionally devastating it can be.

He told me that he knew his stuff was “eye-catching,” so he tried not to shy away from it. He also told me that his tent was taken by the city. The temperature that month dropped to 14 degrees. “I cried because it was cold,” he said.

I asked him what the public doesn’t understand about homelessness.

“I’m just like you before,” he said, looking me in the eye. “I am no different now, I have no home, no home.”