What I Learned Reporting in Cities That Take Belongings From Homeless People

December 29, 2024 7:21 PM

Some cities take people’s belongings — ignoring their own policies and court orders — and then fail to store them. Our reporting shows there are more effective and compassionate ways to deal The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness earlier this year released updated strategies for addressing encampments “humanely and effectively,” advising communities to treat encampment responses with the same urgency they would any other crises — such as tornadoes or wildfires. The council recommends providing 30 days’ notice before a removal and giving people two days to pack, unless there’s an urgent public health and safety issue. (Most cities don’t give any notice if encampments are deemed hazardous or a threat to public safety.)

The council also recommends that cities store belongings for as long as it typically takes for someone to get permanent housing. We found that the longest any city stores property is 90 days. But the wait for permanent housing can be much longer.

If officials, alongside case managers and health care professionals, worked with unhoused people over weeks, rather than days, before sweeping an encampment to help them get inside, they wouldn’t be separated from their belongings and their possessions wouldn’t need to be stored in warehouses, said Marc Dones, the policy director for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing initiative, a homelessness research group that developed recommendations for addressing encampments.

posted by NotLost (19 comments total)

I wish I could still maintain the delusion that governments in US cities cared about being effective or compassionate.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:37 PM on December 29 [17 favorites]

Yeah, municipal policy seems to have moved over towards killing unhoused people. That is the net effect of sweeps, destroying their property, criminalizing aiding them.
posted by constraint at 8:27 PM on December 29 [5 favorites]

It wouldn’t totally solve this cruelty, but a reasonable government service would be providing free safe deposit boxes for at least a folder of documents, like enough room for birth certificates, social security cards, wills, and a few family photos.
posted by smelendez at 8:36 PM on December 29 [13 favorites]

Mod note: Fixed cut-off title text
posted by taz (staff) at 9:29 PM on December 29 [1 favorite]

One of the things often lost in unannounced sweeps is identification documents, without which it is impossible to get permanent housing or a job. Because that's the world we live in--where the city pays employees to throw away the documents that would allow someone to get off the streets, which the city insists it wants them to do. In Atlanta, the Central Outreach and Advocacy Center helps people get these documents and provides document storage once people get them.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:26 AM on December 30 [9 favorites]

In this case, the cruelty is the point: going tent by tent and packing and storing belongings individually would take long enough that community members might come out to defend the encampment. They treat it like war zones, bringing ‘shock and awe’ rather than thinking of what’s best for the people involved.
posted by corb at 5:37 AM on December 30 [9 favorites]

The people who physically clear these encampments and throw the items away--have they no conscience? Throwing away identification documents, dentures, baby pictures. These things are the entire life and lifeline of someone who's so poor they are barely hanging on to life.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 5:58 AM on December 30 [5 favorites]

I believe people are, generally, going to pick the best living situation available to them which means if they are unhoused it is probably because they don't have anywhere else to go. It fills me with rage that in many cases the response to people having nowhere to go that isn't the street is making being unhoused worse instead of giving people a better option. There aren't enough shelter beds and in many cases I understand why someone would sleep outside instead of staying in those that do exist.

I am trepidatious about saying this because I don't want to start a big argument about the utility of voting so I am hoping people read this in the spirit of discussing the challenges of helping people in these situations and not trying to start a fight -- with that said, something very frustrating to me is the number of Democratic politicians at various levels who take a "tough" approach to unhoused populations. It makes me sad and angry and I'm not sure how to push on this issue when so many people on all sides seem determined to continue to address homelessness by attempting to make it as miserable as possible.
posted by an octopus IRL at 6:27 AM on December 30 [9 favorites]

>The people who physically clear these encampments and throw the items away

In Philadelphia that responsibility falls to CLIP, which in addition to full-timers is operated partially as a 'community service' program for people with court orders and a 'Same Day Work & Pay' program, with many of the participants themselves being homeless or housing insecure. The cruelty of paying someone $50 cash for three and a half hours of dismantling an encampment they might have lived in is most certainly the point.
posted by Richard Saunders at 7:33 AM on December 30 [14 favorites]

The people who physically clear these encampments and throw the items away--have they no conscience?

In Minneapolis, they're cops. So no.
posted by Sphinx at 8:19 AM on December 30 [5 favorites]

In Atlanta, city sanitation workers throw away people's stuff while the cops prevent the victims or anyone else from intervening.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:57 AM on December 30 [3 favorites]

Make sure to read the notecards they collected from the people they interviewed. Heartbreaking.
posted by msbutah at 10:26 AM on December 30 [3 favorites]

... a reasonable government service would be providing free safe deposit boxes ...

My first reaction was pretty snarky--it's hard to sleep in a safe deposit box.

Nah, a REASONABLE government service would be to provide a bed in a locked room with communal sanitation. Can't we just do the bare absolute damn minimum to keep people alive and sane? Of course, people need more than that, but couldn't we at least keep people safe and warm? At least a box with a door would be as much as we give a shelter dog. A daily bowl of kibble would be asking too much.
posted by BlueHorse at 11:17 AM on December 30 [5 favorites]

“ Nah, a REASONABLE government service would be to provide a bed in a locked room with communal sanitation. ”

We used to do exactly that, but federal and local governments decided that it was too much trouble to properly care for and secure the properties so in a few years they became unsafe so we tore them down. (in addition to poor design) Then the same folks who decided it was too much trouble in the first place yelled about what a rotten idea it was so we decided not to build anymore - ever. The private market was supposed to solve all of this and that brought us to the point we are at today. Less housing - more money for the private housing providers.

Of course it is a complex issue with many subtleties, but that pretty much sums up the major events and influences involved.
posted by cybrcamper at 1:09 PM on December 30 [4 favorites]

“ something very frustrating to me is the number of Democratic politicians at various levels who take a "tough" approach to unhoused populations”

I wholeheartedly agree! What I believe happens with that is that the solution of building large amounts of some kind of publicly financed housing so everyone has enough could (probably would) add enough supply that property values would either stabilize or fall because the scarcity would vanish. Being a landlord would no longer be the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. Vast amounts of equity would probably be lost and many people would likely wind up upside down on a mortgage. The ensuing uproar could easily overturn the said democratic seats in favor of those who would continue the pipe dream of eternally higher property values.

Standing in the way of that would take an immense amount of political courage, and that does not appear to be emergent. But housing markets tend to unravel periodically and this one is due for it. The ensuing loss of value would likely make new things possible, and probably necessary again.
posted by cybrcamper at 1:22 PM on December 30 [1 favorite]

We really, really, need cheap SROs again. It is astonishing how much that made a difference in the past and is no longer available.
posted by corb at 3:19 PM on December 30 [7 favorites]

I was once on a company volunteer outing to help clean up the shoreline near a river. It turned out that this shoreline was a popular spot for homeless people to camp. The person from the organization that led the cleanups explicitly said not to remove the belongings of the homeless camps. This fell on deaf ears. All of the do-gooders just picked up everything they found and put it in trash bags, regardless of whether or not it was obviously someone's belongings. I tried my best to stop them but they laughed and ignored me. I ended up walking to a different area of the shoreline where there were some beer cans and plastic bags. On the whole it felt extremely gross, and I have avoided participating in that activity since.
posted by grumpybear69 at 5:06 PM on December 30 [5 favorites]

Grumpybear, that's sad and infuriating. What kind of privileged condescending asshole does that kind of thing? Oh, look at me, I'm just such a wonderful human being for caring about the environment. I'm also wondering why there wasn't better supervision with this?
posted by BlueHorse at 7:05 PM on December 30

Something awful just happened at the clearing on an encampment in Atlanta that apparently involved a bulldozer "clearing" a tent with a human being still inside, killing him: Shock, grief after a man is killed during an encampment sweep in Atlanta
posted by hydropsyche at 3:57 PM on January 17 [1 favorite]