Tennessee Encampments: “This Is A Solvable Problem.”

In this post, I’m following up a post last week about Tennessee’s challenge with a law banning camping on public right of way. I had a dialogue with Jarad Bingham principal at Dragonfly Collective in Memphis who I have interviewed in the past about his work in Memphis addressing the needs of unhoused people. Bingham has worked over the years to build the Hospitality Hub, “a holistic approach to helping individuals transition out of homelessness.” In that post, I noted that, “In Seattle, the divide is roughly between the “sweep ’em and lock ’em up” crowd and people that mindlessly defend the status quo because it is “compassionate” and feel it is wrong to force norms on people in the encampments.”

I also noted how much I appreciated “Bingham’s nuanced views and work are what’s needed in the tangled web of politics and inflationary policies that are neither effective nor edifying.”

Recently, his organization managed to tackle a local highway encampment effectively with just such nuance. Using outreach efforts and expertise, workers from the Hospitality Hub began slowly moving people out of encampments on highway right of way. There was a pressure to move; the camps were going to be cleaned up. But the Tennessee Department of Transportation gave workers from the Hospitality Hub passage to use their skills and the knowledge they gained from working with individuals in the camps.

Bingham finds that a leading problem to moving people out of encampments is high barrier, congregate shelter. Often, people living in an encampment on the right of way, or anywhere, are doing so precisely because they can have freedom and privacy, something valued by everyone. Bingham’s outreach workers ask what is a basic economic question: “Is there any place you’d rather be.” Listening to the answer and responding, along with supportive case management to address underlying addiction mental health issues, has become an abiding principle in the work of clearing encampments.

Here’s our exchange about that challenge I addressed in a post last week and how the encampments were dismantled and people got help.

How about some background. What got you motivated to address the encampment issue?

We spent a lot of time thinking about encampments. I went out to LA and visited the one from the cover of Harpers– they had three tents illuminated from within and the text, “Where Would We Go?” I visited San Francisco. We wrote a pro forma for a managed site with tents in Memphis, (I was going to ask North Face to sponsor us). We did put hammocks in our plaza, which is a beautiful urban park without some of the invisible barriers that civic space can have. But in the end, we just couldn’t get comfortable with the idea that some people need to be sleeping outside. Once that was off the table, we got to work designing better solutions.

In the last post, I outlined what appeared to be an intractable problem in Memphis and in other places in Tennessee; a new law made camping or living on public property not only illegal but a felony. What led to this law and do you agree with it or disagree with it? Why or why not?

Let me quote a doctoral candidate at the University of Memphis who came to work with us this Summer. His name is Sharif Hossain, and he is from Bangladesh. His first day with us we had him sit at the front desk on our primary campus and watch people come through and be greeted by Terri Conley’s giant smile or Sam Smith’s comforting eyes. He had a couple of Masters degrees, one in public policy, and I had briefed him on our programs, but when he saw the way human centric design embodies the program elements on both sides of the desk, he was inspired to find me and tell me about why it was so meaningful.

He said that “homelessness is America’s shame,” and I think he’s right. The context for the Tennessee law is the existence of extreme poverty and of literal homelessness and the prevalence of panhandling and the growth of encampments in cities across the country. People are ashamed, both the people living outdoors and the people who walk or drive by, and that shame drives anger or compassion or any number of easier things to feel, including new legislation. Agree or not, the TN law is policy reality now, and the new question is “how do we manage compliance on this new policy initiative?”

Do you think the divide between people who want to, reasonably perhaps, enforce the law and those who favor less intervention has gotten worse? Why?

In one way the law gave substance to anxieties on a continuum of concern for and against people sleeping outside or just being visibly poor outside, but I have not noticed a stronger divide. My experience has been that there are always people against what you do. It is safer to not do than to do. Even now that there is a law, there is a resistance to enact it.

Let’s get specific. You had the City pointing at the State, and the State pointing back at the City. Why did you want to get into the middle of that?

For a lot of reasons, but the through line is that our organizational value is derived from our capacity to solve extremely difficult problems. At the micro level, we are experts at co-developing paths out of homelessness for the endless variety of individuals who seek our help. One click further out, we design nuanced solutions for gaps left by HUD program compliance, and we partner with government, NGOs and philanthropists to fund most of our pilot and long term projects. We provide an important service for maintaining the civic commons. From here it’s easy to see how we’re implicated: our people are the ones living outside, and our partners are the ones stalemated in the search for a solution. Public pressure was mounting. You’re exactly right, I did want to get in the middle of it.

What was the solution and approach to untangle this?

It was a two-part solution, and one part we already had. We had already built an Outreach team, led by Liza Hubbard, who is the embodiment of wisdom from our organization in the field. Under bridges. Deep into forests. Following up on people in hotels and when they get out of treatment and doing all the remarkable work to find people where they are and help them make a solid step away from living outside. We run 120 hours a week, all day, every day, snow, ice, like the mail used to be. Liza’s team and our organization’s thought-out discomfort with encampments is why there are relatively few tent encampments in Memphis today. This interview is about sites on State right of way, which is beyond the control of the City, and therefore beyond our set of permissions.

The second part of the solution was clarifying jurisdiction. I doubt we’re unique in Memphis in that where the city has no right of way and the state does, the city will not enforce, and the reverse is true. I’m sympathetic to them wanting each other to own up to their responsibilities. I’m also sympathetic to the deep resistance both sides have to policing, rounding up, imprisoning or just displacing people from land that could be described as not their responsibility. And I’m sympathetic to the resistance anyone would have to being asked to do something they don’t know anything about. By giving the state the opportunity to support our claims to subject matter expertise and de facto jurisdiction, we were able to get both teams pulling in the same direction.

Outreach visits each site every day to create the conditions of trust that can lead to better outcomes. They found residents, they remembered names, they asked the all-powerful question “is there a place you’d rather be than here?” And they helped the majority of campers find a better path in under two weeks. They follow up every day. They make visits to programs, they give rides from detox to treatment, they call sisters and mothers. A few won’t take help until the last day, and even fewer move on somewhere else, but the effort breaks the inertia of the camps. The last day, after weeks of engagement, Outreach coordinates with CARES team members and CIT to introduce the reality of enforcement. None is needed. The state sends equipment and our work crews arrive to clean the site. Ten thousand residents drive home to a different view than the one which greeted them during their morning commute.

Was it a success and why?

Bubba and Amy were two of the most recent campers. They accepted help, but bailed when we suggested a path to obtain State ID. Liza’s team found them outside again and learned the story: Bubba had a misdemeanor warrant in a neighboring state, and they were afraid he’d be sent to jail. We called across state lines to pull the criminal record and learned that the warrant was minor, a decade old, and would not be valid in Tennessee.

We shared that with Bubba and Amy, and now they’re on their way to permanent, stable housing in Tennessee. Of course, a felony conviction wouldn’t have helped them, but we avoided that for Bubba and Amy and dozens of others through creating a structure of human centered, trauma informed care and then hiring and training for it and then supporting it with the resources it needed to become a civic institution that could broker a truce between municipal and state factions to offer a better way forward.

What can be learned from this and do you think it can be duplicated? Why or why not?

We are fortunate to have made the time to think through the implications, possibilities and limitations of encampments when we did. The scale of the problem matters, so in Memphis, where we have worked to keep the numbers low, we can generally afford to invest in individuals, case by case. Encampment people are not going to submit to congregate shelter. If that’s what you have, then it will be difficult to offer a genuine answer to the field question “Is there any place you’d rather be?” So that gets expensive.

But yes, given an appropriate budget for non-congregate shelter design and construction, and time to build and staff a human centric operations team, you could do what we do anywhere. This is a solvable problem. I keep thinking the new crop of MacArthur inspired philanthropists will find us, fund our work and extend it to other places

What would you say to those who want the law enforced and those who are concerned about making people struggling with mental illness, addiction, and housing illegal?

I would say that society has to make a choice, and one option, which has been well tried, is to lock away things we don’t like. The felony does that. A felony is by definition a crime for which punishment is over one year of incarceration. That’s how the law defines a serious crime. If we are serious about the transgressions of social norms that affect our civic commons, we have to be serious about providing alternative choices to the ones that aren’t working now.

Finally, the Housing First model is under increasing scrutiny, including proposed legislation to require allowances for federal funding be used for faith based and sobriety-based treatment and shelter. What do you think about Housing First, harm reduction, and how can those approaches be balanced with a broader public health approach?

If I were in charge of HUD, I wouldn’t replace housing first, but I would retool it around trauma response. I would make ample, trauma informed emergency shelter the priority, and I would build out Coordinated Entry as a secondary triage to serve placement into housing. I would adjust the scoring matrices to account for trauma informed best practices. I am generally opposed to trying things that have already failed, particularly as policy initiatives.