San Antonio – The City of San Antonio plans to ramp up its use of a controversial strategy in handling its homelessness problem.
In a recent budget priority survey, San Antonians rated homeless outreach and encampments as their top investment priority, ahead of streets and affordable housing. With that in mind, city staff has proposed adding money to clean up 700 camps in FY 2024, compared to 500 in the current fiscal year.
READ MORE: How does San Antonio handle homeless encampments? KSAT Explains
“Beginning October 1, if you call about an encampment, we’re going to assess it, we’re going to outreach, and we’re going to clean it up within two weeks,” said City Manager Erik Walsh.
Walsh said there are federal dollars coming into the city to help tackle the issue, and there are more places for people to go now. As part of the budget proposal, he also included a goal of getting 400 of the 874 people marked as “unsheltered” homeless in the last point in time count off the street.
Not everyone views the plan favorably, though, like former city homeless outreach worker Nikketa Burges, who called it “disgusting.”
“I think that it speaks to their inability to really tackle homelessness and figure out what works for people,” she told KSAT. “I think it’s a form of violence on par with what’s going on at the border.”
Burges resigned from her job with the city in August 2022 but has continued to do volunteer outreach work. She currently works for an Austin-based nonprofit that also deals with homeless issues, though she said she was not speaking on the group’s behalf.
The cleanups are traumatizing events, she said, which set people back on their way into housing and off the streets. Sentimental items, personal documents, and tents alike are scooped into the trash and hauled away.
“And they all love to say this line, ‘you can’t arrest homelessness away.’ And I think that instead of doing that, what they’re doing is death by displacement,” Burges said.
Tinkering with a broken drone that he was trying to turn into a fan by the Hays Street Bridge on Friday, Shane Collett recalled some of his own experiences with encampment cleanups. Though he has a place now at SAMMinistries’ low-barrier shelter downtown, Collett said he has spent “the last about 10, 11 years” on and off the streets.
A lot of times, there would be a day’s notice before a camp got cleaned up, he said, while other times, it came as a surprise.
“I lost all my clothes from...be gone trying to get work somewhere and come back and everything I own was gone, except what I was carrying in my backpack with me, the clothes on my back,” he said.
Asked after Thursday’s budget presentation about whether the camp cleanups were a humane solution, Mayor Ron Nirenberg said, “Encampments are cleaned up only after there’s significant outreach from homeless specialists.”
SAMMinistries outreach teams do some of that work, said CEO and President Nikisha Baker. They head into the camps to try to connect people to resources and warn them that the camp will be cleaned up.
They usually make two to three visits over a two-week span before the cleanup actually happens, Baker said. However, if another agency like the Texas Department of Transportation is involved, or there are extenuating circumstances such as numerous police calls, “it could be shorter and moved up.”
City officials have acknowledged that the cleanups tend to simply push homeless people from one area to another unless they have somewhere to go.
But now, Walsh and Nirenberg said they have those places.
Two permanent supportive housing locations are available: Towne Twin Village and the Hudson Apartments. Plus, the city plans to expand its low-barrier shelter capacity by leasing out another motel.
However, Towne Twin Village only serves people over 50 years old. And SAMMinistries’ said its current 45-room, low-barrier shelter and the Hudson Apartments are full, with plenty of people looking for space at both.
Despite that, Baker said the decrease in “unsheltered” homelessness from 2022 to 2023 indicates there are more places for people to go.
“Now we’re waiting on the system to continue to work and generating housing and bringing online new affordable housing units, new permanent supportive housing units. And that will continue to make an impact,” Baker said.
Everyone agrees that the city can’t “clean” its way out of the problem.