A Reflection on the Encampments
by Ann Marie Staudenmaier, Esq.
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Imagine you are homeless, with nowhere safe to sleep at night or to hang out during the day, and are
desperately trying to keep all of your worldly possessions safe while carrying them with you from place
to place. That is the unfortunate reality for at least 7,300 people in Washington, DC on any given night.
Now imagine that after experiencing the chaos, crime, and inability to ever get a decent night’s sleep in
one of DC’s large homeless shelters, you find somewhere to stay that is peaceful, quiet, and provides a
safe and supportive community, but the city won’t allow you to stay there. This exact scenario is
occurring in numerous homeless “encampments” that have sprung up around the city in the past few
years, following Mayor Bowser’s pledge this week to shut down every homeless encampment in the city.
The timing of this announcement is disappointing and curious, given that winter is right around the
corner and the government’s practice has always been to suspend efforts to dismantle homeless
encampments during hypothermia season. The immediate target of the city’s efforts is an encampment
on Virginia Avenue, NW, on a small wedge of land between Foggy Bottom and Georgetown.
The history of DC’s efforts to curtail and destroy such encampments is a long and sordid one, which is
centered on a government policy with the unwieldy title of the “Protocol for the Disposition of Property
Found on Public Space and Outreach to Displaced Persons.” The original version of this Protocol was
forged 10 years ago through a collaborative process between government officials and homeless
advocates. The resulting document provided protections for people who had no choice but to leave
their belongings in public spaces, and came on the heels of the city illegally destroying all of the personal
possessions of a group of homeless individuals who were staying under a bridge in Georgetown. The
protections put in place by the original Protocol included the requirements that the city post signs giving
at least 14 days warning of a government clean up, and that personal property left at the site be
retained and stored by the city for at least 30 days. However, when Mayor Gray came into office in
2011, his Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services (DMHHS) insisted that the Protocol be watered
down significantly, an effort which the Legal Clinic strongly opposed. The resulting changes required
only that small items of value, such as ID and photographs, be temporarily stored for 30 days. DMHHS
has failed to uphold even these flimsy protections, and instead has inserted into the Warning Signs the
restriction that only items of value “in plain sight” be saved, language that is not in the Protocol itself.
Several people who conduct outreach for the city at the encampment sites have confirmed that the
government workers tasked with the clean-up rarely, if ever, retain and store anyone’s valuable
belongings, because they are unwilling to look into anyone’s bags.
The Legal Clinic was pleasantly surprised when the new DMHHS reached out shortly after Mayor Bowser
came into office last January, to ask for our input into revising the Protocol process. However, our
ability to influence the process has been ephemeral at best, as the government has refused to adopt any
of the changes we have proposed, which include retention and storage of all personal property which is
not hazardous, and not destroying any encampments until housing placements can be offered to
everyone who is staying there. We have met surprisingly strong resistance to the idea that the
government offer housing placements to people at these sites--folks who are so traumatized by
previous stays in shelters that they would rather sleep outside year-round than have to go back into a
shelter--before dismantling the only place they have to call home. The city claims that it can’t allow
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Ann Marie eads the Legal Clinic’s efforts to end the criminalization of homelessness.
people who are living outside to “jump the cue” and get housing before people who are already in line
for one of many new affordable housing programs touted by the Bowser administration, despite the fact
that DC has supposedly adopted a “Housing First” approach. If DC truly believed in Housing First, (which
is based on the idea that if you place someone who is homeless directly into housing, they are far more
likely to stabilize other aspects of their life and become self-sufficient), the city would not require
everyone staying at homeless encampments to go through the lengthy bureaucracy necessary to secure
an affordable housing placement. A number of cities, including our neighbor Baltimore, have placed a
moratorium on the dismantling of homeless encampments until housing placements can realistically be
secured for the people who are staying there. Yet DC is moving full speed ahead with shutting down all
encampments in the city on the cusp of winter, and while they have promised housing to some of the
residents at the Virginia Avenue encampment, there is no guarantee that folks in the other
encampments will be offered anything at all.
Why, you may ask, would anyone choose to stay outside when winter is approaching? The residents of
the Virginia Avenue encampment have some compelling answers to that question. This site, which
happens to be located on a prominent DC roadway, across the street from the luxury Watergate
condominiums and the Kennedy Center, and passed by thousands of commuters every day, is a tidy
patch of green across Rock Creek Parkway from the Potomac River. Thanks to the efforts of a few
charitable citizens and churches, most of the people staying there sleep and keep their belongings safe
and dry inside brand new tents, and they work vigilantly to keep the area in and around the tents neat
and clean. While Deputy Mayor Brenda Donald and her staff, backed up by countless police officers,
were at the site on Monday attempting to explain to the media and the residents why they suddenly
decided to shut down the encampment, the residents told a different story. They explained that this is
the only place that any of them have found where they feel safe and supported, and that unlike the
random strangers they would encounter in a shelter, they have formed a true community of people who
know and watch out for each other. As Ms. Tee, who has been there for 4 months after being in the
shelter system for several years, said, it’s the first place she’s felt “hope” since she became homeless.
Yet even with this sense of community, every person we talked to said they would welcome an offer of
housing—it was the shelters they were afraid of.
Underneath the warm talk of community, however, was a palpable feeling of fear and confusion among
the residents of the Virginia Avenue encampment, because of conflicting information being provided by
the city. The city first posted signs warning of a clean-up last April, but never followed through, leaving
people who were staying there with a false sense of security. The city then posted new warning signs 2
weeks ago, but told the residents that they simply planned to clean up debris and had no intention of
forcing anyone to move. However, sometime during the past week, the Mayor’s office suddenly and
inexplicably decided that it was a top priority to actually dismantle the site, along with other
encampments around the city. This left the residents with little notice to pack up everything they own
and move it all to some unidentified location or risk having their belongings destroyed. The lesson that
the city somehow failed to learn with prior mass clean ups is that simply shutting down one
encampment without providing realistic housing options for the residents will not solve the problem,
but only cause it to move elsewhere. In fact, several of the people staying at the Virginia Avenue site
had moved there after the city shut down and literally sealed shut an encampment in and under the
nearby K Street Bridge in August of this year.
These efforts by the city to shut down homeless encampments are yet another sign of the increasing
problem of cities “criminalizing” homelessness, which sucks people experiencing homelessness into the
criminal justice system for carrying on essential life-sustaining activities such as sleeping and eating. The
only “law” that DC can cite in trying to get the Metropolitan Police Department involved in their efforts
to shut down these encampments is a municipal regulation, 24 DCMR 121, which prohibits anyone in DC
from setting up a “camp or temporary place of abode” without the permission of the Mayor. While this
offense is punishable only by a monetary fine, failure to pay these fines, which are often unaffordable
for someone who is homeless, will result in the issuance of a bench warrant, which can lead to an arrest,
and suddenly someone who did nothing more than sleep in public will have a criminal record which will
haunt them for the rest of their life.
In addition to the innate cruelty and legal liability inherent in these clean-up efforts, DC is getting further
and further out of step with the federal government’s very strong guidance on this issue, as evidenced
by the US Interagency Council on Homelessness Recommendations for Encampments from August of
this year; the USDOJ’s strong statement against criminalization of homelessness in a Boise encampment
case; and HUD’s insertion of criteria based on anti-criminalization efforts in the most recent NOFA
process. The USICH Report, “Ending Homelessness for People Living in Encampments”, cautions that
“forced dispersal of people from encampment settings is not an appropriate solution or strategy…”
and recommends intensive outreach and engagement, along with “providing low barrier pathways to
permanent housing.” Similarly, the US DOJ’s Civil Rights Division in July filed a Brief in a case involving
Boise’s efforts to prosecute homeless individuals for sleeping outside, arguing that “criminally
prosecuting…individuals for something as innocent as sleeping, when they have no safe, legal place to
go, violates their Constitutional rights…Needlessly pushing homeless individuals into the criminal justice
system does nothing to break the cycle of poverty or prevent homelessness in the future.” When no
less than the nation’s top prosecutors are arguing against criminalizing sleeping in public, it would be
wise for the District to sit up and take notice.
If Mayor Bowser truly wants her legacy to include ending chronic homelessness, forcing people to leave
the only safe place they’ve found to stay without offering them other housing options, and destroying all
of their personal belongings in the process, is not the way to go about it. The Legal Clinic strongly
recommends that the city not only place a moratorium on the destruction of homeless encampments
until immediate housing options can be offered to everyone at all of the sites, but that it either
significantly revise its encampment Protocol to make it more humane, or abandon it altogether, and
stop pretending that by having such a Protocol in place, it is somehow protecting the rights of persons
experiencing homelessness.