Homelessness is a condition of desperation. People who pay into the engine of profit (renters and mortgage holders) are given permission to claim a space as their own. People who can't work and can't pay, people who refuse to work two jobs just to pay, people who can't manage their lives, people who are broken and have no resources, can't get that permission. They sleep in places that aren't their own. They sleep in public, in a car where they worry about being rousted in the depths of sleep, or on a sidewalk, where someone who is cruel can kick them or worse, where someone also desperate can steal their few possessions, where someone too privileged to see themselves in that huddle of blankets might complain to the police. The question "Where can I sleep, that is safe?" hangs like a cloud over the entire day, because there is no place to rest, that is their own.
Some who are homeless are luckier than others. They find a place to camp. A well hidden camp increases safety, but can still be discovered, possessions can still be stolen, the tent can still be destroyed, and the person is still not there by permission. But it is better than sleeping in an ATM booth.
So, have you watched as locations used by homeless campers have been cleared, razed or developed? Just here in Burlington, the waterfront, the clover leaf, Pine Street. Or just declared off-limits, like 311 North Ave. The camp site is progressively harder to find.
The Champlain Parkway project will displace numerous homeless campers. As such, the good of the community might be greater if the parkway is built, even after the bad of uprooting homeless camps is subtracted, but where will those campers go? How will the City compensate for the bad of evicting settled, quiet, unobtrusive, campers, people who are hiding to escape notice? Has the City designated locations, where campers can set up tents and expect the protections of police patrols?
As the City pursues its development projects, it forces homeless folks more and more onto the street, into doorways, into church yards. For the first time in Burlington Vermont, tents have cropped up on church properties and bundles of blankets taken residence on church lawns. The time has come for the City to develop plan to help the homeless find homes, places to camp with permission, with police protections, with services, like trash pickup. The homeless are not such because they live outdoors, they are such because they don't have permission to call a place "home", a place they can claim a right to live in. The City can correct this flaw in our thinking by providing safe places to camp.
The aspiration to house everyone in hard-wall housing is laudable. If we had the will, a sufficient will to build that housing, a sufficient will to make that housing affordable to people living on Social Security or a minimum wage job, then we could put everyone in standard hardwall housing, and we could impart to everyone the dignity and safety of their own locked door.
But we don't have that will. Even as we in the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance build up our coordination, new housing comes on line, and some of our long time homeless get housing, more folks turn up as homeless, more folks are recruited into homelessness. Do we see a national plan to build millions of units of housing, as we did after WWII? Do we see HUD pumping millions of dollars into Vermont to subsidize infrastructure and new housing? Until these things happen, we need to recognize softwall housing as a part of our housing continuum, as part of the solution to homelessness, and something we need to plan for. Camps and shelters are solutions we resort to because we don't have the affordable housing that would make them unnecessary. We could do the homeless the dignity of recognizing these solutions as part of our plan for housing.
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