Effect of homeless camp’s closure eyed

Advocates look to help evictees who declined city’s housing offers

Temporary chain-link fencing surrounds the space under the Southwest Freeway this week — two gravel-covered empty lots beneath a Midtown highway bridge that, until Friday, held one of the city’s most notorious homeless encampments.

For two years, the camp near the intersection of Wheeler and Caroline has been filled with tents and people, ripped-up couches and endless piles of trash. People who lived nearby considered the camp a scourge. Four people were murdered at or near the camp since mid-2017. Several times, the Houston Health Department called the camp a public health nuisance and demanded a cleanup to remove the human waste and debris.

On Friday, the city shut it all down, evicting the 30odd people who still called the camp their home. About half accepted offers for housing, but the rest opted to leave the area without any assistance. Now the city, aid agencies and the neighbors are waiting to see what happens next — and whether another encampment will spring up somewhere else.

“Overall, I think the neighborhood is thrilled,” said Barbara McGuffey, vice president of the Museum Park Neighborhood Association, which started pushing for a solution not long after the encampment sprung up in 2016 under the Interstate 69 overpass. “There’s a lot of hallelujahs.”

Housing push

Neighbors are happy the camp closure was compassionate, she said, and that every resident was offered the chance to move into alternative housing. But at the same time, McGuffey said, in the past two years “we’ve been through a lot in our neighborhood.”

As the area started to attract crime, she said, neighbors started speaking at city council meetings and formed a “self-appointed task force” to work with agencies and the city to find a solution.

The city, the Coalition for the Homeless and other housing agencies had been working to house people who lived at the Midtown camp well before Friday’s eviction. The focused effort began in May, with caseworkers visiting the camp daily to try to get people into permanent housing, one at a time. The number of residents at the camp dropped from 72 to about 30, said Eva Thibaudeau, vice president of programs for the Coalition for the Homeless.

“When people started seeing their encampment neighbors leaving and coming back with house keys, saying ‘I have an apartment. I signed a lease. I have a bed and a table and chairs,’ I think the holdouts were more inclined to work with us,” she said.

On Friday, the remaining camp residents were offered immediate shelter — no wait lists, no requirements. About half of them accepted it, Thibaudeau said. The rest of the camp’s residents — about 15 people — opted to scatter.

There’s nothing to prevent those people from finding another spot to camp, of course, but the city and the Coalition for the Homeless are planning to keep trying to track them down.

“All we can do is continue our efforts to permanently house these individuals, no matter where they might move to, and offer emergency shelter and services in the interim,” said Marc Eichenbaum, special assistant to the mayor for homeless initiatives.

‘Ongoing project’

“Every day we have street outreach teams who are going out,” Thibaudeau said — people who will look for the Midtown camp holdouts in nearby neighborhoods and offer help again. “We’ll find them and continue to engage them,” she said.

McGuffey, with the Museum Park Neighborhood Association, said she and her neighbors are optimistic about the camp closure, hoping it’ll get people into housing and make the neighborhood safer at the same time. But they know that putting up a fence won’t solve all their problems.

“This is going to be an ongoing project,” McGuffey said. “The Coalition is well aware that they just scattered the population that was left (at the camp). Now the mission is to go find them and keep offering them help.”