I recently got involved with the Amarillo unhoused community through our non-profit's dedication to serve and advocate for the homeless with mental illness. It was a cold winter night, and I decided I was going to get involved. I was told by advocates in the trenches that tarps were needed because it would be a rainy night, and hypothermia could be a risk. At the homeless encampment, they could shield themselves from the rain by positioning themselves under the tarps. I purchased some tarps and dropped them off alongside the true heroes (those that assist daily), and I felt like maybe I made a difference in a small corner of the world. The very next day, I received a call from some of the homeless advocates saying they needed more tarps because many of them got thrown away by city municipal workers and the Amarillo police.
I rushed to the former encampment and was visibly stunned as I saw the city police negotiating a homeless relocation. I witnessed a large trash dumpster full of discarded homeless belongings and an ear-splitting municipal dump truck drive by. At that point my heart sank. I thought to myself, "Even if I wanted to be a better man and assist those without homes, the City of Amarillo would not allow me to do it."
Being a neophyte in homeless social services, I had to brush up on what happened here. I discovered that homeless encampment cleanouts are not idiosyncratic to Amarillo, Texas. This is something that the homeless have had to endure in multiple cities, and how a city conducts these homeless cleanouts and relocation can be consequential.
This controversial practice places a spotlight on Texas House Bill 1925 that passed on June 15, 2021. The law prohibits homeless individuals from camping on public property without the consent of the officer or agency having the legal duty or authority to manage the public place. Those who violate the law can receive a misdemeanor and be incarcerated (https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB1925/2021).
HB 1925 does not mandate city officials to confiscate and discard homeless survival gear, winter clothing, sleeping bags, and tarps that shield people from inclement weather. Yet the law does not preempt city leadership from taking creative license to produce and enforce their own ordinance related to camping on public property. (https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB1925/2021).
My reading of the law is that no one is telling these cities to throw away a homeless individual's belongings and survival gear. These are ordinances created by the cities, themselves, that allow such inhumanity, and the law does very little to prevent them from doing it.
Let's see what other alternatives exist.
Encampment resolution pilot programs exist throughout the United States. In Philadelphia, during encampment clean-outs, the unhoused individual's survival gear can be placed in a storage facility for 30 days. The homeless can retrieve their gear and belongings at any point during the 30 days. Philadelphia social workers intentionally follow up with those affected by the clean-out, and they connect them to an array of supported services including case management, substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, and housing alternatives. Everyone gets a bed when the encampment closures begin. The mindset is if you are going to forcefully remove someone from their makeshift shelter, you better have a bed waiting for them. The municipal leadership of Philadelphia reported in February 2020 that 48% of the homeless in the Kensington neighborhood encampment closures were still housed or in residential treatment programs. The Philadelphia pilot program is leading the pack when it comes to successful encampment resolution programs. (https://www.phila.gov/2020-02-21-our-encampment-resolution-program-a-social-service-led-program/)
Finding the homeless legitimate housing is an important part of these proactive encampment resolution programs. Credible non-profit organizations and the Center for Disease Control have acknowledged that the most efficient and cost-effective way to mitigate homelessness is a comprehensive approach that provides housing with supports. Over the long run, cities who implement these ideas can save money because city officials, municipal dump trucks, and the police are not regularly dispatched to assist with the abatement. The city police can spend more time protecting the citizenry as opposed to negotiating the forced geographical relocation of the homeless. I don't think a person joins the police academy with the ambition of throwing away a homeless woman's last possessions. Why do we have a system in Amarillo that imposes this on a police officer?
Geographical relocation without offering shelter and support poses a danger for the homeless and presents a liability to the City of Amarillo. According to Westbrook and Robinson, researchers at the University of Colorado at Denver, 80% of homeless individuals who were affected by the Denver abatement and relocation policies did not receive supportive services. Their findings highlighted that 45% of those individuals experienced an increase in morbidity and mortality due to weather exposure injuries. (https://www.texasobserver.org/unhoused-community-sweeps-deadly/)
Imagine what happens when one deprives the homeless of their survival gear during the unpredictable weather gyrations of the Texas Panhandle. Any city that allows municipal workers to discard winter clothing, vital tent shelter, tarps, hand warmers, and other survival apparatus is most certainly clearing a path for the homeless to get injured or die. What if their medications accidentally get thrown away during a sweep? My view as an Amarillo citizen and a mental health advocate is we need to do better.
The CEO of SAM Ministries, a local nonprofit dedicated to reducing homelessness in San Antonio, articulated that some unhoused individuals who died in San Antonio (2023) may have lost their lives due to that year's unprecedented heat wave. The CEO stated that out of the 322 recorded deaths in the homeless community, heat exposure was a factor in 20% of those deaths. Obviously, they were not protected from the weather in San Antonio.
This is one of many complex and multi-faceted issues concerning the traumas that the homeless face regularly. I don't have the answers, but I do suspect there is a more humane way of doing encampment closures. I am currently involved in the Amarillo City's Homeless Continuity of Care meetings that occur every other month, and my hope is that we secure homeless representation in those meetings. The homeless deserve a seat at the table to discuss issues that relate to them and how to resolve those challenges. And the challenges are many.
While Transformation Park (a 50-cabin homeless shelter being built) shimmers bright on the horizon, there are homeless shelters that will not provide safe haven to individuals with certain mental health diagnoses or criminal histories. Amarillo Housing First, a life-saving non-profit homeless shelter that opens on dangerously cold nights, desperately needs private and public funding to expand their services. I regularly see disabled individuals in wheelchairs navigating the streets, and I don't understand why we have left them there as a community. I see unhoused individuals sleeping on cold concrete slab, hallucinating, and talking to someone who doesn't exist. It's clear they have a mental illness. What are they doing out there? Why are they not getting any help? I need people to care about these issues.
Being homeless and disabled are not crimes.