OFFICIALS TOUR HOMELESS CAMPS
Benchlands camp projected to dissolve ahead of winter rains
SANTA CRUZ >> As if on cue, Michael Allison called out a thanks to a large group gathered at San Lorenzo Park on Friday.
“This camp is helping me out, a lot. I’m 62, trueborn American. I just want to get off the street,” Allison said from astride his bicycle. “But the camp is doing a lot for me and I appreciate it. All the people that donated and whatnot, I just want to thank you. Because believe me, it is helping, a lot.”
Nearby, U. S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, State Assemblyman Mark Stone and John Laird, candidate for Bill Monning’s state senate seat, stood in a circle with elected Santa Cruz city and county representatives and their staff members. Allison’s comments had coincided with the conclusion of a tour started hours earlier, staged to showcase Santa Cruz’s need for support handling its homelessness crisis. The group first visited Sycamore Grove, a wooded pull
off along Highway 9 serving as the core of an unsanctioned homeless encampment and concluded at the San Lorenzo Park Benchlands, where a managed homeless encampment has stood since late July.
The Santa Cruz Countyrun benchlands camp, offering tent- based shelter for about 60 people, served as a case study for an effective government collaboration, but is tentatively is set for closure Oct. 31.
Since the launch of a safe parking program, the benchland camp’s launch and the reopening of the National Guard Armory as a 24-7 homeless shelter, Mayor Justin Cummings said he could report a vast improvement in constituent feedback. For comparison, Cummings described the situation more than a year earlier, when a large unsanctioned encampment sprawled along Highway 1 behind the Gateway Plaza Shopping Center. T hat “Ross Camp,” Cummings said, featured health and fire threats and was linked to an increase in crime reports and drug issues — it was “not a humane thing for us to do and we knew we could do better.”
“So, I think what we’ve been able to demonstrate in the past year with COVID and then receiving more funding to provide these services is that, when the funding’s available and we can hire the staff to help manage these encampments, they work and they’re compatible with our community,” Cummings said.
Vice Mayor Donna Meyers, however, called Santa Cruz’s situation “dire,” citing the concentration of 53% of the county’s homeless services located in a
city with 23% of the county population. City Manager Martín Bernal, citing the armory shelter, the county’s Emeline Center complex and the city’s largest homeless shelter at Housing Matters on Coral Street, said community members are concerned, asking that future resources be located elsewhere in the county.
Wirter’s Challerme
For all its successes, the benchlands camp is located along the banks of the San Lorenzo River and its flood zone, a concern as winter weather looms on the horizon.
City Fire Chief Jason Hajduk told those gathered that the benchlands were built as a back-up flood control measure for the river levee. He said that while he believed the managed was “one of the more successful” collaborations between the city and county, it was, by its nature, either temporary or an “impending disaster.”
“We know that if it rains and we have a watershed
that’s been fire- damaged and it’s coming down, this is all going to be under water,” Hajduk said. “So, for a risk mitigation, we need a location where we can put people in a safe place and keep them there, or split them up.”
Santa Cruz County Assistant County Administrative Officer Elissa Benson said state and federal coronavirus-related funding for the camp will dry up if officials continue to try to operate in a flood zone when it is no longer safe. She added that the county is working diligently on finding a new transitional camp location and may consider a temporary extension past Oct. 31 if needed. The possibility that the camp will be dissolved without an alternative, however, remains a possibility, she said.
Building social support
Benchlands camp resident Greg Bengston said he feels sick and depressed
about the pending homeless encampment closure. As a former resident of the Ross camp that has been forced to relocate countless times, Bengston commended the camp’s services while criticizing how officials limited the camp’s capacity to a small group and was not better prepared for the coming winter’s dangers.
“It was weird having enough time to decompress and relax from defensive combat mode every day, and suddenly people started doing things,” Ben g st on w rote in a broadly circulated letter last month. “Getting a job. Taking classes. Going into rehab. Getting in touch with estranged family. Addressing neglected health issues, many of which need time to implement and complete, not to mention the time it had taken for us to realize that there really was possibility for our lives, that we didn’t have to continually run around looking for food and a safe place to sleep. We got healthier, eating well on a dependable schedule, decreasing drinking and drug use often used to cover fear or boredom or hopelessness. We really started to build some social support networks, as well as just make some new friends.”
Watching and recording the city tour from his bike, grassroots homeless services provider Brent Adams said he expect san influx of new refuge-seekerst o be pushed out of the benchlands and into such unsanctioned camps as the one he has kept close tabs on for the last 10 months, up the levee near the residential Felker Street where Adams bases his Footbridge Services program.
Adams, speaking to the Sentinel prior to the tour group’s arrival, described the approximately 100-person encampment near Felker Street as “the most successful renegade camp in Santa Cruz history ,” touting Footbridge Services employees and volunteers, as well the camp residents’ work to regularly clear up their own trash with the help of regular city trash collection.
For those venturing down inside fencing around the camp, resident Lawrence “Blue” McGregor gifted the bounty of a flourishing garden he tends just outside the camp, quietly proud of his promotion to “leader” with the Downtown Streets Team job skills training program. Blue said he has had to uproot and replant his garden some five times while being forced to relocate.
“I’m moving wherever they move me. This is home now,” McGregor said, referring to those at the camp with him. “I can’t leave it, even if they have to arrest me.”