Inside America's homeless encampment sweeps
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This is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. Today, it's another episode in our special collaboration with ProPublica, the award-winning nonprofit newsroom, where we combine On Point's analysis with ProPublica's investigative reporting to bring new perspectives to some of the most complex issues facing the nation. My name is Stephanie, and I am currently 44 years old. I'm currently homeless, and I've been homeless for, I believe, nine years now.

Across the nation, homelessness is at a crisis point. More than 650,000 people experienced homelessness on one night in January 2023, according to point-in-time count data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It's a record high, up 12% from 2022.

Stephanie lives in Portland, Oregon. In Multnomah County, where Portland is located, more than 6,000 people were counted as homeless in 2023, a staggering 20% increase from the year prior. Many of those people experiencing homelessness are able to find a place to stay of some kind, temporarily staying with friends or family or in a shelter. But 40% of those 650,000 people have no secure accommodation at all.

They are living on the street, in tents or in vehicles, in many of the nation's most populated cities. Stephanie told her story to ProPublica's Asia Fields in October. Stephanie says she became homeless after she lost her job and then her home. She moved around Portland, mostly living in trailers, until 2022, when she set up a tent camp near Johnson Creek in southeast Portland. Even though it is in the city, it was kind of a secluded area. There wasn't a lot of people around.

It was very peaceful out there, very quiet, and made life a lot easier for me at the time. Stephanie was there for more than a year, until one day in September 2023, when the city of Portland swept her encampment. When the sweep happened. It was a lot really fast. Removals of homeless encampments, commonly known as sweeps, have grown dramatically in recent years for a number of reasons.

In Portland, city officials say they're necessary to protect the safety of people living in the encampments and protect from potential harms to, quote, people living, working or commuting nearby, end quote. In many U.S. cities, notices must be posted before a sweep takes place. It's the city of Portland's policy to post notices no less than 72 hours before a planned clearing.

Local social service providers may also be notified so that caseworkers have an opportunity to help people find somewhere to move. Stephanie was not able to move in time.

The first day, a younger guy showed up and he was very compassionate the first day. He helped me to go through things and see what I wanted to keep. And when it became evident it was going to be a two-day thing, I decided that I would work through the night. The next morning, I went and got a few hours of sleep and

When I got there, I was like maybe 45 minutes late. They had already bagged up most of it, including irreplaceable things of my fiance's that had died. The wedding engagement ring he had given me. There was his wallet and a couple other sentimental value items. And they had already bagged it all up. They had taken the cot and they took my purse as well. And I had my food stamp card and all the money I had. When I walked away that day, I had nothing.

ProPublica asked Portland city officials about Stephanie's experience. The city told ProPublica that, quote, They went on to say, quote, End quote.

It's Portland's policy to store personal items collected during encampment sweeps for at least 30 days. ProPublica examined policies and records from 14 U.S. cities. They found Portland stores the most items, but people reclaimed their property only 4% of the time in a recent 12-month period. Stephanie, who was pregnant at the time, had to walk and take multiple buses to get to the city's storage facilities.

When she got there, she says many of the items she most valued, keepsakes from her late fiancé and her purse, none of them were there. None of it was anything. There wasn't a stove to cook on. There wasn't a tent. There was nothing. It was all ridiculous, like garbage stuff. They don't know my life. They don't know what I need, what makes me feel safe, what doesn't. So why are they deciding for me what I can't keep? Laura Rood is communications and data coordinator for the city of Portland.

She says that the sweeps are high-stress events, both for contracted staff doing the work and the homeless people losing their possessions. Rude says that can lead to conflict over what's put in clear bags and sent to storage and what's packaged in black trash bags as waste. And this just kind of illustrates how tough these situations are when we hear from people about property being missing or things happening during removals. It

It's just, it becomes really hard to confirm details. Because I think the process is just so, it's stressful for people and our emotions are running high. Stephanie describes the days and months that followed the sweep as some of the hardest of her life. She slept on a sidewalk for the first time. She says she attempted suicide. It was the lowest point in my life, without a doubt. It takes real effort to gain the things that you need to survive.

I mean, it's not like, you know, we have money and a paycheck or we can go into a store and buy this stuff and everything. It's really hard to get that stuff. And so taking away from somebody homeless and expecting them to be able to pick themselves up and brush themselves off and, you know, find a job or housing or anything like that, it's never going to happen. It doesn't work that way.

Portland acknowledges that campsite sweeps aren't designed as a solution to homelessness. The city sees them as, quote, a necessary response to our ongoing homelessness crisis, end quote. Laura Rood says the city is working to further train staff to make the process less traumatic for the homeless residents living in the encampments.

We have to balance, you know, these competing needs of people living outside and knowing that camp removals are harmful for people, but with also the needs to kind of clean up and maintain city property and mitigate health and safety risks.

The ideal situation is that people will see the notice and at least be ready to move when our crews arrive or, you know, move before our crews arrive. And then we can just kind of pick up anything that's left behind, any trash or debris that's left behind. But it very rarely works out that way. In other words, the city has an obligation to protect the public health and safety of all Portland residents.

Kristen Van Buskirk moved to Portland in the 1990s, drawn to the city's cleanliness and vibrance. She owns Woonwinkle, a home goods store in the city's downtown, where evidence of Portland's homelessness crisis has become inescapable.

When the pandemic hit, there was just this crazy huge proliferation of tents and that definitely impacted my everyday. When I would walk from my house to my business, you know, I would choose carefully which direction to walk. I was kind of constantly pivoting so that I could walk on this side of the street or the other.

And my young son has completely learned to navigate the streets that way. You cross on this side of the street to avoid an encampment. You cross on that side of the street. And along the way, I would encounter things like feces, a porta potty that had been completely melted into the sidewalk because it caught on fire. Van Buskirk says she's seen a noticeable decrease in public encampments in the last few years.

She's noticing that tents are cleared more quickly, and she believes that the city is making progress. I would say the vast majority of Portlanders approach the problem with equal parts of compassion and pragmatism. The people that I talk to know that being unsheltered is not safe for anybody.

And we have compassion for these folks and we want to treat them with respect and we want to find solutions that are respectful and that help them in the long term. And you can see that in our last election. We elected a mayor who campaigned on ending unsheltered homelessness much quicker than what the city and the county have been talking about. And he won easily.

So I know that Portlanders want to see this happen. I have seen tons of progress. I've seen so much progress and I'm proud of my city for the progress that it's made. Everyone wants to see it go faster. From July 2023 to July 2024, Portland cleared 5,857 tents and camps, or about 19 camps per day on average, according to city data.

However, frustration over the tent camps grew to a point where homelessness became the central issue in the city's 2024 mayoral race. Keith Wilson won that race. He's owner of Titan Freight Systems, a trucking company. Until last month, he'd never held public office. Wilson once experienced homelessness himself. After college, he moved to New York, didn't land a job, and spent nights sleeping in LaGuardia Airport.

After returning to Portland and building up his family's trucking business, Wilson founded Shelter Now, a nonprofit seeking to build safe alternative shelter for Portland's growing unhoused population. He said earlier this year, quote, End quote.

During his campaign, Wilson promised to end unsheltered homelessness within a year of taking office, a promise he repeated in his victory speech. It's time to end unsheltered homelessness and open drug use, and it's time to restore public safety in Portland.

Stephanie, who lost her possessions in a 2023 sweep, is now living in an RV. She says she understands why homeowners might be frustrated with homeless encampments. But she says sweeping away a problem temporarily does nothing to actually fix it. Nobody has ever asked me, you know, what my barriers are, you know, what can we do to help me to, you know, not be here. And, you know, until people start focusing on

The problems that homeless people have, rather than the problem of the homeless people, nothing's going to change. It's going to be homeless. Portland is just one of dozens of cities across the country dealing with the growing homelessness epidemic. ProPublica reporter Nicole Santa Cruz and her colleagues have been investigating encampment sweeps in those cities. She'll join us after the break. This is On Point. Support for the On Point podcast comes from Indeed.

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You're back with On Point. I'm Magna Chakrabarty. And today it's another one of our special episodes in collaboration with ProPublica, the award-winning investigative newsroom. And today we're taking a deeper look into the impact of homeless encampment sweeps going on in cities across the country.

Nicole Santa Cruz joins us now. She's in Albuquerque, and she's a reporter with ProPublica who's been covering this issue in depth for quite some time. She's reported several stories, including Swept Away, which was published just in October. And cities say they store property taken from homeless encampments. People rarely get their things back. That published in November. She co-reported those with Ruth Talbot, Asia Field, and Maya Bollinger.

Nicole, welcome to On Point. Thank you for having me. All right. So first of all, we heard a little bit of the background of what's been taking place in Portland, Oregon. How does that compare to other cities that you've reported on in this ongoing project that ProPublica has been undertaking?

Yeah, so Portland actually has a more, I guess you would say, formulated encampment policy than other places. It's dictated by a lawsuit. And so there's a lot of very specific things that the city must do before they clear an encampment. A lot of other cities are also struggling with this issue as well. Unsheltered homelessness has been steadily rising in the U.S. since 2015. So places like

Los Angeles, Seattle and cities in the Bay Area are struggling with similar issues as Portland. You know, the numbers in Portland are really disturbing, right? That 20 percent increase. Is the rise that dramatic in those other cities that you mentioned? It is as dramatic. The increases that we've seen in unsheltered homelessness have been the highest in the pick counts. So

Sheltered and unsheltered homelessness, it's both of those numbers are going up, but unsheltered homelessness is rising more dramatically. Okay. And pit counts for people not familiar with that?

Those are point in time counts. So on a night in January, people go out and they literally count people who are experiencing homelessness. So they go on foot and ask people who are staying outside, you know, are you experiencing homelessness? And they count them. Okay.

So we're really focusing on your reporting regarding the sweeps that happen of homeless encampments in these cities. So first of all, like the one that Stephanie described, why do cities say or what have they told you about why they're performing these sweeps? I think there are a lot of different reasons why cities conduct these actions.

They've told us that they do it to mitigate impact to businesses and residents. They need to keep sidewalks and public spaces clear. They're also trying to, in some ways, address public health hazards as a result of people living outside. And they hope that these removals will lead to shelter and housing. Are sweeps becoming the norm?

I would say that it's more the norm. We heard from people from all parts of the country who had experienced sweeps. And I think that's a good thing.

In some places, it's hard to know how many sweeps occur because sometimes it's as simple as a police officer coming and saying, hey, you got to move or you're going to be arrested. So sometimes these are things that aren't even really tracked. But I would say that it's more prevalent than not. Now, we mentioned earlier that...

In terms of what happens to the people's belongings, to their possessions, can you tell me in a little bit more detail what you found happens to those things from the city to city that you reported on?

Yeah, so we focused on possession loss and examined kind of what happens when people's belongings are taken in sweeps. We spoke with about 135 people who had experienced these actions, and we heard repeatedly time and time again that these actions create a cycle of hardship. Important documentation is taken, their survival gear, which includes sleeping bags, tents, tarps, blankets,

Priceless items like photographs, ashes are also taken by cities, which...

kind of amounts to a psychological setback for people. It makes it harder for them to take actions to get off the streets. You know, is it even worth it for me to go and try to get an ID if it's going to be taken, you know, within two weeks? You know, these are long-term impacts for some people. Well, you're listening to Nicole Santa Cruz. She's a reporter with ProPublica who's been covering the impacts of

of homeless sweeps that have been happening in cities across the country. And Nicole, hang on here for just a minute because let's learn a little bit more about what's been happening in Denver, Colorado, because Mayor Mike Johnston joins us now. He was inaugurated last July. He ran on the issue of ending unsheltered homelessness in Denver. Mayor Johnston, welcome to On Point.

Thank you so much. Delighted to be on. Okay. So first of all, describe to me what the situation was prior to you taking office in Denver that led you to campaign on ending unsheltered homelessness in the city there.

Yeah, we knew that homelessness was the most significant crisis we had facing the city. And so that was true for the folks who were living on the streets, which we knew were in the greatest risk. And it was true for businesses and residents. You know, we had thousands of people that were living on the streets and encampments throughout the city. And so that was, we knew, the most important place to start, both on the moral command to serve folks needed us the most and to help the city recover both financially and in terms of just people's

open access to public spaces. So we were at that point among one of the five or 10 worst cities in the country with our unsheltered homelessness problem. And that's where we vowed to start. Worst cities, meaning what, in terms of the percentage change? I mean, put some figures on that. Yeah. Yeah. We had seen about 300% increases in unsheltered homelessness over the previous three or four years. We'd gone from about 500 people in our point in time count to closer to 1500 in

on the streets in our point-in-time count. So it was going up every year and going up dramatically. And for a city our size, we had among the highest populations. That's enormous, actually, right? I mean, there's no way to underestimate that. Why? Why a 300% increase in such a short period of time, Mayor?

I think we saw the perfect storm of obviously COVID hit and many people left from our downtowns. And so those downtowns were empty and were easy for people to move in encampments. We saw obviously an explosion of an addiction crisis, particularly around the arrival of fentanyl, which was more deadly and more affordable than any other drug previously. And then we saw the expanded mental health crisis that everyone in America felt during the COVID pandemic. And if you add to that being unsheltered or on your own,

and at risk of violence, those things all exploded at the same time. And then it was very hard to get those cities back that had been mostly occupied by encampments while the rest of the folks were working from home. Okay. You had said a little bit earlier about the impact that this explosive growth in unsheltered homelessness has had not only on the people experiencing it, but on the rest of the city of Denver as well, business owners, et cetera. Can you elaborate on that?

Yeah, we had small businesses that were going out of business because they had encampments in front of their business every single day and residents didn't want to come or didn't want to visit. You know, we had families who wouldn't come downtown anymore to take your family out for dinner or to go to a Nuggets or an Avalanche game or to go to the theater. And so I think those...

Businesses were really struggling. We had people that were moving out of downtown or of the city in general, jobs that were moving out because people thought it just wasn't safe and it wasn't an environment you'd want to live in or work in or play in. And that is, we think, catastrophic for a city. So it's clear on all fronts why this was the central issue, right, of the campaign that you ran on. So after your inauguration, I understand that you announced...

House 1000, which was an initiative to move 1,000 homeless residents indoors. So they had some shelter by the end of the year. And you succeeded in doing that. So can you tell me how you did it? Yeah, we did. And at this point, we've actually now moved more than 2,300 people indoors. And so the effort has continued rapidly. We did a couple of core things that are really important.

One was we got really sustained public input. I did 60 town halls all across the city to talk to folks about what they wanted to do. We then opened up new units. We brought on 1,200 new units of housing that offered everyone private individualized housing either in a hotel room or a tiny home.

We offered wraparound services at all those sites so folks could get mental health and addiction and housing navigation on those sites. Then we made sure whenever we took an encampment and closed it, that we permanently closed that section of the city to future camping. So we closed all 18 of the city's largest encampments, and we've now kept about 400 square blocks of the city permanently closed to camping so all of our downtown now does not have a single tent or encampment in it. And then finally, we focused on once we got folks off the street and into transitional housing,

giving them the support they needed to get up into permanent housing so they were on their own with the job, supporting themselves with the treatment they needed. And so that was our big path along those five steps. And we're really excited about how well it's worked. And we believe that while this is a hard problem, it is absolutely a solvable problem. And we've shown that there's progress to be made. Mayor Johnston, when you describe it like that, it sounds like a magic wand. Yeah.

But I'm going to presume that it hasn't actually been that easy. It is not that easy at all. So in terms of the transitional part, which is really, really important, right? Like getting someone into a hotel room is only a temporary shelter solution, right?

How far along in the process is the city of Denver in terms of making a more permanent housing solution? Plus, as you were saying, the other things that a person needs to live a decent life, income, job, et cetera. How far along are you in helping the people that you've moved into temporary housing?

Yeah, I think we're providing wraparound services at those sites. We have what we call a housing command center, which helps people the moment they arrive at one of our transitional housing sites to start working towards what they need to get into a permanent unit. But as you said, it's so important to get people off the streets right away because what we know is trauma compounds the longer you stay on the street. So it's really important for us to focus first on the folks that are most at risk.

off the streets and into our all-in sites. We call them all-in Denver. And then from there, we get you directly connected to case managers who help you get an ID if you need it, get a resume together if you need it, get job applications and clothes to go on an interview, but plus to get treatment if you need it for mental health needs or for addiction needs. We know we do believe that Housing First

helps manage a lot of those initial trauma of those needs. But we do then connect you to the services that get you permanently back up and out. And we will, by 2025, be moving about 25 people per week into permanent housing every week. And we think that's the goal. Okay. At the risk of being overly insistent on reality checks here, is what you're saying that by 2025,

You again, I hear that goal of 25 people per week really moved into more permanent life situations. I think it's realistic to say by that time you'll have more than the 2000 people you've tried to help already. I guess what I'm trying to say is how long do you realistically anticipate people are going to have to be living in places like a hotel room?

Great question. So our focus is getting folks off the street into our transitional housing. Now, all of our focus now is doing our case management better and better. So the length of stay at these transitional sites is shorter and shorter. That both helps get you back up on your feet faster, also helps open up that room for the next person who might need it. And this is how we get to what we call functional zero, which is ending street homelessness in our first term, is if we have a thousand units of housing,

And we can move people out every three months into permanent housing. That means we could bring 4,000 people off the street each year if we're bringing 1,000 people in every three months. When we get to that stage, we will be able to end street homelessness as we know it. That's what we're focused on now, and it is about better and better case management to move people out quicker and quicker. Okay. I'm going to get back to the issue of sweeps in just a second here, but...

Are you building new units for people to get their permanent home situation? I mean, how are you getting to functional zero?

Yeah. So obviously the big effort that when we first launched the project was in, you know, in these first six months, we brought on these 1200 units of transitional housing. That was unprecedented. I would take the previous, you know, the city had taken three or four years to bring on 40 units before that, because it can be so contested neighborhoods. So the volume of units you need to meet the demand is a critical first step. It takes a lot of political will, but we were very proud we got that done.

But yes, we know same thing is true for servers and teachers and nurses in the city, as is true for folks exiting homelessness. It is hard to find affordable units. So as a key other part of our priority, we're working to bring on 3,000 new affordable housing units every year. We are building them. We are acquiring existing apartment buildings. We're buying and then putting deed restrictions on them so they stay permanently affordable. We're preserving units that maybe were affordable because they were on an old

LIHTC investment, but they're going to be expiring and those units will be lost to affordability. And then we're building new ones. So we're doing all of the above as a way to add more affordable units to the supply every year. How much is all this costing the city of Denver?

So we have different efforts, one that's focused on homelessness and one that's focused on our long-term affordable housing effort. We will be at about $55 million or so a year in terms of our ongoing homeless services. That's actually, we cut it by about $80 million from last year's budget. So we're both doing much more and we're doing it with less. We had to do a lot of capital expenditures to buy these units in the first place. That's why we had a big investment last year. But now that we're at steady state service provision,

We're at about 50 million or so, which is much lower cost per person than you'll see in most cities. So we think it turns out doing this better actually equates to doing it cheaper. Regarding building more housing for people to help people,

unsheltered homeless residents of Denver find a permanent solution. What does political will mean? Does it mean changing zoning regulations? Does it mean, I don't know, really working hard to partner with construction companies? What does it mean? Yeah, for us, it meant building eight

all in or buying eight all in housing sites, which looked like hotels that we bought and converted into transitional housing for folks who were previously homeless. It meant building tiny home villages. So finding a vacant plot of land and getting the neighbors to agree to us building up 40 tiny homes on that site. Was that hard or easy? That was very, very hard. I mean, we had, I did 60 town halls in one year. Uh, actually I did 60 town halls in six months, um, to talk to neighbors. We had town halls where 1400 people showed up and they did not show up because they were happy.

And so it meant walking into an auditorium and getting booed as if you were at a World Wrestling Federation contest. And so what we were saying is, yeah, if you're mad that people are defecating on the street in front of your business and you're mad that they're sleeping there, if we get them a place to stay with their own bathroom, their own locked door so they can keep their stuff safe while they go out to apply for jobs during the day, you'll see they show up in a very different way. So we had a town hall back in that same neighborhood

three months ago, and there were 15 people that showed up because the site we've opened has been very effective, but it is not easy. So it does take standing in the gap in those moments and saying if it's the right thing, we're going to do it even if people are worried. Okay. To get back to the issue of the encampment sweeps, as we've been talking about through the course of this hour, I heard you say that those are still going on in Denver as part of this overall strategy to end unsheltered homelessness.

So they're really not. Because you have no more people living without shelter on the streets. Is that right? Well, so what we do now is when we find an encampment, we realize the same thing your earlier presenters were talking about. Sweeps don't work because all they do is move someone from one block to the next. So our plan was that we don't sweep encampments. We close them by moving everybody into housing. So we get 50 open units.

We go to an encampment with 50 people. We close that encampment and move all those folks into housing. Important to note that some people will say, oh, folks want to be homeless. They don't want to come inside. And that first stretch where we brought 1,200 people inside, we did not offer housing to a single person who said no. All 1,200 said yes.

But it has to be dignified. It has to be private. It's not sleeping on a gymnasium floor. It's your own place with your own lock and key. You have access to bathroom, shower, kitchen. It's got to be dignified. But if it's dignified, people say yes. So we don't close encampments or we don't have any more large encampments. We don't move people off the streets now if they're in a group of tents unless we have access to housing to offer them or unless there's some major public health and safety risk.

Well, Mike Johnston is the mayor of Denver, Colorado. Mayor Johnston, thank you so much for joining us today. You bet. Thank you so much for having me. Nicole Santa Cruz with ProPublica. I appreciate your patience in listening along. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'd love to hear a little bit of what you think about the story that Mayor Johnston said. And then we'll also talk more broadly about hopefully finding long-term solutions to the challenges that cities are facing across the country. This is On Point.

You're back with On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty and Nicole Santa Cruz is with us. She's a reporter for ProPublica. And Nicole, I wanted to give you a chance to just share any thoughts that you had from listening to my conversation there with Mike Johnston, the mayor of Denver, Colorado.

Well, one thought that I did have is that, you know, Mike Johnston seems to be really prioritizing the housing first model, which, you know, recognizes a person's kind of right to housing. Like if you stabilize that individual by providing them, you know, permanent long term housing, then a lot of those other issues are

that they're experiencing can be treated. So many times in many cities, when people are swept, there's maybe a person that comes out and says, hey, do you want shelter? And it's not really an offer of shelter.

because people have been to the shelter. They know what it's like. They really do want more stability. And, of course, that's predicated. The Housing First model is predicated on either having that housing available or being able to create it, which I know we could spend another several hours on the challenges of that, right? Yeah, it's tough. Okay.

Okay, so Nicole, hang on for a second, because now I want to bring in Mark Doans. Mark is Policy Director at the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. Mark, welcome to On Point. On Point.

Thanks so much for having me. Okay. So obviously we spent a lot of time talking about Portland first and then how Denver is working to reduce unsheltered homelessness. Talk to me a little bit about the work that the Benioff Center does to help cities sort of navigate this challenge.

Sure. So a lot of our work starts with trying to understand really what's happening. And recently, we actually, you know, have been putting out reports from the California statewide study on folks experiencing homelessness, which is the largest study ever.

on homelessness in about 30 years, actually. And it's representative data, so we can say a lot about what we understand or, frankly, don't understand about what's happening outside. And we use that information to help guide jurisdictions to adopt evidence-based practices. I think one of the things...

that often dominates political discourse around homelessness is I heard a story, right? Everyone has a story of someone they saw or someone they talked to. But the question that particularly policymakers need to be asking is, well, how frequently does that story actually occur? And should we set policy on it? I'm kind of stubbornly persistent when it comes to wanting to know what those evidence-based best practices are, Mark. Lay them out for us. Yes.

So, you know, I think a lot of what the mayor of Denver was just talking about really falls square in what we would advise. The first and foremost is whenever you're thinking about unsheltered homelessness, you need to be prioritizing bringing people inside, right? So displacement-based strategies don't do anything. They just move people around the jurisdiction and oftentimes at a really high price tag. So what we can see in the data, particularly the administrative data,

is that that strategy often runs a much higher price tag than some of these other more complicated from a political will perspective, but ultimately more effective strategies that involve bringing people inside. I think, you know, as Nicole said, the importance of adopting housing first is not

necessarily just the ideology of that people deserve to be inside. It's also that once people come inside, they stabilize, right? And a lot of the services and supports that they need become, frankly, more apparent because they're not experiencing active trauma anymore. And I think the last thing that I would say in terms of just basic

basic best practice is to ensure, again, as the mayor was talking about, that the overall system has what we call throughput, which means that if someone comes inside to a temporary location, that that location truly is temporary, right? So we see in some jurisdictions that people will go into shelter and they will remain in shelter for many, many years, right? I've seen...

You know, places where folks are in shelter for three, four or five years, really making sure that people move rapidly into permanent housing, really within six months or less. Yeah.

You know, the housing first approach, as we've discussed, requires that that housing be there. And I think the other really interesting thing that Mayor Johnston revealed to us is how hard he had to work to convince neighbors to allow shelter to be built. I mean, that's sort of where the rubber meets the road aspect of political organizing or political will, as he called it. I don't know if you have...

Do you have advice for lawmakers on that? Is that part of a toolkit that you can share with them? Yeah. So we've released a number of things specifically focused on untilted homelessness. One is just what we call topic brief, which is a report that goes through all of the data that we know, again, to be true about folks who are currently being forced to live outside. But we also put out something called an encampment resolution toolkit.

And in it, one of the things that we talk about is this idea that in any sort of system that has scarcity, you do have to make administrative decisions about who's first, who's second, who's third, right? But that doesn't mean that for the folks who are fourth, fifth, sixth, that we do nothing.

And oftentimes there is a great deal of symmetry between the concerns that encampment residents have and the concerns of the housed neighbors or the businesses in the area. Right. So, again, to use the mayor's example, if there is, you know, if someone is defecating in the street, you know, not to be crass, but I can guarantee you that no one wants to be defecating.

pooping outside. That's not what anyone wants to be doing. And so what we can do is we can look at encampments and offer, and this is in the resolution toolkit that we released, we offer stabilization strategies. So we say, look, if you're not able to get to

an encampment right away, that doesn't mean that we just sort of say, well, we'll get there. When we get there, we think about, you know, what are the primary concerns that the residents have, both housed and unhoused, in this area? And how do we address them by perhaps connecting that encampment with trash removal or connecting that encampment with hygiene supports, including, you know, maybe porta-potties and, you know, other things

that can assist the residents in managing their day-to-day and reduce the overall strain on the community. And I think that can really help build the political will. Nicole, let me bring you back in here because I understand that...

sort of the exchange of best practices information regarding, let's say, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. This year they had some document that they released about 19 strategies for communities to address encampments in a humane and effective manner. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, so a lot of it is kind of recommendations that, you know, the Denver mayor also brought up and things that Mark has also brought up. But it's about having kind of a...

solution that includes various stakeholders, you know, multiple with service providers and connecting people to services, prioritizing the needs of residents and making sure that they're listened to, actually connecting them with services, not handing them a piece of paper that says, hey, here's where the nearest shelter is. So it's a lot of the same stuff. Okay.

Now, Mark, I understand that even though you're with the University of California, San Francisco, you're located in Seattle, Washington, correct? Correct. So King County's also had to face this issue. I'm wondering what you've seen happen there in the Seattle area about why cities are even saying that they're doing these sweeps.

Yeah. I actually used to run the King County system. Okay. So I'm asking the right person. Tell me more. So a lot of the encampment resolution strategy that we put out was based on my experience actually needing to close very complex encampments. I think similar to what the mayor said, you know, and what you heard in the initial segment,

Over the course of COVID, we had very large entrenched encampments develop. And I think the largest encampment that I closed in King County was about 100 people.

And so began to develop a methodology that is, you know, again, in our toolkit that looks at, you know, sort of how do we identify, assess, plan, and then appropriately draw down an encampment in a way that is, you know, focused on bringing people inside. And I think that like the reason that we felt the pressure to get that methodology is that I think

The electeds and the policymakers, they really don't know what to do anymore. They feel that the sweeps are necessary because...

They feel like there's nothing they can do, right? They don't have the housing. They don't have the resources. And there are these increasing public pressures to address, you know, again, the objectively negative impacts of encampments, right, which are real for both the residents and their surrounding community. So that's why the stabilization strategies are so important in resolution, because we want to be clear that we can hear the concerns and we can address the concerns without causing additional harm. Right.

OK, so we have to take a second to note that this year, the United States Supreme Court issued a major ruling that has directly to do with the sweeps of homeless encampments. They issued the ruling on June 28th, 2024, and it was a case called City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson. And in the 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that enforcing laws regarding camping in public spaces, a.k.a. these sweeps,

enforcing those laws is not cruel and unusual punishment. And so, therefore, it is in comportment with the Eighth Amendment. Really important decision in this context because not long after that, in places like California,

California, I mean, that entire state accounts for nearly 30% of the nation's homelessness in 2023. Well, Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing state agencies and local governments to crack down on encampments. And he posted a video to ex-AKA Twitter, and he directly cited this Grants Pass decision. And he's speaking in the video over footage of individuals spearing trash and clearing items at an underpass encampment.

It's time to move with urgency at the local level to clean up these sites, to focus on public health and focus on public safety. There are no longer any excuses. A billion dollars this state has invested to support communities to clean up these encampments. We have now no excuse with the Supreme Court decision.

All right, so that was in July of this year. Then on September 10th, in Berkeley, California, the city council there voted to enforce encampment clearings, even in cases where shelter isn't available. When the city deems that the encampments pose a fire or health hazard, that's the criteria they say. Or if they're in the way of maintenance or traffic work. So here's then-Mayor Jesse Aragine, who voted in favor of the ordinance. I hear you, Beth.

There are reasons why that's happened, and we have responsibilities to make sure that that doesn't happen. But we also have a responsibility to not let people continue to live in dangerous conditions and not let conditions be so dangerous of threatening the immediate businesses and neighbors as well. We are responsible to keep everyone safe, to make sure the quality of life of everyone, housed and unhoused, business owners and residents is protected.

So, Nicole, let me turn back to you here. I don't know if you had any thoughts about the sudden moves that the Supreme Court ruling has allowed cities to take in terms of, I guess, fearlessly sweeping encampments, even if there's no alternative housing available. Yeah, definitely. So I've got a Google alert for camping bans. And I've just noticed every day, you know, there are more and more cities that

who are either enacting bans on camping, they are making their camping bans more punitive, or they are starting to enforce their camping bans. So maybe they had a camping ban on the books, now they're enforcing it. Enforcing a camping ban usually means that they're gonna start sweeping people. - So seeing more than essentially is what you're saying. - More of that, which will lead to more possession loss and more of that cyclical, you know,

impacts. Mark, your thoughts? Yeah, I think, you know, it's a bit of a mess. I think that what we've seen post-Grants Pass is very haphazard drives towards these enforcement responses. And I think that, you know, as we say in our tool, like,

You know, I'm particularly taken by the sort of, oh, well, we have to respond because there's, you know, a hazard to the residents. But, you know, when we developed the tool and when I was working in King County, we had a whole hazard protocol where I remember the very first encampment that I resolved was for people who were living on the on-ramp of an expressway where it was extremely dangerous, right? And so we said they have to come inside, right? Mm-hmm.

And the way that we approach that was certainly not to say just move somewhere else. The way it was to say like, hey, you four, you got to come inside. What do you need, right? So there's a way to look at like what is a danger both to the community and

And to the folks who are living in encampments that drives prioritization rather than other kinds of enforcement action. And I just want to briefly go back to the thing that I was saying about how expensive enforcement is, right? Because we're talking about, you know, all of these shortages, you know, in money and housing, et cetera. I was listening to a mayor recently essentially brag about this.

You know, requesting $30 million in the next year's fiscal budget to spend on removals, on sweeps, right? Like, that's a tremendous amount of money to spend on not bringing people inside. Right.

When we could easily convert that kind of expenditure into like flexible local voucher dollars or standing up interim housing opportunities that the mayor of Denver was just speaking about, right? So it's a really, I think, again, it's very pressured. I understand what these elected officials are trying to respond to, that they're trying to look responsive to their electorates. But I think they need better advice. Yeah.

You know, I'm glad you mentioned that because ultimately this is going to be a problem that has to be solved at the local level. I mean, I know in Washington, Congress could free up more money, for example, to assist localities in managing building more housing for people. I mean, that's all theoretical until it happens. And in Washington, I'm not holding my breath.

So, Nicole, I mean, that kind of brings me to my final question for today. The focus we've been having is on the local level because that's where the problem will either continue or be solved. I mean, do the officials that you've spoken with kind of expect that even more responsibility is going to be shifted on localities and municipalities to find solutions to this crisis as we've been talking about?

Well, Donald Trump has said that he will use every tool at his disposal to get homeless people, he says, off the streets. And he's talked about finding large

pieces of land to open up tent cities. And at the federal policy level, we could see a move away from housing first policies, these policies that are centered around connecting people with long-term permanent housing. So even though these decisions are made at the local level, there could be shifts in federal policy that kind of trickle down. I'm going to guess you're not going to make any bets, though, on that. No.

As a reporter, you never would anyway. Okay. Well, Nicole Santa Cruz with ProPublica, thank you so much for your reporting and your team's reporting, and thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me. And Mark Doans with the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco. Mark, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm Meghna Chakrabarty. This is On Point. ♪