Police officers and sheriff’s deputies arrived at the tent city pitched across the street from Cincinnati’s Jack Casino in Pendleton early the morning of Aug. 9 and by 7:15 a.m. had begun issuing notice that its inhabitants had to leave.
As police cruisers blocked off the short stretch of Reading Road that branches off of bustling Central Parkway, those staying in the camp scrambled to take down their tents and find places to put their belongings, bagging up their clothing and other items. Social service workers from various organizations talked to individuals, working to convince them to go to area shelters. City crews and inhabitants cleaned up. The occasional jogger zipped by. Young professionals wearing headphones and stiff leather shoes walked to work.
The camp removal has become a familiar ritual in Cincinnati as city officials try to remove tent cities. But camp inhabitants and their advocates say not enough is being done to address structural issues including an overall shortage of shelter beds and affordable housing.
The move from Pendelton was the third time in two weeks camp inhabitant Jessica Barnett has packed up and moved. She was among the last to leave an earlier camp under Fort Washington Way camp for another on Third Street. The city has removed both. It would soon remove another camp Barnett moved to on Gilbert, causing a handful of residents to set up camp on private land in Over-the-Rhine.
Barnett wears a perpetual tan. Her shoes are worn, but her clothes are neat, for the most part, her hair pulled back tightly from her face.
“Where am I going to go?” she asked before motioning to the empty tent next to hers in the Pendleton camp inhabited by a man named Dave, who woke early that day to go to work. “Where am I going to take his stuff? He’s going to come home from work and all of his stuff is going to be gone. I’m out here by myself and, as a female, that’s never easy. He helps me out.”
Finding stasis has been hard for the 36-year-old since she lost housing she was staying in via a Talbert House program a few years back. Since then, she’s been to jail for misdemeanor drug possession. She’s had all of her belongings — including her ID, her birth certificate and her social security card — stolen on the street. The lack of those documents made it hard to find a job, she says.
Eventually she’d like to find housing stable enough to welcome back her two daughters, who currently live in Florida.
Nearby, Demeta Good also wondered where she would go. Good was displaced by a fire at an apartment building in Spring Grove Village in June. A friend died in that blaze, she says, as did his grandson.
“After the fire, I went out of town and tried to stay with some friends,” she says. “That didn’t work out, so I came back here. I’ve been on the streets since, in Avondale, in downtown. Never been homeless in my life until the fire. My whole unit was burnt. I lost every damn thing. It was bad.”
Good has had other struggles — namely with alcohol —but says she’s hoping to get into a treatment program in a couple weeks.
Barnett said she was hoping to get into a Jimmy Heath House program soon that will provide a place to stay. In the meantime, she has been packing up her belongings and moving from location to location.
After the Pendleton camp was removed, some camp residents like Barnett headed to a spot on Gilbert Ave. just east of I-71, then a boundary for a prohibition on camps issued by Hamilton County Judge Robert Ruehlman. Others at the Pendleton camp planned to head west across I-75 to a location in Price Hill. Some took advantage of offers for spots in area shelters.
That move came a few hours after U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Black declined to halt the removal of the camp ahead of an Aug. 20 court hearing over a lawsuit filed by camp resident Joe Phillips and the Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition.
The controversy over the camps has developed into a cat and mouse game between inhabitants and local officials. When camp residents pushed by Ruehlman’s restraining order moved from Third Street to Pendleton, the judge expanded the order to a much larger area bounded by I-71 and I-75 to the east and west and the Ohio River and the Norwood Lateral to the north and south. On Aug. 9, as camp inhabitants moved to places like Gilbert Ave., Deters pressed for a county-wide ban on the camps — a move Ruehlman approved.
The inhabitants of the Gilbert camp then moved to another site at 13th and Republic Streets owned by a subsidiary of Over-the-Rhine Community Housing. That tent city presents a tougher challenge for authorities — since it is on private land, police can’t simply order inhabitants to move unless a crime is reported there.
On Aug. 10, residents there filled out paperwork for housing assistance, spoke with doctors from a nearby clinic and tried to rest.
“I’m tired of the city putting things on the back-burner,” camp inhabitant Stacey Hollander said. “We’re real people out here.”
Deters and Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley say the camps present a risk to public safety, citing what he says have been incidents of drug use and hepatitis outbreaks that may have their roots in the camps. Advocates with the Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition and camp residents have flatly denied this.
“While I am sympathetic to the plight of the homeless, it is simply not healthy or desirable to have people living on the streets of Cincinnati,” Deters said in a statement. “We are fortunate to have many resources in our area to help the homeless so that no one has to live this way and, in fact, social service providers in our area stand ready to help all of these people.”
But that help comes in the form of overcrowded shelters and temporary assistance, advocates say. Inhabitants say they’re standing their ground for something more permanent.
So far, no one has been arrested as the chess game ensues, though some inhabitants of the camps believe police presence is a “scare tactic” to get them to move. Police see it differently, however.
“For the most part, I think they understand that there is a court order in effect, and that at some point we have to enforce the terms of that court order,” CPD Assistant Chief Paul Neudigate said. “I think we’ve been lenient. We came yesterday and tensions were high. It was not the time or the place, but things seem to be more calm and responsive right now.”
Social service nonprofits have provided some help at the camps, including a jobs van provided by the GeneroCity 513 program that pays workers experiencing homelessness $45 a day to clean up litter. And more help is available, according to officials.
“A lot of accommodations have been arranged,” Neudigate said, at homeless shelters like Shelterhouse. “Some are willing to go there. Some say they have relatives or friends coming to get them. We’ll do whatever it takes to take them. We don’t want to leave them out on the streets.”
That’s been a tricky subject. Some camp inhabitants are banned from some shelters due to infringement of their rules. Others don’t want to stay there for any number of reasons — from mental health issues like anxiety, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder. And advocates at the Greater Cincinnati Homeless Coalition and other organizations point out the shelters are already over capacity.
Strategies to End Homelessness, the nonprofit that coordinates many shelter options, says there were roughly 7,100 people experiencing homelessness at some point in the year in Hamilton County in 2016.
To address that need, there are 675 permanent shelter beds, with more emergency shelter space available during the winter months. The men’s shelter on Gest Street in Queensgate is 130 percent full and a women’s shelter in Mount Auburn has 78 people staying in its 60-bed facility.
A debate has raged between advocates for those in the camps and officials hoping to get everyone into a shelter about the space available.
STEH Executive Director Kevin Finn acknowledges the shelters are over capacity, but says that space is still available for those willing to take it.
“The Shelterhouse men’s and women’s shelters serve as the safety net for the system, and in doing so have been over capacity since 2015,” he says. “But this does not mean they are turning people away. Quite the contrary, they bring people who show up at the door in and let them sleep on mattresses on the floor. So, everyone is correct: the shelters are over capacity and the people on the streets could go into shelter.”
One area where Finn and activists like the homeless coalition agree: finding ways to get more affordable housing will be critical to addressing the issues raised by the camps long-term. Hamilton County needs 40,000 more units of housing affordable to house its lowest-income residents, a study from Greater Cincinnati’s Local Initiatives Support Corporation found last year.
“Affordable housing is the issue,” Finn says. “If we had more affordable housing, people wouldn’t stay in shelter as long, and we would actually need fewer shelter beds.”
But the city’s recent budget set human services funding at roughly 1 percent of its operating budget expenditures — less than the 1.5 percent stipulated by council ordinance. And any big boost to affordable housing will be a long time coming. The city has set up a fund called VTICA into which developers can voluntarily pay in exchange for a tax incentive, but it will take years for it to accumulate significant funds to bridge the city’s affordability gap. A similar program used to help fund Cincinnati’s streetcar has generated less revenue than expected since it was launched last year.
In the meantime, some inhabitants of the camps say they’re not going away. Deters, however, says it is time for the camps to go.
“Every time we make a new boundary, they just move,” he said when he requested the county-wide prohibition on camps. “We’ve had enough of it. They need to go to shelters and they need to obey the rules of the shelters.”
This article appears in Aug 8-15, 2018.
