Northcoast Environmental Center Staff
More and more we get word of areas around the community that are being “swept” of unhoused people. This is not a phenomenon that is specific to Humboldt; all around the country more people are ending up living on the streets, which means more cities are resorting to sweeps – evicting people from where they are camping because they have nowhere else to go. Even the word is dismissive and hurtful, indicating that the people being moved are akin to dirt.
One such action is happening in north Arcata as we are preparing to go to press this month. Whether these acts of forcefully removing people happen on a street filled with parked RVs or an encampment in a green belt, the results are the same: people who have already experienced trauma and hardship being retraumatized as they are forced to move from place to place, often losing belongings and connections to their community in the process. These sweeps do nothing to solve the problems associated with being unhoused; they just push people from open space to open space and the cycle continues. We’ve seen time and again how this plays out and it’s disappointing that the powers that be don’t seem to recognize that they are feeding a cycle of displacement that is harmful, inhumane, expensive, and ultimately unproductive.
Oftentimes, cleanup groups and self-identified environmentalists justify these sweeps as preventing environmental degradation, working directly with the police to push houseless communities from place to place. As environmentalists who also care deeply about our unhoused neighbors, the staff of the NEC feel the need to speak out and push for solutions that don’t put people’s lives in danger. While these actions may seem benign to some, they truly are life threatening to the people who are pushed even further to the margins, are severed from their community and service connections, and receive the message loud and clear that their lives are less important than those of their housed neighbors.
So what do we do? One obvious solution is to provide more low and very low income housing to help prevent people living on the streets in the first place. In the meantime, a solution that has worked in other communities is to establish safe parking and camping facilities that are managed by the people who live in them.
First and foremost, we need to start seeing people who are living on our streets as neighbors and community members – not nuisances to be swept away. The NEC supports stopping these sweeps and encourages environmentalists to not fall into the anti-homeless rhetoric spewed by clean up groups. For our neighbors who are living on the streets, it might literally be a matter of life and death.