A hopefully balanced opinion piece (if such a thing can exist) from Ohio’s Akron Beacon Journal helps unscramble some thoughts about ‘hands on’ private activism as a means of supporting the homeless.
Is it possible for conscientious activists with available resources to create a private response to homeless shelter where none otherwise exists, or is inadequate? Can a private citizen with available land and a great deal of compassion set up a private tent city?
Akron’s experience, detailed in the opinion piece below, provides good reasons why such well-meaning initiatives are doomed to failure.
The fundamental roadblock? Health and safety regulations.
The homeless deserve as well as any other citizen the rules that cover such issues as sanitation, fire prevention and law-and-order. The community itself would be derelict in its responsibilities if it did not insist upon appropriate regulations.
A human feces-littered camp site is a recipe for epidemic. Nylon tents and naked flame can add up to maiming and death.
And so the theoretical construct of a private, Good Samaritan, tent encampment simply collapses in the face of health and safety responsibilities without . . .
Yes, indeed, there is a ‘without.’ It can be converted to a ‘with.’ But such a condition is hard to come by for private citizens: literally millions of dollars in setup funding are needed, together with a continued inflow of healthy amounts of cash for continuing support.
As the Akron Beacon Journal article points out, these sums of money can be obtained, but are more likely possible by an ‘official’ tent city with a management that can tap initial and ongoing subsidies from various levels of government. The resulting official ‘encampments’ are not without their problems.
Affordablehousingaction.org has been following the attempts of Sacramento, California to create and maintain them1.
Whether based on insulated tents or more rigid shelter structures such as ‘pallet’ homes, they are billed as ‘transitional’ housing, a kind of way station between unsheltered homelessness on one hand, and occupancy of a proper home on the other.
Attempts to establish safe, orderly ‘transitional’ shelter will come to depend on the elephant in the room. Where are the growing numbers of truly affordable homes that can permanently accommodate the people who are homeless?
Right now the nation has small numbers of people who are ready and waiting ‘temporarily’ in transitional housing for permanent affordable housing. As they wait, far greater numbers currently attempt to survive in here-today destroyed-tomorrow illegal tent encampments occupied by people who cannot, or will not out of fear, find a spot in a public or charitable shelter.
And, oh yes, those shelter occupants are all waiting for truly affordable housing, too.
Read more in the Akron Beacon Journal: Lack of order, resources diminishes efforts to shelter Akron homeless in tent city
Footnotes
- For the Sacramento’s latest well-meaning ‘oopsie’ in navigating laws and bylaws to create healthy legal encampments try: Sacramento Continues to Attempt Homeless Pratfalls With A Heart
