PORTLAND, Ore. — Tossing tent poles, blankets and a duffel bag into a shopping cart and three wagons, Will Taylor spent a summer morning helping friends tear down what had been their home and that of about a dozen others. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last.
Contractors from the city of Portland had arrived to break down the stretch of tents and tarps on a side street behind a busy intersection. People had an hour to vacate the encampment, one of more than a dozen cleared that July day, according to city data.
Whatever they couldn’t take with them was placed in clear plastic bags, tagged with the date and location of the removal and sent to an 11,000-square-foot (1,020 square meter) warehouse storing thousands like them.
“It can get hard,” said Taylor, 32, who has been swept at least three times in the four years he’s been homeless. “It is what it is. … I just let it go.”
Angelique Risby, 29, watched as workers in neon-yellow vests shoveled piles of litter into black garbage bags. Risby, who has been homeless for two years, said she was prepared for a drill she’s done multiple times.
“Everything that I own,” she said, “can fit on my wagon.”
Tent encampments have long been a fixture of West Coast cities, but are now spreading across the U.S. The federal count of homeless people reached 580,000 last year, driven by lack of affordable housing, a pandemic that economically wrecked households, and lack of access to mental health and addiction treatment.
Records obtained by The Associated Press show attempts to clear encampments increased in cities from Los Angeles to New York as public pressure grew to address what some residents say are dangerous and unsanitary living conditions. But despite tens of millions of dollars spent in recent years, there appears to be little reduction in the number of tents propped up on sidewalks, in parks and by freeway off-ramps.
Homeless people and their advocates say the sweeps are cruel and a waste of taxpayer money. They say the answer is more housing, not crackdowns.
The AP submitted data requests to 30 U.S. cities regarding encampment sweeps and received at least partial responses from about half.
In Phoenix, the number of encampments swept soared to more than 3,000 last year from 1,200 in 2019. Las Vegas removed about 2,500 camps through September, up from 1,600 in 2021. And in Minneapolis, camp removals have more than doubled from last year to 44 through Nov. 9, according to city records.
But even officials at cities that don’t collect data confirmed that public camping is consuming more of their time, and they are starting to track numbers, budget for security and trash disposal, and beef up or launch programs to connect homeless people to housing and services.
Removing encampments is costly — an expense more cities, counties and states have to budget for. Several cities queried by the AP provided some cost breakdowns, but officials at others said comprehensive costs were difficult to get given the multiple departments involved, including police, sanitation and public health.
Denver reported spending nearly $600,000 on labor and waste disposal in 2021 and 2022 to clean about 230 large encampments, some more than once. Phoenix said it spent nearly $1 million last year to clear encampments.
Despite all that spending, said Masood Samereie, little seems to change on the streets. The real estate broker has seen businesses lose customers because of people camped on sidewalks, some clearly in mental distress, and he wants tents gone.
“It’s throwing money at it without any tangible or any real results,” Samereie said.
Being homeless is supposed to be a temporary event, he added. “Unfortunately, it’s becoming a way of life, and that is 100% incorrect.”
For homeless people, sweeps can be traumatizing. They often lose identification documents, as well as cellphones, laptops and personal items. They lose their connection to a community they’ve come to rely on for support.
Roxanne Simonson, 60, said she had a panic attack during one of the four times she was swept in Portland. She recalled feeling dangerously overheated in her tent. “I started yelling at them, ‘Call an ambulance, I can’t breathe.’ And then I changed my mind, because if I go, then I would lose all my stuff,” she said.
And yet, cities can’t stand by and do nothing, said Sam Dodge, who oversees encampment removals for the city of San Francisco. His department, created by the mayor in 2018, coordinates multiple agencies to place people into housing so crews can clear tents.
“Saying, ‘This is not working, this is dangerous, you can do better than this, you have a brighter future than this,’ I think that’s caring for people,” said Dodge, who has worked with homeless people for more than two decades. “It seems immoral to me to just … let people waste away.”
In New York City, more than 2,300 people were forcibly removed from encampments from March to November 2022, according to a June report from Comptroller Brad Lander. Only 119 accepted temporary shelter, and just three eventually got permanent housing. Meanwhile, tent encampments had returned to a third of the sites surveyed.
“They just totally failed to connect people to shelter or to housing,” Lander, who opposes sweeps, told the AP. “If you’re gonna help them, you have to build trust with them to move them into housing and services. The sweeps really went in the opposite direction.”
A spokesperson for Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Charles Lutvak, disagreed. He said 70% of camp sites cleared were not re-established and homeless residents accepted offers of shelter at a rate six times higher than under the previous administration.
“Despite the inherent difficulty of this work, our efforts have been indisputably successful,” Lutvak said in a statement.
The city of Phoenix cleared out a massive downtown homeless encampment by a court-ordered deadline this month, and said it had helped more than 500 people find beds in shelters and motels.
In Portland, the encampment dismantled in July was cleared again, in September and November. Two dozen newly installed boulders helped keep the camp from being reestablished along parts of the sidewalk.
Kieran Hartnett, who’s lived in the neighborhood for seven years, said there was fighting, drug use, open fires and vehicle break-ins around the encampment. Some tents were on grass just outside his house, which was particularly stressful when people started acting in erratic ways.
He hopes the people moved from the site are getting help.
“I understand the argument that clearing them just moves them to somewhere else, and they don’t really have a better place to go,” he said. “On the same account, I feel like you can’t allow things to just fester.”
“There’s not a good solution to it,” he said.