Tent camps for the homeless

LA Times

From the LA Times:

....Cities up and down the West Coast, including Seattle, Sacramento and San Francisco, confronted by the high cost and slow progress of building housing for homeless people, have turned to these permitted tent encampments. 

They offer services such as toilets, meals and help finding a permanent place to stay. These efforts, once anathema among some homeless service providers, are becoming more widely accepted as unsheltered homelessness has grown and government officials reckon with a pandemic that has made placing people in large shelters dangerous.....

The city’s first site in the shadow of City Hall and next to the public library sprouted up just as the shelter system’s capacity was limited by the coronavirus and large encampments with 10 or 20 tents began to appear on San Francisco’s streets. It started as an ad hoc response to the pandemic but will probably remain in some form.

City officials say there’s more demand for the roughly 260 spots at these sanctioned tent encampments around the city than spaces available. On one day in early April, there were five open sanctioned camping spots, four spaces open at one of the city’s congregate shelters and two hotel rooms. All were filled by outreach workers by the early afternoon.

City officials, including San Francisco Mayor London Breed, have partially credited this effort for a decline in the number of tents on the city’s streets. In April 2020, there were 1,100 tents on San Francisco streets and 66 encampments of six tents or more. 

Now, there are just under 400 tents and 10 large encampments, according to Jeff Kositsky, who previously ran the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and now is in charge of its unsheltered homeless response.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently debated and eventually shot down a proposal to require the city to provide shelter for all unhoused people. Its lead supporter has said that this could be accomplished mainly through the expansion of the safe sleep sites. 

The city’s latest point-in-time count found about 8,000 homeless people, but officials say based on other estimates the number is closer to 20,000.

“This creates choices for people. They have agency in getting to decide how to live their life,” Kositsky said....

Rob's comment:

Do we need a new redundant term to discuss homelessness? I thought it might be just a prose hiccup in the LA Times story, but then the writer used it again: "unsheltered homeless." Is there such a thing as a "sheltered" homeless person? 

Maybe, if you count people who have no place of their own and are sleeping on someone's couch. Still, the word "homeless" can already be that inclusive.

See also Semantics and the homeless.