Properties
was relieved when it finally happened. But to his consternation, more recently, homeless people have been squatting in the empty lot where the home used to sit.
It’s one instance of what city officials say are rising complaints about homeless encampments on private property throughout Santa Fe, which the city is now making a more concerted effort to address.
“This is fairly new, and it’s been very successful so far,” said Isabelle Sharpe, manager of the city’s constituent services department.
Encampments on private property are harder to deal with than those on city-owned land, which are illegal under a city ordinance disallowing camping on public property. Rangers in the city’s Parks and Open Space department conduct regular patrols of city property and give people camping a 24-hour notice to vacate, after which the encampments are cleared out by contractors.
The process for encampments on private property can take much longer — especially when, as is often the case, the owner does not live on the premises.
Often, Sharpe said, the owners don’t even live in Santa Fe, “so they don’t see what an issue it is.”
A team of people from constituent services, the park rangers, police and code enforcement have been holding regular meetings to compile a master list of properties the city has received complaints from the public about, she said. The most common subjects of complaints are vacant lots, Sharpe said in an email, followed by empty or abandoned houses, business locations and recreational vehicles and campers.
The city then tries to identify and contact the property owners to ask if they are aware people are living on their land. If they do not have permission from the owner to be there, Sharpe said, the city asks the owners to sign off on a “no trespassing” authorization form. Once that has been posted, police then have the legal ability to remove people from the premises.
“When unsheltered individuals are on private property, and when we receive the ‘no trespassing authorization form’ from the owners, we then have the authority to remove them immediately,” Sharpe wrote in an email. “However, we acknowledge that these unsheltered individuals don’t have anywhere to go, so we try to be sympathetic. Every circumstance is different; there is no specific time frame.”
That is a possibility only if the property owners are willing to sign off, however.
“It’s not something we’re going to enforce if the owner doesn’t want it enforced,” said Santa Fe police Capt. Thomas Grundler, who oversees the department’s support operations teams.
If the owner is not willing to do anything to discourage squatters, at that point they can be cited by code enforcement, he said. If a property is the subject of enough complaints it can be deemed a nuisance property by the city, which then gives it the power to place a lien on the property to demolish it.
Grundler said the bicycle patrol team works closely with the park rangers to locate encampments, and his bike sergeant has become very skilled at identifying property owners — which isn’t always easy, especially when the owner is listed as a corporation with a sparse public footprint.
“Sometimes it’s taken weeks if not months to find out who a property owner is,” he said.
Sharpe said there isn’t a specific part of town that encampments appear to be concentrated in, based on complaints from the public.
“It’s pretty much all over,” she said, noting vacant land is the most common type of private property they address.
At a town hall hosted by Councilor Alma Castro in February for residents and business owners on the south end of District 1, many of the more than 100 attendees voiced frustrations with homeless people living in the area.
Speakers had different solutions in mind, with some saying they wanted the city to ban panhandling, increase police patrols or put homeless people in jail, while others wanted the city to build a drug treatment facility near Pete’s Place or work to get people into housing. Something nearly everyone seemed to agree on is the dearth of resources for people looking for a way to get clean or to get a roof over their heads.
Coleman said homeless people need “more places they can turn to to get help.” He said he largely blames fentanyl for the number of homeless people he encounters in the city.
“That’s what’s fueling all this,” he said.
Coleman said from early January until last week several homeless people had been squatting on the Calle Caballero property and using drugs. He said a wall on the property has been repeatedly tagged with graffiti.
The property is owned by a man who lives in Las Cruces and has a health problem, Coleman said. Someone must manage his affairs because the property taxes are up to date, but nobody seems interested in doing more than that, he said.
Coleman said he called the police multiple times regarding the property and occasionally asked officers he saw in the neighborhood to ask the squatters to disperse but rarely saw them do anything.
“They have much bigger fish to fry, I’m sure,” he said.
Police being stretched thin was another topic at the town hall. Castro noted that of 166 positions in the department, 23 were vacant at the time. With police unlikely to be able to respond quickly to calls that don’t involve crimes in progress or accidents, she said, alternative ways of addressing these issues are needed in Santa Fe.
Castro said the constituent services department is “overwhelmed” responding to the number of complaints they receive, and having a fully builtout code enforcement department would take the strain off both it and the police and ensure the city is able to enforce the regulations it has on the books.
The assistant land use director oversees code enforcement, city spokesperson Bernie Toon said Thursday. There are currently five ordinance enforcement specialists, though he said none of them have code enforcement as their only responsibility.
In an earlier interview, Toon praised the city’s work addressing nuisance properties.
“We’re really trying to do a better job on that front, and I think we are,” he said.
New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness Associate Director Mark Oldknow said they are aware of the issue of homeless people camping on private property — it even happens at the coalition’s Santa Fe office, where people occasionally shelter under the portal.
While he acknowledged there are times law enforcement needs to get involved, he said the coalition is opposed to the criminalization of homelessness, which he said exacerbates the problem instead of solving it by putting more barriers in front of homeless people trying to improve their situation.
“Putting even small court cases, fines, incidents onto their record undermines their ability to remedy the things that make them homeless in the first place,” he said.