Encampment and Encroachment

Homeless Tents Threaten Americans

According to the Collins Dictionary, “An encampment is a group of tents or other shelters in a particular place, especially when they are used by soldiers or refugees (Encampment definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary (collinsdictionary.com)).  The word “encampment” is the standard term for groupings of tents where homeless persons reside, and there are many photos of them, both as the featured topic of articles and the backdrop for pictures of non-housed persons, their communities, their demonstrations, and government interference in the lives of those persons.  Refugees. An interesting way to think of homeless people.

The tents are a strong symbol of American failure—failure for some people to make enough money to afford a rent or mortgage, failure to hold a job, failure to escape poverty, failure to flee from alcohol, failure to make good decisions, and failure of communities to be able to find persons an apartment, room, or house in which non-housed persons can dwell. 

The encampments we see in all the articles of urban communities of non-housed persons are a sign that the American Dream (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream) does not extend to everyone.  For a variety of reasons—usually the homeless themselves get blamed—the people living in those encampments do not want or deserve or merit or desire to live indoors.  In Chicago, and in many other American cities, there are homeless encampments.  This includes in Seattle, in Los Angeles, and in Denver, just to name a few. 

In Chicago, Alderman Cappleman insisted last year after a cleanup of the famous viaduct in Uptown that that some homeless simply do not want to live indoors.  He mentioned offhandedly he had proof of this after he had offered those community members some apartments but that several did not want them (John Greenfield, May 28, 2021, “Ald. Cappleman Discusses 46th Ward Walk/Bike Projects, and the LSD Viaduct Issue,” Streetsblog Chicago, https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/05/28/ald-cappleman-discusses-46th-ward-walk-bike-projects-and-the-lsd-viaduct-issue/).  

His mean-spirited comment, even though he provided some explanations why the homeless did not want housing, was met head on by Patricia Nix-Hodes, Director of the Law Project of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, who stated, “ ‘People experiencing homelessness want and need permanent housing. It is simply false to claim otherwise.’ “  

The fact that Alderman Cappleman even offered explanations of why the non-housed do not want this help are perhaps meant to help establish his professional and White-privileged status.  He has to be the one to explain the reasons on behalf of the lesser persons here, the homeless.  The homeless cannot speak for themselves, and they cannot compete in most media to offer their own explanations about their own lives or their own plans or their own situations.  Somebody else has to do that for them.  Cappleman is said to have background in Social Work.     

So on the surface, homeless encampments are an eyesore, are a result of homeless people simply not wanting to live indoors.  As long as the tents can be limited and removed, they are a temporary dwelling Americans can move on from and forget about.  We can clean the area where the tents were located.  We can add bike lanes to sidewalks and other means of reclaiming—or spreading—the territory of persons who in fact are housed and are therefore not in need of someone else speaking for them.  We can close it down, thank God. 

We can “clean” it.

One thing we do not want to do is let the tents remain too long, lest their evil powers infect society at large.  What’s worse, we cannot let them expand into public locations, into parks, into gentrified neighbors, into the city.  Growing tent communities is not an encampment.  The term for growing tent cities is “encroachment” and it is symbolic and threatening and it is, well, un-American!         

“Encroachment” refers to something dangerous indeed.  It occurs when a property owner builds or extends a structure onto public areas or spaces, Investopedia tells us (James Chen, “Encroachment,” Investopedia, August 24, 2021, https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/encroachment.asp).  James Chen tells us in his extended definition of encroachment that “Structural encroachment occurs when a property owner builds or extends a structure onto the public domain such as sidewalks or roads.”  Structural encroachment is a real estate term, and it has to do with construction of a structure.

Encroachment also refers in a more symbolic way to threatening the value of the landowner’s home and property through construction of inappropriate structures that are eyesores or unsuitable.  All over the country, residents talk in term of homeless tents and structures encroaching on their privileged areas.

An article in the Los Angeles Times talks of residents being “fed up with” the homeless encampment along Jefferson Boulevard, just west of Lincoln Boulevard in Playa del Rey.  (Erika Smith, November 27, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-27/banning-la-homeless-encampments-could-get-more-support-than-liberals-think).  Abandoned recreational vehicles, old buses, and other signs of the homeless who have taken up residence in that area dominated the landscape. 

Are the old RVs and buses really the problem?  Or is something else going on?  Scott Culbertson is the executive director of the Friends of Ballona Wetlands—in front of which a “few dozen occupants had been making frequent incursions into the Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve and adjacent freshwater marsh, leaving mounds of trash and causing brushfires.”  Perhaps it is the mess left by the homeless—or the presence of the homeless persons themselves—that is really the problem for Culbertson and his friends.

A recent article in Block Club Chicago called “City Matches Touhy Park Tent City Residents With Housing In New Push To Fight Homelessness” reports on 20 residents of this encampment being taken in a van and assessed for participation in Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s new program called an “Accelerated Moving Event” to help the homeless (Joe Ward and Madison Savedra, November 19, 2021, City Matches Touhy Park Tent City Residents With Housing In New Push To Fight Homelessness (blockclubchicago.org)). 

However, the name of that article is a misnomer.  The city did NOT match residents with housing.  At least not on that chilly autumn morning.  All they did was make a record of the homeless people, their most personal information, all their financial data, and the fact that they can be considered “non-housed” individuals.  Lesser.  Lower.  Outdoors.  Somehow defective.  

The placement in an online system only served to document the homeless person’s need.  They were not immediately placed in housing and had to return to the park.  A follow-up needs to be done to see how many got housing in the week or two after that—the period they were told it would take to “find a good match for them,” and how many of them are still housed, three months later.   

The van had arrived quite late that morning from the Chicago Department of Family and Support Services.  Residents and others waited around tents and a fire to meet the van scheduled for a 9:30 arrival.

But is that all that was planned for the day? 

Two City of Chicago pickup trucks full of workers arrived and waited in front of the park while the Touhy Park residents, some other homeless persons and advocates, and reporters from the Block Club Chicago crew waited for the vans.  Some of the workers in the pickup trucks leaked the information that they were there “to do some cleaning in the park, like rake some leaves,” said one of them anonymously.  The workers were from a different City of Chicago department.  They seemed to not know what to do about all of the people accompanying the homeless persons in the park. 

That chilly morning in Touhy Park, there was NO throwing of personal items into the trash that morning.  No tents were removed or set on fire.  No chairs or benches were taken away from the park.

Thwarted by their attempts to do anything in the park, the workers in the two City of Chicago trucks left.

The reader is reminded that the residents of Touhy Park’s homeless encampment had been told many times they would not lose their possessions while they went in the vans to the meeting so city representatives of the new program could  “register” them and provide them with housing.  They even had letters from the alderwoman, Maria Hadden.  She also spoke at that meeting in November, saying they would not have to fear losing their tents.

Then why two pickup trucks full of city workers?

At that same meeting, not only homeless persons from the park but also their neighbors spoke of hygiene and sanitation issues.  Those homeless people—and those damn tents—should just not be there!  That is always the message that comes through loud and clear.  Posted on one of the polls in the park was an announcement that the city would be conducting an “off-street cleaning” on a different date, soon, with cleaning possible from 6:00 am to 4:30 pm.

Cleaning.