East Lansing City Council to Meet With Advocacy Groups to Discuss Proposed Camping and Loitering Bans
For nearly three hours local residents, researchers, housing advocates, attorneys and more beseeched the East Lansing City Council during their Tuesday night meeting to halt consideration of bans on loitering in parking areas and camping they say would criminalize homelessness and ensure individuals remain unhoused.
Opposing the bans is a matter of survival, a speaker named Carver said during the public comment portion of the meeting. Carver told the City Council they are homeless.
“A camping ban does not solve homelessness. It only traps us in unstable conditions, which perpetuate homelessness. By sweeping homeless people, we lose valuable possessions, medications, wheelchairs, the documents, my dad’s ashes,” Carver said.
And when unhoused people are pushed by law enforcement to areas where they can seek shelter without being seen like the woods, Carver said they lose access to emergency services and trust in organizations that may want to help.
“One of my biggest fears when I live outside is police,” Carver said. “They might show up with a sandwich one day and an eviction notice the next, arrest me, my belongings, so that I can’t survive when I do get out of jail.”
Following the barrage of condemnations for the council’s consideration of the bans, which carry fines and incarceration for those who violate the proposed ordinances, the council agreed to participate in a meeting with advocacy groups that sent a letter on Friday warning the council of the dangers of the ban.
Given the breadth of feedback City Council received during public comment during the Tuesday meeting, City Manager Robert Belleman implored the council to consider the offer in the letter from groups to learn more about the impacts of camping and loitering bans and to respond accordingly.
The council agreed to send Mayor Pro Tem Chuck Grigsby and Councilmember Kerry Ebersole Singh to meet in the coming days with the groups behind the letter: The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, the Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness and the National Homelessness Law Center.
Council did approve an introduction of the ordinances at Tuesday’s meeting. However, the meeting with housing advocates and comments made by council members during the meeting raise doubt council will adopt the ordinances when they come back at a future meeting.
“I just wanted to say thank you to the audience members for coming in and giving such powerful testimony,” Grigsby said. “For me personally, it’s an easy decision, you’ve just really affirmed a lot of where I’m at.”
The proposed ordinances are uninformed and would not effectively address any of the concerns city leaders have when it comes to the unhoused population, Nicholas Cook, director of public policy for the Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness told East Lansing Info.
City Council has been considering bans on loitering in parking areas and public camping for several weeks now, but reintroduced revised ordinances Tuesday which clarify provisions, including that the loitering ban doesn’t apply to people seeking shelter during adverse weather events like during a tornado warning or during sleet or thunderstorms.
The proposed loitering and camping bans were originally under the same ordinance, but have been split in the most recent introduction and have added additional language for the definitions of actions.
But the root of the ordinances is still cruel, Cook said, and it wouldn’t address concerns about the homeless population. City Council has heard residents accuse unhoused individuals of destroying business owners’ property and verbally abusing and intimidating residents in the downtown area.
“I think their minds were changed last night,” Cook said. “I don’t think they understand the totality of the unhoused population in East Lansing. I don’t think they understand that if somebody is harassing somebody, somebody’s assaulting somebody, there’s already laws on the books to take care of that… This is to target the homeless population.”
Even the caveat that police officers enforcing the ban must connect unhoused individuals with helping organizations or shelters before imposing the penalties of the camping ordinance is unhelpful, Khadja Erickson of the Mid-Michigan Tenant Resource Center said during public comment at the City Council meeting. Violators would face up to 30 days of incarceration and fines, while East Lansing only has one small shelter, which typically serves families, not individuals.
East Lansing’s plan abdicates city leaders of any responsibility to improve housing and poverty resources and makes unhoused neighbors the enemy, Erickson said.
All the area shelters are full, Michigan has had a particularly grueling winter and the proposed bans institute policy that is so lethal and cruel, it will certainly open the city to legal repercussions that will worsen the city’s existing financial troubles, Erickson said.
“Punishing people for sleeping outdoors when shelter is unavailable during Michigan winters is precisely the kind of punishment our state constitution forbids,” Erickson said. “There is no realistic pathway currently in East Lansing to go from the street to housing, and it’s not even embedded in the ordinance. There is no bridge being created here. This is precisely just a mechanism for removal.”
It’s bad policy that advocacy groups know violates state law and other legal protections and opens the city up for lawsuits, Cook told ELi. Despite city leader assertions that much thought has gone into these proposed bans, Cook said he doesn’t know a single helping organization for unhoused individuals that supports these ordinances.
The goal is to meet with the two East Lansing City Council members, potentially Thursday, Cook said, and for elected leaders to learn more about how the bans beckon disaster for the city.