Tent city, Houston
Despite progress on homeless issue, encampment ban isn’t working.
“You take 100 people in one city block, it’s like a neon ‘open’ sign for people to come and prey on these individuals.” Marc Eichenbaum, aide to Mayor Sylvester Turner
Homeless people are scattered across greater Houston, often in inconspicuous settings that arouse only passing attention: A man sleeps on a downtown sidewalk. A woman and child crouch in the shadows of an abandoned suburban strip center.
But when dozens of the homeless crowd into one or two city blocks — a sort of village of the dispossessed, complete with tents, bicycles, wheelchairs and mattresses (these are real examples we witnessed this week) — they’re harder to ignore. This is particularly true when the encampment lies between two urban neighborhoods enjoying a surge of redevelopment.
For more than two years, residents of Midtown and Museum Park have complained about crime, trash, human waste and other problems associated with the homeless people who have settled under U.S. 59 near Wheeler. Last weekend, neighborhood websites lit up with news about the fatal shooting of a man near Wheeler and San Jacinto, the fourth homicide linked to the encampment since mid-2017.
“I live next to this crap,” one poster wrote, “and am tired of seeing all the waste, loss of life, and garbage. I am beyond disgusted.”
In April 2017, about a year after the Wheeler site emerged, the Houston City Council passed an ordinance that essentially banned encampments. While it doesn’t technically criminalize being homeless or prohibit sleeping on public streets, the measure authorizes police to cite or arrest those who erect tents, use portable heating devices or accumulate more possessions than would fit in a container 3 feet tall, 3 feet wide and 3 feet deep.
More than a year later, there’s little evidence that this law has been an effective part of an otherwise broadly successful campaign to reduce the number of people living on the streets or in emergency shelters. Actually, it’s been a costly distraction.
A month after the ordinance was passed, the American Civil Liberties Union challenged it in court on behalf of three encampment residents. While the case has wound through the courts, enforcement of the law has been inconsistent. Dozens of tents — many of them vacant, city officials say — and numerous possessions exceeding the limit were visible under the freeway this week.
Meanwhile, the annual count of homeless people in Harris and Fort Bend counties increased this year by 8 percent, to 3,866, after several years of steady declines. Since 2011, homelessness in greater Houston has been reduced by more than half. This year’s uptick was attributed to the destruction of housing by Hurricane Harvey’s floods.
The problem is exacerbated by the emergence of synthetic marijuana on the city’s illicit drug scene. A large group of vulnerable people in one place is an irresistible target for peddlers of this dangerous drug.
“You take 100 people and you spread them around the urban core, that’s one thing,” says Marc Eichenbaum, an aide to Mayor Sylvester Turner who works on homeless issues. “You take 100 people in one city block, it’s like a neon ‘open’ sign for people to come and prey on these individuals.”
Starting last March, the city and its partners launched an aggressive outreach effort to get all 73 people then living in the Wheeler Street encampment into housing. As of Aug. 31, according to Eichenbaum, 43 people had been housed. With other results and new arrivals, the census stood at 41 people.
The encampment ban is partly a bargaining chip: The threat of citations or arrest, city officials say, can induce homeless people to avail themselves of social services and accept assistance in finding shelter.
This is a questionable tactic, in part because the reasons someone might not be receptive to moving to a shelter are more complicated than, “They like living on the streets.” And a law that allows people to sleep in public, while denying them the most basic provisions they need to survive, is disingenuous at best.
Despite the excellent work the city and its nonprofit partners are doing to get people into housing, gaps remain in the system. There’s an urgent need, for example, for a “transition center” where people on the street can be housed immediately without the rules and other barriers to entry that apply in most shelters. Funding such a facility would be a fine project for a philanthropist looking for a creative way to help the community.
Eliminating encampments like the one under U.S. 59 is an essential policy goal in terms of public safety and quality of life, both for the homeless people and the surrounding residents. It can best be achieved not through punitive laws, but by continuing and expanding the kind of outreach work that reduced the population of the site this year. It’s a slow, tough process — one that needs time, public support and more investment to work.