City clearing homeless camps at MLK & Lee; where do we tell them to go?

I’ve had some emails and calls from the City about an active homeless camp on the site of the old Salvation Army Red Shield Lodge property at Lee and MLK. Apparently the City is about to clear the land, and before they can do that, they need to clear the homeless people. I was asked if our NightWatch street outreach team would make a visit and see if we could help the folks find another place to stay. Getting bad news from a bunch of people out helping the homeless because we love them is probably a little easier than getting it from cops who have no choice but to move people out of their camps before the bulldozers find them. So I agreed. But I made it clear that I have no place to move the people. Our shelters are full and our housing programs have waiting lists. Those people are camping outside in downtown Greensboro because there isn’t anywhere else for them to live. If there was, they’d already be there.

I’ve driven by the property a few times by myself and we drove by the back side last Friday night, but everyone we saw was across the road in another location where folks from the community gather. It was a busy night and we didn’t get a chance to go walk the property. So today, my friend Katherine and I went by to check it out in the daylight before going back tomorrow night. We parked in the back of the property and didn’t see any paths. We asked people that we saw on the street but if anyone knew anything, they weren’t telling.

I tried calling a cop friend who works the area, but he wasn’t on duty yet. So we called GPD Communications and asked for a CRO. None were available so two patrol cops came out to meet us. They got on the phone with other cops and I got on the phone with City people and realty people and then we talked to some guys walking by, one of whom I knew because he is homeless and he’s been asking me to help him find a place to stay. (Which I haven’t done yet because I don’t have anything for him yet.) He knew there was a camp there, and said he’d tell the people we were looking for them.

By this time, I’d found out from the real estate guy what part of the property the camp was on. So we went in. And then when we walked up on it, I felt kind of stupid because it was so obvious and we would have found it ourselves pretty quickly if we had just kept walking around the whole place. (But hey, it’s a big property, and you can’t see the camp until you get up on it.) But our team has rules about guys going with the girls when we do street outreach, so having the cops there kept me and Katherine from breaking any rules. (Even though one was a girl cop. But she was a girl cop with a gun.)

The good thing was that although we found multiple campsites, it was pretty clear that they weren’t all being used. Judging from what we saw, I think maybe 1-2 people are living on the property right now, and the cop I was walking with agreed. So that’s actually good news, because the less people staying there, the less people who will be kicked out of their campsites with no place to go so that the land can be cleared.

When we were walking back to our cars, one of the cops asked me who owned the land. I don’t know, but I told him I just assumed the City did, because that’s who was calling me about clearing the land and getting the people out. But I don’t know. Maybe they do that for everybody.

And I was thinking of how the number of homeless folks in downtown Greensboro is shrinking day by day as the places they stay disappear to make room for all this new development. And frankly, there’s nowhere for them to go. Our shelters are full. We don’t yet have enough permanent supportive housing. The existing programs have wait lists. Our treatment programs for mental illness and addiction are woefully inadequate. We do still have jail. But apparently that’s overcrowded, too. (This is not a slam on our providers. We have some amazing homeless service providers in this city — and God bless them!! The need just outweighs the resources right now…)

As we got back out to the street, I looked over at the cop, shook my head and said, “It’s getting harder and harder to be homeless in downtown Greensboro.”

He looked back at me like maybe I wasn’t real bright and replied, “Well, I think that’s the point.”