Homeless Encampment Crackdowns by Capital-Area Governments Raise Concerns From Helping Organizations

The next few days are going to be a cyclone of emotionally saturated hands-on work as local advocates help prepare residents of a Lansing homeless encampment to vacate the premises after the city brought legal action to disband the camp.

The trauma of losing the large long-standing encampment in North Lansing is severe, especially for those who have found safety in numbers there for years, Executive Director of Punks with Lunch in Lansing Kelsea Hector told East Lansing Info over the phone following a local court’s decision Wednesday.

“They have to vacate, the order is to be gone by the [Dec.] 23rd… it’s all boots on the ground to make sure that people, their stuff, isn’t displaced,” Hector said. “We want to make sure that people are supported by people that have created a relationship with them and care for them and that we continue to hold the city accountable as we’re moving forward… to make sure that people don’t get lost in the cracks.”

At the same time, East Lansing government leaders for months have been alerting to a rise in the presence of unhoused individuals in the downtown, in part due to Lansing’s recent encampment crackdown. Some business owners in the area have beseeched the City Council to address what they say is an influx of individuals causing disturbances and threats to the public’s safety.

“If you come to downtown East Lansing in the morning, you will see my employees cleaning poop outside the businesses…I have lottery tickets stolen. I have every problem in the world,” Ali Haider, owner of a 7-Eleven in the downtown area told East Lansing City Council members during public comment at the Dec. 9 City Council meeting. 

Haider implored that he cares about all his neighbors, but said unhoused individuals have broken doors on his business’ alcohol fridges and yell obscenities at young women downtown. He said City Council has to make decisions to support the safety of everyone in the downtown.

Also at the Dec. 9 City Council meeting, council members decided to formally consider an amendment to the city’s loitering and camping ordinance which would make repeated attempts to camp in East Lansing a criminal offense punishable by a $200 fine and up to 30 days of imprisonment.

The proposed changes to the ordinance outline the East Lansing Police Department’s response to camping and loitering in the downtown, Police Chief Jennifer Brown told city council members at the Dec. 9 meeting. The proposed amendments say police and city officials must alert individuals to the changed ordinance and provide information on local helping organizations like family homeless shelter Haven House, East Lansing’s sole shelter, or other organizations in Lansing.

“It gives the city a clear process for addressing prolonged gatherings or activities in these spaces that can make others feel unsafe or discourage use of the facilities,” Brown told city council members at the City Council meeting.

The fact that there is only one organization city leaders could list for individuals to vacate to that is in the city, while the rest are in Lansing is telling of the city’s intention to move people, not help them, Executive Director of the Women’s Center of Greater Lansing Rebecca Kasen said.

There’s an assortment of reasons a person may not qualify to enter a shelter to receive one of the limited bed spaces in the area, Kasen said, and with the proposed bans on loitering and camping, there seems to be nowhere for unhoused individuals to go but to jail.

“These ordinances will push people into the woods and into isolated spaces where overdoses, hypothermia and medical emergencies are far more likely to become fatal because no one is around to help. Criminalization does not reduce homelessness, it increases suffering. It increases risk. It creates a cycle,” Kasen said.

Unhoused individuals have already caught frostbite and called Punks with Lunch for help this winter, Hector said.

The holidays present a perfect storm of danger for unhoused individuals, Hector said as people trying to stay warm accidentally burn down their tents and the emotions of the holiday season can lead to increased substance abuse.

The City of Lansing has called a “Code Blue” for several days this winter which operates to alert the public of the health hazards associated with prolonged exposure to the elements, as well as allowing warming centers and shelters to temporarily bypass some limits on capacity in order to assist those in need of shelter.

But just because there’s a Code Blue and shelters or warming centers are open, doesn’t mean people are going to go to them, said Nicholas Cook, director of public policy for the Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness. 

Warming centers are often just chairs and people are not allowed to sleep on the floors, Cook said. People who have endured the pain of homelessness and are seeking shelter from the winter weather want to be comfortable and lay down. 

Helping organizations separate men from women and a lot of homeless individuals team up, especially women, Cook said, so the fear of losing an ally, or having to abandon property or pets can lead to individuals remaining on the streets.

“Homeless individuals are just like everybody else. I think that that’s something everybody has to understand. If you ask a homeless individual, they would rather be in housing. They all have a story… There’s a million reasons why they’re homeless, from being laid off of work, being hurt on the job, for domestic violence, for drug abuse, for mental health issues, just something that happened at their home, or a repair that they couldn’t keep up with, or a landlord that raised the rent and they just couldn’t afford the rent. People are just trying to survive on the street,” Cook said. “They’re trying to survive. They’re not bad people, they’re not criminals. They’re your neighbors, they’re your friends, they’re your family.”

Criminalization of homelessness by way of camping and loitering bans do not reduce homelessness, Cook said, but they are very effective at pushing people further and further into the margins making it hard for first responders to assist them and render life-saving services.

The human aspect of homelessness is often lost on the public, Cook said, as everyone is one catastrophic event, one serious illness, one bad day, one layoff away from being homeless. Living paycheck-to-paycheck in Michigan is not uncommon as for the last five years rents in Michigan have increased 25% and the state is short 185,000 affordable housing units for low income residents.

While some in East Lansing point the finger at Lansing for the presence of unhoused individuals in the downtown, Hector said many of the individuals Punks with Lunch serves have said that they purposefully avoid East Lansing.

“They’re not going to East Lansing, because East Lansing police have a history of not treating poor people with kindness, especially unhoused folk… No one wants to go to East Lansing. I can tell you that right now,” Hector said.

Some individuals do make the short trek between East Lansing and Lansing, Hector said, but if a few of the Capital-area communities stopped exiling their unhoused neighbors to the next municipality over and instead collaborated on solutions, there would probably be fewer cyclical issues.

Hector echoed the same concerns that several other unhoused advocates have iterated surrounding Lansing’s encampment crackdown and East Lansing’s potential ban on loitering and camping, that these actions criminalize poverty.

“It really does shift responsibility away from the systems that have actually failed to provide housing, behavioral care, economic stability and puts it right back on people that are struggling just to get food that day,” Hector said.

For those displaced from the Lansing encampment, the agreement parties came to in court outlines that the city will pay for six weeks of shelter at an area hotel as they sort out their future housing needs. However, Hector is concerned that though six weeks is enough time for public outcry to settle down over the encampment, it is not enough time for these individuals to construct a safe life after some of them spent three years constructing this community of unhoused neighbors.

“I’m not really sure what the system expects,” Hector said.