ProPublica is a nonprofit news company that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive the biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
One afternoon in May, Teresa Stratton sat in a walker near a freeway in Portland, Oregon, and talked about how much she wanted to live indoors. She missed having uninterrupted sleep in her bed and having running water.
Living outdoors, the 61-year-old says, “dirt gets into your skin.” “It doesn’t come out anymore, so you have to choose.”
Living indoors also means their belongings won’t be repeatedly confiscated by the crews the city hires to clear encampments. She said the encounters, commonly known as “sweeps,” were “the biggest disappointment in the world,” noting that she lost her late husband’s remains in the sweeps.
Over the past year, my colleagues Ruth Talbot, Asia Fields, Maya Miller, and I have learned that cities sometimes ignore their own policies and court orders, and as a result, during encampment clearing. We’ve been investigating how homeless people’s belongings are taken away. It was also found that some cities were unable to store real estate in preparation for repossession. People told us that local authorities were taking everything from tents and sleeping bags to diaries, photos and memorabilia. Even when cities are ordered to stop seizing possessions and provide storage for stolen property, we find that people are rarely reunited with their belongings.
Loss can be traumatic and worsen health conditions, making it difficult for people like Stratton to find stability and recover.
Following a June Supreme Court ruling that allows local governments to penalize people who sleep outdoors even when shelter is not available, cities have recently passed new camping bans or expanded existing camping bans. Our report is particularly important as the United States begins to implement the prohibition against the United States.
President-elect Donald Trump will “take the homeless off the streets” by banning camping in urban areas, creating “tent cities” and making it easier to institutionalize people with severe mental illness. I swore. “Our once great cities have turned into uninhabitable, unsanitary nightmares, given over to homeless, drug addicts, violent and dangerously deranged people. Because of people’s whims, we are making a lot of people suffer, and they are actually unwell,” he said in a campaign video.
But our report shows there are more effective and compassionate ways for cities to address these issues.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness released an updated strategy to address the encampment response “humanely and effectively,” giving it the same urgency as other crises like tornadoes and wildfires. It advised the local community to take action at campgrounds. The city council recommends 30 days’ notice before removal and two days to pack up, unless there is an urgent public health and safety issue. (Most cities do not issue any notices if encampments are deemed dangerous or a threat to public safety.)
The city council also recommended that the city store their belongings for the period it would normally take to obtain permanent housing. We found that the maximum term for a store property in a city is 90 days. But the wait for permanent housing can be even longer.
If authorities, along with case managers and medical professionals, worked with unhoused people for weeks instead of days, then helped them clean up encampments and get inside, they would be able to remove their belongings. You will not be separated from your family and you will not have to manage your property. Mark Dorns, policy director for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, a homelessness research group that has developed recommendations to address the encampments, said they are being warehoused.
This approach puts caseworkers and service providers on the front lines of encampment removal. Research shows that sanitation personnel typically respond to such traumatic evacuations. And in America’s 100 largest cities, police typically work with health officials to not only shut down encampments, but also conduct warrant checks and arrest people for camping and trespassing.
Good journalism makes a difference.
Our nonprofit, independent newsroom has one job: to hold those in power accountable. Here’s how our research is driving real-world change.
We are trying something new. Was it helpful?
People are typically forced to relocate with no or minimal connections to housing and support. We heard from people that the shelter provision was sometimes just a piece of paper with a mass shelter phone number written on it, or just a mention of the shelter by city officials. .
In many American cities, this perpetuates a vicious cycle that displaces people into surrounding neighborhoods, leading to more residential complaints and more sweeps.
“We’ve been committed to deep cleaning, but we haven’t really looked at other options,” said Megan Welsh Carroll, co-founder and director of San Diego State University’s Sanitary Justice Project. he said. You can use the shower and toilet. “And I think if our sidewalks are cleaner and safer to walk on, we can bring back compassion and empathy.”
Sarah Rankin, a law professor at Seattle University who studies the criminalization of homelessness, said punitive policies, whether initiated by President Trump or by local governments, make homeless people less visible. , he said, would continue to undermine public sympathy. “All of these approaches are designed to create the illusion that the problem is getting better, but in reality, they just throw humans under the rug without considering our humanity or what’s really going on.” I’m just sweeping it under,” she said.
People experiencing homelessness said they already feel seen as a problem to be solved, rather than people to be helped. In reporting on this issue, we wanted ProPublica readers to recognize the humanity of the people we’ve met and talked to, so we gave them notecards and asked them to describe their cleaning experiences in their own words. I asked him to do so.
‘I lost everything’: The cost of cleaning up urban homelessness
We wanted our readers to have a deeper understanding of people like Kyra Gonzalez, a woman we met in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She said city officials recently took photos of the only daughter she had. As we talked, I discovered that her daughter and my 4-year-old have the same birthday. Making that connection helped me understand how emotionally destructive cleaning can be.
She said she knows her belongings are an “eyesore” so she keeps them out of the way. She also said her tent was taken by the city. Temperatures that month dropped to 14 degrees. “I cried because I was cold,” she said.
I asked her what the average person doesn’t understand about homelessness.
“I was once just like you,” she said, looking into my eyes. “Nothing has changed for me. I just don’t have a home, I don’t have a home.”
