Sweeps

A sweep (also “clean-up") is the forced disbanding of homeless encampments on public property and the removal of both unhoused individuals and their property from an area. Practices vary by workers conducting the sweeps, where the sweeps occur, how much advance notice encampments are given, and what the city does with property collected during a sweep. The last decade has seen a rapid growth in the number of homeless encampments in cities, suburbs, and rural areas across the United States. This has lead to massive encampment sweeps, often encouraged by the complaints of housed neighbors as well as by local ordinances that prohibit camping on public land.

Role in judicial decisions

Lavan v. City of Los Angeles

Lavan v. City of Los Angeles (Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals 2012) was a case that challenged the City of Los Angeles’ policy of seizing and destroying personal property left temporarily unattended on public sidewalks. In Lavan, the plaintiffs temporarily left their property behind to “perform necessary tasks such as showering, eating, using restrooms, or attending court.” The plaintiffs argued that simply because the property is left unattended while the owners performed necessary tasks such as using the restroom or attending court does not render the property “abandoned.” In conclusion, the Ninth Circuit held that destruction of a homeless individual’s personal property, even when temporarily unattended, was a Fourth Amendment violation. In addition, although a homeless encampment may violate ordinances against trespassing or camping on public property, that does not nullify an individual’s rights to notice and preservation of their property. The Court further ruled that failure to provide reasonable notice prior to seizing and destroying the property violates the Fourteenth Amendment right to due process.

Ellis v. Clark County Department of Corrections

Ellis v. Clark County Department of Corrections (Western District of Washington 2016) was a federal lawsuit that challenged the confiscation and destruction of property during a sweep conducted by workers for Clark County, Washington. The lawsuit described how the plaintiff's private property was confiscated and destroyed, sometimes in their presence and always without their consent. While their property was at times left unattended it was never considered abandoned by its owners. Plaintiffs left their belongings at encampments in order to do things like eat a meal, or go to work. The court found that there was no “good faith belief” that the property was abandoned before it was destroyed. The judge ruled that the immediate destruction of property during a sweep is unreasonable unless there is no less intrusive or destructive alternative and therefore violates the Fourth Amendment. It also held, citing Lavan, that violation of a camping ordinance does not remove a homeless person’s constitutional right to their property. Finally, the court ruled that failing to provide any process for returning seized property or notice that it had been taken violates the Fourteenth Amendment.

In the Ellis case, the court held that ten minutes of notice given to one homeless individual prior to a sweep was unreasonable. Because cities may not immediately destroy abandoned property, they must store it and provide means for owners to reclaim it. Therefore, cities are also required to give notice of where individuals can reclaim their property once it has been collected. There may also be a problem with adequacy of the notice if it is unclear or not easy for people to see or understand.

Mitchell v. City of Los Angeles

In March 2016, the Los Angeles City Council settled a lawsuit that accused police of seizing and destroying the property of four unhoused people. Their belongings included blankets, tents, and medication. Some business leaders criticized the city’s decision to settle the case, citing health concerns, such as a typhus outbreak in Downtown Los Angeles. But Pete White, founder and executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), and other Services Not Sweeps organizers argue that very little cleaning takes place during sweeps of homeless encampments.

Momentous sweeps

There are countless homeless encampment sweeps that happen daily throughout the United States. The following sweeps have received the media's attention at a national level.

Echo Park Lake, Los Angeles, California

In Fall 2019, unhoused people started relocating to the Echo Park Lake encampment, partly as a refuge from the CARE+ comprehensive sweeps program that was rolled out with Los Angeles Municipal Code Section (LAMC) 41.18 (a sit/lie ban law which had recently been amended). Unhoused residents were drawn to this park because it had the only public restrooms and water fountains in the area. By January 2020, the Echo Park Lake encampment had grown to around 60 residents. Compared to most homeless encampments in Los Angeles, Echo Park Lake was safe and had community support — particularly for women fleeing domestic violence. Park resident Mina Sullivan told the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy researchers conducting a report on the effects that the sweep had on the former residents, “There were lots of good people in that community. So if anything ever happened, they would stop it. They would help you.” The encampment functioned on a simple set of rules: don’t steal from other residents, and keep drug use inside tents. When conflicts occurred, they were handled internally, without the involvement of law enforcement. However, media coverage of the encampment tended to focus on the negative. As 2020 wore on, the public narrative portrayed Echo Park Lake as dangerous and crime-ridden. In the following weeks, conflicts with law enforcement escalated, including blockades, late-night harassment from LAPD, and the violent arrest of park resident Davon Brown by park rangers. The tensions eased in March 2020, when COVID-19 shelter-in-place guidelines put a temporary end to the sweeps. By the end of the year despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and lack of housing options, Council District 13 staff was coordinating with the LAPD to clear the encampment and close down the park.

On March 24, 2021 approximately 200 unhoused residents of Echo Park Lake awoke to find themselves fenced into the park, surrounded by police, in what the UCLA report calls “a full-scale militarized police seizure of public space.” Approximately 400 LAPD officers descended on Echo Park Lake, kettling and brutalizing activists supporting the unhoused community. Within 24 hours, police evicted the encampment’s last residents, and arrested nearly 200 supporters and journalists. Overnight, city employees put up a fence around Echo Park Lake. Residents were told that if they didn’t leave by nightfall, they’d be arrested — and once they left, they weren’t allowed to step foot in the park again, not even to collect their belongings. Throughout the day, LAHSA employees scrambled to connect the remaining park residents with housing. The sweep resulted in unhoused residents being displaced from outreach and support and access to housing for some was immediately broken. On the evening of March 25, 2021 another protest was held outside Echo Park Lake in solidarity with the few residents who were still inside the fenced-off park. Over 400 officers were deployed to break up the gathering — which they accomplished by kettling and arresting 182 protesters and journalists. By the morning of March 26, Echo Park Lake’s last two residents were removed from the park in handcuffs. CPA and Los Angeles City Controller candidate Kenneth Mejia estimates the total cost of the Echo Park Lake raid at over $2 million.

The vast majority of Echo Park Lake residents were initially placed in Project Roomkey, a temporary program utilizing vacant hotel rooms as housing for vulnerable unhoused individuals during the pandemic. The conditions inside Project Roomkey are now well-documented. At the LA Grand Hotel, where many Echo Park Lake residents were sent, participants didn’t even get a key to their own rooms. Staff were allowed to enter the rooms without permission at any time. Most alarmingly, participants weren’t allowed to have visitors, or visit each other’s rooms. Residents were given a strict curfew, which forced them to spend around half of each day in solitary confinement. Breaking any of the program’s rules could lead to a “non-compliance notice,” and even one notice can be grounds for immediate eviction. This lands participants back on the streets with no path to permanent housing.

The UCLA report notes that while the city of LA is receiving billions of federal dollars for housing and shelter, much of that money is going toward temporary solutions, like Safe Sleep Villages and Tiny Homes. And although 6,806 emergency housing vouchers were recently made available to the City and County of LA, the system has failed at implementing them effectively. Even for those who receive vouchers, finding a landlord willing to accept them can be difficult. The result is a never-ending revolving door of displacement. Council District 13 Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, whose office planned the raid, immediately touted it as a “success,” claiming that 209 people had been placed into transitional shelter. But according to a report from the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, one year later, only 17 of those people have been placed in long-term housing. Of the 84 former Echo Park Lake residents the UCLA researchers interviewed or had community knowledge of, most are still waiting in the system, have been forced back into homelessness, or have disappeared. Six former residents were dead by the time of publication. On the day the report was released, that number increased to seven, with the death of a former park resident known as Dancing David. He was waiting for an emergency housing voucher in the weeks before his death. The report, which is based on 11 months of LAHSA data and ethnographic research, highlights the failures of a housing system based on displacement and carcerality.

On May 26, 2021, after two months of “renovations,” Echo Park Lake reopened to the public — with a permanent fence around the perimeter. Heavy police presence, Urban Alchemy employees, and 33 new CCTV cameras ensured that no unhoused people would resume their residence in the park. The “renovations” also included new signs banning vending in the park, citing LAMC 63.44 — a local law that was previously overturned by the state. The signs were later updated to say “no vending, unless in accordance with city rules and regulations.”

According to emails published in the UCLA report, the “Echo Park Operation” was a collaboration between CD 13, Recreations and Parks, LAPD, LASAN, the Department of Transit, the city attorney, and the nonprofit subcontractor Urban Alchemy. The report refers to Urban Alchemy as “a mercenary outfit” that serves to “disappear visible poverty in a manner that appears less violent and more palatable than previous sweep systems.” The company is currently the subject of two class action lawsuits. “Mitch O’Farrell unleashed rage, the likes of which I have not seen in emails from a Council District office, on LAHSA, commanding LAHSA to do his bidding,” said Ananya Roy, director of the UCLA Luskin Institute. When the agency didn’t comply with Councilmember O’Farrell’s request to move Echo Park Lake residents into shelter beds (for the understandable reason that said shelter beds didn’t exist), Council District 13 instead signed a $350,000 contract with Urban Alchemy in December 2020 for “outreach and other supportive services.” In the following months, the private company’s employees performed daily tent counts at Echo Park Lake and tried to persuade residents to move into shelters. However, throughout early February 2020, Urban Alchemy’s daily reports frequently noted that the shelters they contacted were full. “There was no help given, no appropriate information, no actual in-paper contracts for any of us,” said Queen Mendez, a former resident of the Echo Park Lake encampment. “They just terrorized us with the constant, you know, showing up with a police undercover… the constant helicopters in the night.”

The UCLA report suggests four key strategies to prevent a disaster like the mass eviction at Echo Park Lake from happening in the future: (1) Keep people housed by building tenant power and preventing evictions. (2) Tackle discrimination in housing markets by eliminating application fees, background checks, and credit checks, especially for people with housing vouchers. (3) Abolish criminalization by repealing laws like LAMC 41.18 that make it illegal to sit or lie on the street, and eliminate law enforcement contracts with shelter and housing systems. (4) Invest in the public acquisition and community control of property through community ownership and operation of public housing.

Powderhorn Park, Minneapolis, Minnesota

On June 7, 2020 less than a mile away from where a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd, a veto-proof majority of the City Council gathered at Powderhorn Park and pledged to dismantle the police department and rethink public safety. A few days later, more than 200 homeless individuals were evicted from a hotel they had been using as an ad-hoc shelter, and about a dozen of those evicted made their way to Powderhorn Park, the closest park to the hotel they were temporarily staying at. In the month following the hotel evictions, many more unhoused individuals followed. City officials estimated more than 560 tents and 800 people had been living there by July 9, 2020, in what is the largest known homeless encampment in Twin Cities metropolitan history.

Residents in the Powderhorn Park neighborhood initially jumped into action and mobilized to support their unhoused neighbors—many of whom were Black and indigenous. Despite making up roughly 14 percent of Hennepin County’s population, Black people represent 65 percent of those living in its homeless shelters, and 49 percent of homeless adults living in the county overall. Minneapolis has one of the largest racial income gaps in the country, and Black homeownership in the city stands at one-third the rate of white families. Some federal funds flow to tribal governments, but the majority gets spent on reservation life, despite the fact that most Natives now live in cities.

Supporters of the encampment at Powderhorn Park began organizing amongst themselves to put pressure on elected officials for help. But as the encampment grew, some housed residents’ cited concerns about crime and safety. While the Minneapolis Park Police told those living in the encampment they would have to evacuate, dozens of housed residents protested, and pointed to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance and an executive order issued by Governor Tim Walz urging against homeless encampment sweeps during the pandemic. The Minneapolis Park Board relented and said the encampment could stay, and five days later, on June 17, 2020 the board approved a resolution to allow homeless people to seek “refuge space” in Minneapolis parks. By this time nearly 200 tents had been set up at Powderhorn Park.

As time went on, residents felt abandoned by the government and frustrated that the bulk of care duties were falling on untrained volunteers. On July 4, 2020 some residents brought tents and camped outside the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, demanding a more organized state-led response to the homelessness crisis. Government officials have defended their crisis response, while noting that the pandemic has put unprecedented strain on their systems. “The most critical issue is that all of our staff and services have been stretched beyond anything we’ve ever known,” said David Hewitt, the director of the Office to End Homelessness for Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis.

A week later, Park Superintendent Al Bangoura ordered evictions of camps he believed had grown out of control, which included Powderhorn Park. "There were multiple reports of domestic disputes and fights and documented sexual assaults and shootings. There were many late-night disturbances," Bangoura declared. Yet former encampments residents detailed how they ended up in parks after suffering from addiction, abusive relationships and full emergency shelters.

Between Monday, July 18-20, 2020 Minneapolis police led a partial eviction, bulldozing and clearing the east encampments of Powderhorn Park and notices were given to the 65 tents that remained at the west encampment and elsewhere in the park. Notices to transition were served on July 31 and two weeks of MPRB outreach, transportation offers, and efforts to incrementally move those living in the remaining tents were unsuccessful," noting using law enforcement is the "last strategy."

While sweeps were underway, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed for a temporary restraining order. U.S. District Judge Wilhelmina Wright denied the request after the Park Board superintendent and police chief attested that encampments were disbanded only after they became dangerous, and when alternative shelter existed without any acknowledgment of the CDC guidelines or the dangers of living in shelters during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ACLU of Minnesota sued the city of Minneapolis, Hennepin County and the Park Board in October 2020, alleging law enforcement violated the property, privacy and due-process rights of unsheltered people when they swept tent cities from Minneapolis parks. The ACLU says the way park police swept homeless encampments violated residents' constitutional rights. Park Board lawyer Ann Walther argued park defendants were faced with an unprecedented situation in the summer of 2020, "dealing with chaos, criminal activity and a pandemic where one of the few things people could do was get out in parks." She said the Park Board has never been in the business of handling homeless encampments, and that Bangoura and Ohotto acted within the parameters of Gov. Tim Walz's COVID-19 executive orders. In March 2020, Walz issued orders prohibiting disbanding encampments unless they became a public safety threat.

Looking ahead, even those most supportive of letting homeless people take sanctuary in public parks recognize an alternative solution must be developed, with the freezing Minneapolis winter just months away. Policymakers are also worrying about thousands of new people becoming homeless if lawmakers start lifting eviction moratoriums and unemployment rates stay high.

The east encampments were cleared July 18-20 and notices were given to the 65 tents that remained at the west encampment and elsewhere in the park. Notices to transition were served on July 31 and two weeks of MPRB outreach, transportation offers, and efforts to incrementally move those living in the remaining tents were unsuccessful," noting using law enforcement is the "last strategy."

Earlier this month, Minneapolis Park Board members considered a resolution that would have limited homeless encampments to 10 parks, at a maximum of 10 tents per park, with all encampments having to be cleared by Sept. 1. After protests, the park board voted 5-4 to table the resolution.

MPRB says there has been "significant crime and safety incidents" at the park, noting the encampments are within a safe school zone, which is not allowed per a resolution the Park Board Commissioners passed on July 15.

The ACLU of Minnesota sued the city of Minneapolis, Hennepin County and the Park Board in October 2020, alleging law enforcement violated the property, privacy and due-process rights of unsheltered people when they swept tent cities from Minneapolis parks. If it succeeds, the lawsuit could potentially restrict encampment sweeps, forcing local governments to provide extended notice, storage, help with packing as well as transportation to alternative housing, said ACLU legal director Teresa Nelson. "On the one hand that might sound expensive, but on the other hand we provide a lot of city services, and our people who are unhoused are members of the community as well," she said. The ACLU is representing Zakat, Aid and Charity Assisting Humanity (ZACAH), a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to prevent Minnesotans from becoming homeless, as well as nine individuals who lived in Minneapolis parks until they were evicted.

It describes how plaintiff Henrietta Brown, an Oglala Sioux tribal member living at Peavey Field Park, was woken before 5 a.m. by police shaking her tent and shining a light in her face, yelling that she had 30 minutes to get out in pouring rain. "Because Ms. Brown never received an eviction notice, she was not prepared to leave," according to the complaint. "When Ms. Brown told a deputy sheriff that she needed to get important papers from her tent, he told her that she could not do that and threatened to arrest her."

Plaintiffs allege police destroyed IDs, irreplaceable family memorabilia and winter survival gear.

Wright denied the request after the Park Board superintendent and police chief attested that encampments were disbanded only after they became dangerous, and when alternative shelter existed. In September, Wright dismissed all federal-law claims against Hennepin County and Sheriff David Hutchinson, leaving some state-law claims intact. The judge recognized that while encampment residents believe their property was taken without fair notice, the county had to disband encampments to promote general safety. "Plaintiffs have not identified any legal authority demonstrating that a tent pitched unlawfully on public land is a home such that its owner has an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy," she wrote. At the same time, Wright drew a line between confiscating encampment residents' personal effects and destroying them. During Friday's hearing, Wright's questions returned to the nuance between taking encampment residents' belongings and razing them, using the analogy that an illegally parked car may be impounded but not destroyed without giving the owner a chance to reclaim it. Walther responded that there is no clearly established definition of "adequate notice" or any requirement that government hold on to property cleared from an unlawful encampment. Wright does not have a deadline to issue a ruling following Friday's hearing. Homeless encampments have not been permitted in Minneapolis parks since February 2021, yet they persist in neighborhoods throughout the city. There are an estimated 13 camps scattered throughout Minneapolis, including two on private property.

Modesto, California

Shannon Marie Bigley, 33

Stockton Boulevard, Sacramento, California

On November 4, 2008 the Sacramento Housing Redevelopment Agency (SHRA), requested authorization from the City of Sacramento to acquire the property at 5700 Stockton Boulevard due to "blight, code violations, and due to its alignment with Stockton Boulevard five year project plan". Nearby residents also alerted authorities about the endless piles of "filth, trash and dangerous items" that they see as a threat to public safety. Sacramento County Sheriff's Officers arrived at the encampment about 8 a.m. Wednesday, May 1, 2019 and started meeting individually with those living there and told them they needed to pack up and leave. Officers evicted nearly approximately 65 unhoused people living in the encampment on Stockton Boulevard, which was once home to The San Juan Motel and Mobile Home Park. Organizers showed up to protest the eviction, officers then formed a line between the protesters and the homeless camp. By 9 a.m., the Sheriff's Office started making announcements that the protest was an "unlawful assembly." They asked protesters to disperse or face being taken into custody. The Sheriff's Office said three people were detained - two protesters were cited and released and one man living in the encampment was arrested and booked into Sacramento County Jail. Officials said he was cited for obstruction and was found to be violating his parole. By the evening, all residents who were formerly living in the encampment were displaced. Some of the unhoused residents of the Stockton Encampment were former tenants of the Motel and Mobile Home Park, including a woman whose arm was broken by a Sheriff Deputy during their violent eviction. Several people who were living in the encampment moved to the nearby sidewalk.

Before the demolition of the San Juan property, Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency (SHRA) hired a third party relocation agent responsible for determining if all occupants were eligible for relocation payment. Years later, however, several of the property’s former tenants remain unhoused on publicly-owned vacant land, including the resident who had her arm broken by a sheriff deputy. Many of the encampment residents suffer from severe health issues that were being treated by doctors making weekly visits to the site. In the three long, hot days following Sheriff and SacPD’s displacement of residents at Stockton Boulevard, local housing advocates observed a deceased puppy, an elderly female suffering from a seizure, another resident passing out from heat stroke, and a resident who disclosed she was raped.

Tompkins Square Park, Manhattan, New York

On June 3, 1991 more than 350 New York City Police Department officers converged at Tompkins Square Park shortly after 5:00 A.M. and displaced approximately 200 unhoused people from their encampment. Most of the residents left on their own, but a handful, shouting taunts staged an impromptu demonstration. Several hundred protesters marched down Avenue C and across East Sixth Street, beating garbage-can lids and carrying signs saying "Stop the War on the Poor" and "S.O.S. Tompkins Square Park." Seven people were arrested for refusing an order to leave the park and four of them were also charged with resisting arrest. By early this morning, after a thunderstorm dispersed protesters. At 9:07 A.M., NYPD Commissioner Gotbaum declared the park "officially closed for renovations." The park was then immediately fenced off for a $2.3 million renovation project.

The 1991 eviction in Tompkins Square Park was the culmination of protracted contestation over housing and community that started with the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riot and lasted several years, marking “the battle for New York’s Lower East Side.” As New York’s homeless population grew, newly elected liberal mayor David Dinkins sanctioned the police-led closure of the park in 1991. Various first-hand accounts of the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riot make evident the role of police violence in state-led displacement, noting how hundreds of “vicious out-of-control cops … were attacking anybody in their sights,” beating protesters, bystanders, and journalists, all “to serve and protect real estate.” In the face of such police violence, protesters held up signs stating that “Gentrification is Genocide.” The struggle at, and for, Tompkins Square Park continues, most recently with new barricades, brutal sweeps of a homeless encampment, and police violence targeting unhoused residents.

Toriumi Plaza, Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, California

During the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately 80 people had been taking shelter at Toriumi Plaza located in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles neighborhood. On Thursday, March 17, 2022 approximately 20 unhoused residents were swept from their encampment, many of whom had spent the last 11 months to three years on 1st and Judge Aiso Streets. Local grassroots collective building community power in Little Tokyo. J-TOWN Action & Solidarity led a sweep defense alongside LA CAN, Street Watch LA and Stop LAPD Spying. The sweep, ordered by mayoral candidate Kevin de Leon, violently displaced the unhoused community members. His staff gleefully stood by while people’s belongings were destroyed, and no permanent housing solutions were offered to our unhoused neighbors. This manifestation of the city’s campaign of banishment was capped off by a large police presence pushing community members out, 20 hours after the initial sweep.Brown said the closure of the plaza is also in part to address public safety concerns from residents and businesses who have long complained about the encampment. Toriumi Plaza sits a little over an acre of public space with a Metro Bike Station. The plaza also sits atop an underground parking lot that is used for visitors when shopping in Little Tokyo and the downtown area. Over the last month, many of them left on their own accord to avoid being moved into 90-day A Bridge Home shelters, temporary rooms by way of Project Roomkey, or new tiny home villages in Councilmember Kevin de León’s district that come with strict rules and curfews. For volunteer-run Jtown Action & Solidarity, a group that holds weekly Power Up services and advocates for unhoused rights and anti-gentrification, LAMC 41.18 is used to benefit people with wealth and power who aim to privatize public space, which harms unhoused human beings in the process.

For Jtown Action & Solidarity, calling for a sweep of a community that had been protecting each other from housing instability was akin to the historical events that happened around 100 years ago when residents were displaced and incarcerated when Executive Order 9066 turned 1st Street into a holding area for Japanese American incarceration.

town Action & Solidarity proceeded with their weekly Power Up outside the now fenced-off Toriumi Plaza two days after their sweep defense. “Things are no different from before,” said Steven Chun, a member of Jtown Action & Solidarity. “Even those who accepted ‘housing’ from the city returned to the Power Up […] because the community and relationships we’ve built are irreplaceable.

Reception

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued guidelines instructing cities that, unless housing units are available, “do not clear encampments during community spread of COVID-19. Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community,” which “increases the potential for disease spread.” Despite being given these guidelines, cities around the U.S. continued to conduct sweeps.

Responses by those involved

Organizers within the unhoused community say even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the sweeps were disruptive, further traumatizing people already living on the edge. When people living in swept encampments are displaced, they lose contact with outreach workers who provide them with access to various forms of support, food, medicine, harm reduction resources and mental health services.

Anti-sweeps coalitions

Sacramento Homeless Union

The Sacramento Homeless Union was founded by its current President, Crystal Sanchez, and is a local chapter of the National Homeless Union. The National Union of the Homeless was founded in 1985 in response to the drastic cuts in federal housing spending and the subsequent spike in homelessness. The NHU rose to about 15,000 members in 20 different unions before dissolving in 1993. In June of 2019, the original founders of the NHU went to Washington DC with a national Poor People’s Campaign to re-establish the union. Crystal was part of that meeting and a 3 day forum in which she spoke about what happened out at Stockton Boulevard in Sacramento, California. Crystal is also an Executive Board Member of the National Union of the Homeless, and Co-Founder of Sacramento S.O.U.P. – Solidarity Of Unhoused Peoples.

Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP)

The Western Regional Advocacy Project was founded in 2005 by local social justice organizations across the West Coast of the United States. Organizers in this group sought to expose and eliminate the root causes of homelessness and poverty, empower communities to demand protection of civil and human rights, and advocate for restoring federal funding for affordable housing. WRAP does research, community organizing, and policy advocacy that aims to translate the outrage at sleeping bodies in public into a catalyst for change in attitudes and practices rather than something to quickly hide away from sight, disregarding human dignity and rights for appearances’ sake. Affordable housing and addressing structural inequalities will be a long and hard fight. Prioritizing localized community organizing and connecting these efforts to larger policy conversations puts homeless people in the driver’s seat, and it’s slowly but surely created change.

Street Watch LA

Street Watch LA is a coalition of organizers founded under the umbrella of the DSA-LA Housing and Homelessness Committee which is committed to abolishing neoliberal housing policies and the heavily funded police state that enforces them. Street Watch LA does outreach with those who are most oppressed by anti-homeless policies in an effort to help alleviate the systemic pressures they face, and help empower their voices in the policy making process. We will learn from and build solidarity with other housing rights and police monitoring organizations in LA and beyond to pressure elected officials, property owners, and city employees to immediately cease their inhumane treatment of low income and unhoused peoples. We will also seek to engage with those who view housing inequality and the criminalization of poverty as normal or immutable to shake them from their complacency, and encourage them to organize with us and join us in demanding a society that provides a dignified home for everyone.

Street Watch stands apart from progressive and non-profit homeless outreach efforts because they explicitly acknowledge that the housing and homelessness crisis cannot be solved through charity within the capitalist framework. They acknowledge that capitalism itself is cause of this crisis. Therefore, we acknowledge that it is not only the private sector’s control of housing policy that forces people to live on the streets, but also the private control of health care, labor, law enforcement, and government.

Supporters

Legislators and housed residents who would prefer that unhoused people be moved out of their view (and advocate for this to occur) are reassured that their circumstances have improved, with no insight into the conditions within the homeless services systems.

Effects

Encampment sweeps disrupt the lives of their residents in a number of ways. Aside from the burden of having to regularly relocate, those displaced by encampment sweeps often lose personal belongings including vital documents, necessary medications, and objects of sentimental value. Most of all, bonds of community which help people living on the street to cope with their situation are broken. Along with other forms of the criminalization of homelessness, encampment sweeps can also further erode the trust between people experiencing homelessness and the system allegedly set up to assist them. Seattle's Human Services Department admitted that the majority of residents displaced in sweeps do not end up in city shelters, and a Honolulu survey revealed that more encampment residents stated that sweeps cause further instability in their lives and make them less likely or able to seek shelter than the reverse.

Homeless sweeps are costly and ineffective and make homelessness worse, not better. More importantly, courts have held that failing to give sufficient notice before a sweep, so people can act to keep their property safe, or destroying property during a sweep violates the rights of homeless individuals.

Isolation

The criminal legal system and decades of racist policing are also notorious drivers of homelessness. Formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 more times likely to be homeless than the general public, and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness reports roughly 48,000 people who enter shelters every year come directly from jails and prisons. Having a criminal record can then be a serious impediment to finding housing, which can then begin vicious cycles right back into prison. One study found that people returning from prison who lacked stable housing were more than twice as likely to end up back in prison than those with stable homes

References

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