Encampment sweeps aren’t about ending homelessness

On February 15, 2023, national leaders who spend their careers advocating in the halls of Congress and the White House to make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring stood side-by-side with local DC advocates and service providers who typically focus their advocacy on the Wilson Building.

They came together to confront an injustice that spanned federal and local agencies: the clearance of the encampment in McPherson Square in downtown DC without first connecting those living there to housing.

All the experts echoed versions of the same overarching message: The interventions that help people exit homelessness and access housing are well-documented. The encampment clearance that took place in McPherson Square is not such an intervention. “This is shameful…Forced closure of encampments absent housing & support is traumatic, ineffective & utterly counterproductive,” wrote Kevin Lindamood, president and CEO of Health Care for the Homeless.

Evicting people experiencing homelessness from where they are sheltering runs counter to evidence-based practices developed from many years of work, research, and experience. It is instead an attempt to criminalize homelessness. It is unnecessarily cruel and dehumanizing.

“We see here just a tremendous presence of law enforcement at tremendous cost to the city and all of these dollars should be used to house people. …Even as we move them today, we’ve done nothing to end their homelessness,” said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, in an interview with WUSA9’s John Henry while at McPherson Square.

Of the estimated 74 people who had been living in McPherson Square, the Washington Post reported that only two had been connected to permanent housing and 20 had accessed bridge housing within 24 hours of the encampment clearance. Approximately two-thirds of the evicted residents were thought to have slept on the street following the sweep. And while 47 individuals had been found eligible for housing assistance, one advocate pointed out that it is, optimistically, from that point on, a six- to nine-month process for an individual to actually become housed. Last week’s sweep directly harmed people living in the District, and its ripple effects will destabilize their lives going forward.

McPherson Square is a federal park, under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service (NPS). NPS conducted the clearance approximately two months ahead of its initial schedule, reportedly in response to a request from Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration.

The federal plan to end homelessness

Both the federal and local agencies involved know that last week’s actions run counter to what works to end homelessness. Their public plans make clear that they are versed in good practice.

“The United States Interagency Council’s new strategic plan that was just released calls for us not to do this, calls for us not to clear encampments unless people have direct connection to housing,” explained Amanda Andere, CEO of Funders Together to End Homelessness, in an interview with Athiyah Azeem of Street Sense Media.

The US Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) is a federal agency made up of 19 member agencies, including the Department of the Interior, the parent agency of the National Park Service. It released a strategic plan in December 2022 that says:

Unless encampment closures are conducted in a coordinated, humane, and solutions-oriented way that makes housing and supports adequately available, these “out of sight, out of mind” policies can lead to lost belongings and identification which can set people back in their pathway to housing; breakdowns in connection with outreach teams, health care facilities, and housing providers; increased interactions with the criminal justice system; and significant traumatization—all of which can set people back in their pathway to housing and disrupt the work of ending homelessness.

In order to end unsheltered homelessness, the plan says, “USICH member agencies that own federal land will promote strong collaboration with local organizations in response to encampments that form on federal property,” and that USICH and its member agencies will “promote alternatives to criminalization.”

Just two months into this new strategic plan, the National Park Service violated the strategies of the interagency council of which it is part.

“[The US Interagency Council on Homelessness] should be decrying this action publicly and inside the administration. They know better. Their leadership knows better,” tweeted Lindamood.

When not-seeing-homeless-people is the priority, not ending homelessness

Early in her first term, Mayor Bowser set out a goal of ending homelessness – and has followed it up with two major strategic plans. In 2021, her administration launched a pilot program targeting a small number of encampments, the stated goal of which was to “provide intensive case management and behavioral health/substance use services to encamped individuals while working to connect clients to appropriate housing opportunities.” (At one of those pilot sites, the gap between goal and practice was made apparent when encampment clearance resulted in one unhoused individual being bulldozed while still in a tent.) While that pilot project pertained to encampments on local property, not federal, the alignment between stated local and federal priorities could have been put into action in McPherson Square, but that is not what happened.

There’s been much finger-pointing in the past few weeks. District officials contended that most residents refused to engage with caseworkers. Advocates and some elected officials disagreed with that characterization. At-Large Councilmember Robert White visited McPherson Square in early February to meet with residents and said he had numerous conversations with residents who were desperate for housing, but distrustful after years of meeting with caseworkers and putting their names on lists.

Though it might not have been possible to foster and rebuild trust between McPherson Square’s residents and the government in the span of a couple of weeks, such a violent action will make future efforts to do so that much harder—and wasn’t necessary, anyhow.

DC has enough housing vouchers to end homelessness. District officials did point to an ongoing shortage of caseworkers as impeding their ability to connect people to housing (reporting by Street Sense Media last fall highlighted systemic problems in the timely administration of vouchers).

But, despite those capacity constraints, District officials turned down two offers of assistance from the National Coalition for Housing Justice. Advocates contend that more could and should have been done to assist individuals living in McPherson Square. They should know: They stood ready to help make it happen, and they were given the brush-off.

The flurry of activity in, and elected officials’ visits to, McPherson Square over the several weeks prior to the February 15 clearance show that the District did have the ability to marshal people and resources to the park. Had this level of activity been paired with the original April 12 encampment clearance date, more people could have been matched with housing.

Instead, at least 50 people are now significantly worse off than they were in the park. And we’re no closer to the goal we all supposedly agree on: to permanently house them.

Opportunities wasted

Local and federal officials together made the choice to prioritize an expedited encampment clearance over helping people access housing. Had leaders within either level of government chosen, instead, to pursue their stated objectives related to ending homelessness, McPherson Square could have become a national model for how to meaningfully engage unhoused residents and connect them to services and housing.

The goal of last week’s encampment clearance, however, was not to end homelessness. The goal of last week’s encampment clearance was not to improve the lives of the 74 or so people who had sought refuge in McPherson Square. Officials’ actions made that clear. As I’ve written previously, this form of encampment clearance is for the comfort of the housed, not the benefit of residents experiencing homelessness.

While both the Biden and Bowser administrations have charted robust, evidence-based paths for ending homelessness, their approach to encampment sweeps in the absence of housing provision negates those plans – and reinforces an institutionalized belief that something, or someone, else matters more. In their handling of the McPherson Square encampment clearance, officials deemed the needs of our most marginalized neighbors to be less important than someone else’s preferences.

Governing informed by evidence-based practices is important. So is governing from a place of compassion. As Deacon Tony Remedios of Our Lady Queen of Peace said in an interview from McPherson Square, “[Through] lack of humanity or maybe forgetfulness, we’ve forgotten that we belong to one another–and we really do.”