Teresa Stratton sat on a walker near a freeway in Portland, Oregon, on a May afternoon and talked about how much she wanted to live inside. She lacked uninterrupted sleep in bed and water.
When you live outside, “the dirt soaks into your skin,” the 61-year-old said. “You have to pick it because it just doesn’t come out anymore.”
Living inside would also mean her belongings would no longer be repeatedly confiscated by crews the city hires to clear the camps. These reunions, commonly known as “purgings,” are “the biggest disappointment in the world,” she said, noting that she lost her late husband’s ashes.
Over the past year, my colleagues Ruth Talbot, Asia Fields, Maya Miller, and I have explored how cities sometimes ignore their own policies and court orders, resulting in them taking the belongings of homeless people during sweeps. We also found that some cities do not store property so it can be reclaimed. People told us about local authorities take away everything from tents to sleeping bags to diaries, photographs and memorabilia. Even when cities are ordered to stop seizing property and ensure that the property they take is kept, we found that people are rarely reunited with their possessions.
Losses are traumatic, can be debilitating, and can make it harder for someone like Stratton to find stability and come back inside.
Our reporting is especially timely because cities recently enacted new camping bans or began enforcing existing ones following a Supreme Court ruling in June that allows local officials to fine people for sleeping outsideeven if there is no shelter.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to ban urban camping and “take the homeless off our streets” by creating “tent cities” and making it easier to institutionalize people with severe mental illness. “Our once great cities have turned into unlivable, unsanitary nightmares, given over to the homeless, addicted, violent and dangerously insane. We make many suffer because of the whims of a few people who are very sick, and they are really sick,” he said in campaign video.
But our reports show that cities have more effective and compassionate ways to address these challenges.
Earlier this year, the US Interagency Council on Homelessness released updated data strategies to deal with camps “humanely and effectively,” advising communities to treat camp responses with the same urgency as any other crisis — such as tornadoes or wildfires. The council recommends giving 30 days’ notice of removal and giving people two days to pack unless there is an urgent health and safety issue. (Most cities do not report when encampments are considered unsafe or a threat to public safety.)
The council also recommends that cities keep the property for as long as is normally required to obtain permanent housing. We found that the longest holding period for property in the city is 90 days. But you can wait much longer for permanent housing.
If officials, along with case managers and health workers, had worked with the homeless for weeks instead of days before sweeping the camp to help them get inside, they wouldn’t have been separated from their belongings. and their property would not have to be taken away. are stored in warehouses, said Mark Dons, policy director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, a homelessness research group that developed recommendations for solving campsites.
This approach would put health workers and service providers at the forefront of eliminating the camps. Instead usually handled by sanitation workers these traumatic movements, research shows. And in America’s 100 largest cities, police routinely work alongside sanitation workers to not only shut down campgrounds, but also conduct warrant checks and cite people for being campers or trespassers.
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People are usually forced to move with no—or minimal—connections to housing or support. We heard from people that the shelter offers were sometimes just a piece of paper with the phone numbers of the shelters being picked up or city workers mentioning the shelter.
In many American cities, this perpetuates the cycle, pushing people out into the surrounding neighborhoods, causing residents to complain more, leading to more sweeps.
“We got completely invested in the sweeps and didn’t explore other options,” said Megan Welsh Carroll, co-founder and director of San Diego State University’s Sanitation Justice Project, which advocates for homeless shelters. can shower and use the toilet. “And I wonder if we could bring back a little compassion and empathy if our sidewalks were cleaner and safer to walk on.”
Punitive policies, whether they come from Trump or local governments, make homeless people more invisible, which will continue to erode public compassion, said Sarah Rankin, a Seattle University law professor who studies the criminalization of homelessness. “All of these approaches are designed to create the illusion that problems are getting better, when in reality people are just being swept under the rug without regard for their humanity, without regard for what’s really happening to them,” she said.
Those who have become homeless have told us that they already feel they are seen as problems to be solved rather than people to be helped. In reporting on this issue, we wanted to help ProPublica readers recognize the humanity of the people we met and talked to, so we gave them note cards and asked them describe their experience with sweeps in their own words.
We wanted our readers to better understand people like Kira Gonzalez, a woman I met in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She told me that city officials had recently photographed her daughter. During the conversation we discovered that her daughter and my 4 year old share the same birthday. Making that connection helped me understand how emotionally devastating purges can be.
She told me she knows her stuff is an “eyesore” so she tries to keep it away. She also told me that her tent was taken away by the city. The temperature this month dropped to 14 degrees. “I was crying because it was cold,” she said.
I asked her what the public doesn’t understand about homelessness.
“I was just like you once,” she said, looking into my eyes. “I’m no different now, I’m just homeless, homeless.”
