Encampment on the Parkway

Some comments, solicited by a local journalist, on the encampment that has been going strong at the Ben Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. I sent them an email giving my thoughts, which I will paste here.

Before doing that though, I’ll link to a recent article that is the best, current description of the the encampment situation that I have seen. I read it after writing my comments, but the two are pretty consistent.

And here is my take. Hopefully I’ll update this blog more often now.

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Hi [name witheld],

 Here are a few thoughts on the JTD encampment.

I've done a good bit of research on unsheltered homelessness in Philadelphia (including an evaluation of the City's closure of two large encampments in Kensington in 2018) and have recently completed, with Barbara Poppe, an extensive study of alternatives to punitive approaches to homelessness. In both cases, we showcased the City for their outreach efforts and for their approach to offering housing and services in conjunction with closing down encampments as models for other jurisdictions.

 The City's challenge in moving people out of encampments and into housing or treatment is that, while there is sufficient temporary housing capacity, there is little permanent housing or long term residential facilities for people to move to. afterwards. Both the city and the housing authority have done in recent years to expand the number of permanent housing placements for homeless individuals and families. This backs up the system and when there are demands for PH, as there are now, the City has difficulty complying.

 The City, when it comes to encampments, typically has to walk a tightrope between two constituencies: advocates for the homeless who demand housing and neighborhood residents and/or business owners who demand that the City just get rid of the camp. I write about this some in the Kensington evaluation. This gets compounded on the parkway and the Fairmount neighborhood, which are relatively high income neighborhoods.

 The City is taking a very cautious approach to clearing the encampment, which I think is wise. The organizer/advocate involvement with the camp creates a unique situation which pairs a homeless population with people who are prepared to resist efforts to clear the camp and know civil disobedience methods. I don't think that the organizers have done a good job with publicity and handling the media, but active resistance is more in their wheelhouse. Usually the homeless population doesn't want trouble and tends to leave the camp before police come to clear it. But not in this situation. This creates a very difficult situation for the City, especially in the wake of the BLM protests, in which they took criticism for their use of force.

 My position on the encampment resolution is pretty well-described in the letter to the City from Scott Burris and Temple's Center for Public Health Law Research, which I signed off on, urging the City not to evict the camp residents in the absence of housing availability, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic. Of particular note is how evicting the camp residents would go against CDC's recommendations to cities not to clear encampments without any suitable alternative housing, as this merely moves the problem around and increases COVID risk for everyone. The City has evicted encampments, contrary to CDC guidelines, at the Convention Center and at the Airport since the pandemic broke out, and is clearly willing to clear this camp as well. This is where I am most critical of City policy, and where it goes contrary to the more non- punitive approaches it took not that long ago and which I had highlighted in previous work.

Finally, clearing the camp under the current circumstances is ultimately an act of whack-a-mole as it is inevitable that one (or more) encampments will pop up in some other location after this one is cleared. Clearing a camp does nothing to end homelessness, and there is too large an unsheltered population in Philadelphia for an encampment not to emerge somewhere. For the long term, the City needs to come up with a workable plan for expanding housing opportunities for the homeless population that it is willing to commit to, and in the short term it needs to consider some more innovative solutions such as sanctioned camps, tiny home villages, or fixed up PHA housing, all of which have been thrown around in the current negotiations.

I hope this helps, good luck with your story. Let me know if you have further questions.

Steve