On a May afternoon, Teresa Stratton sat on her walker near a freeway in Portland, Oregon, talking about how much she wanted to live inside. She missed sleeping uninterrupted in a bed and having running water.
When you live outside, “the dirt embeds in your skin,” the 61-year-old said. “You have to pick it out, because it just doesn’t come out anymore.”
Living inside would also mean no longer having her belongings repeatedly confiscated by crews the city hires to clear encampments. These encounters, commonly known as “sweeps,” are the “biggest letdown in the world,” she said, noting that she lost the ashes of her late husband to a sweep.
Over the past year, my colleagues Ruth Talbot, Asia Fields, Maya Miller and I have investigated how cities have sometimes ignored their own policies and court orders, which has resulted in them taking homeless people’s belongings during encampment clearings. We also found that some cities have failed to store the property so it could be returned. People told us about local governments taking everything from tents and sleeping bags to journals, pictures and mementos. Even when cities are ordered to stop seizing belongings and to provide storage for the property they take, we found that people are rarely reunited with their possessions.
The losses are traumatizing, can worsen health outcomes, and can make it harder for people like Stratton to find stability and get back inside.
Our reporting is particularly relevant because cities have recently passed new camping bans or started enforcing ones already on the books following a Supreme Court decision in June that allows local officials to punish people for sleeping outside, even if shelter isn’t available.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to ban urban camping and “get the homeless off our streets,” by creating “tent cities” and by making it easier to institutionalize people with severe mental illness. “Our once-great cities have become unlivable, unsanitary nightmares, surrendered to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged. We are making many suffer for the whims of a deeply unwell few, and they are unwell indeed,” he said in a campaign video.
But our reporting shows there are more effective and compassionate ways for cities to deal with these issues.
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.
This approach would place case workers and service providers on the front lines of encampment removals. Instead, sanitation workers usually handle these traumatic displacements, research shows. And in America’s 100 largest cities, police are usually working alongside sanitation workers to not only conduct encampment closures, but also run warrant checks and cite people for camping or trespassing.
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People are usually forced to move without any — or minimal — connections to housing or support. We heard from people that offers of shelter sometimes were just a piece of paper with phone numbers for congregate shelters on it or city workers mentioning a shelter.
In many American cities, this perpetuates a cycle by pushing people into surrounding neighborhoods, which causes housed residents to complain more, which leads to more sweeps.
“We have gone all in on sweeps, and we have not really explored other options,” said Megan Welsh Carroll, co-founder and director of the Project for Sanitation Justice at San Diego State University, who has advocated for spaces where people experiencing homelessness can shower and use the restroom. “And I wonder if we could bring back some compassion and some empathy if our sidewalks felt cleaner and safer to walk down.”
Punitive policies, whether they originate with Trump or local governments, make homeless people more invisible, which will continue to erode public compassion, said Sara Rankin, a law professor at Seattle University who studies the criminalization of homelessness. “All of those approaches are designed to create the illusion that the problems are getting better, when really it’s just sweeping human beings under the rug without regard to their humanity, without regard to what really happens to them,” she said.
Those experiencing homelessness told us they already feel like they’re seen as problems to be solved, not people to be helped. In reporting on the issue, we wanted to help ProPublica’s readers recognize the humanity of the people we had met and talked to, so we gave them notecards and asked them to describe their experiences with sweeps in their own words.
We wanted our readers to better understand people like Kyra Gonzales, a woman I met in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She told me that city officials had recently taken the only pictures she had of her daughter. While talking, we discovered her daughter and my 4-year-old share the same birthday. Making that connection helped me understand how emotionally devastating sweeps can be.
She told me she knows that her belongings are an “eyesore,” so she tries to keep them out of the way. She also told me that her tent had been taken by the city. Temperatures that month dropped as low as 14 degrees. “I cried because it was cold,” she said.
I asked her what the public doesn’t understand about homelessness.
“I was just like you once,” she said, looking me in the eye. “I’m not any different now, I’m just without housing, without a house.”
