Christopher Peak photo
A tent from a homeless encampment set up by the Mill River near the Ralph Walker Rink earlier this summer.
Thomas Breen photo
LCI’s Linda Davis at Monday night’s meeting.
The city is planning to clear a large Mill River homeless encampment near the Ralph Walker Skating Rink sometime before the beginning of the new year.
Livable City Initiative (LCI) neighborhood specialist Linda Davis delivered that message to the East Rock Community Management Team (ERCMT) on Monday night during the team’s regular monthly meeting at the mActivity Gym on Nicoll Street.
Davis told the team that the city’s Homeless Outreach Task Force plans to clear out a homeless encampment that has been active for months under the I‑91 overpass sometime “before the first snowfall.”
The encampment is tucked away on the eastern bank of the Mill River about 1,000 feet down from State Street, between the Ralph Walker Skating Rink and the Blatchley-Willow highway exit.
She did not know exactly how many people are currently living in the encampment; an Independent report from earlier this summer found that somewhere between six and 20 people were staying at a camp in that same area by the river.
“One of the mayor’s number-one priorities is to make sure that the encampment on the east side of the river at Blatchley-Willow is taken care of before the first snowstorm,” she said. “The encampment we’re talking about now is near the water. So that’s going to be a challenge, because we’re not sure how deep the debris goes. And there’s a lot of stuff inside those tents.”
She said that the city expects to have to pick up even more trash from this new encampment than it did last year, when a crew cleared a long-standing encampment that had been set up on the western side of the Mill River near Rice Field. The city removed over 12 tons of garbage from that encampment.
Davis is a member of the city’s Homeless Outreach Task Force, a mix of city officials, police officers and non-profit social service providers overseen by Homelessness Services Coordinator Velma George. The group is charged with finding shelter and relevant aid for the city’s homeless, as well as reducing the number and impact of homeless encampments that have been popping up in recent years in city parks and beneath state-owned highways.
According to this year’s annual Point-in-Time count, the city’s homeless population is currently around 543.
Although that number is down from last year’s count of 625, city officials have noted an increase in homeless encampments populated by a younger population reluctant to enter the city’s shelters or accept the aid of social services.
Click here for a story about some people who lived in an encampment on the Mill River earlier this summer, and here for a comment in a SeeClickFix thread by a homeless person explaining why he chooses to live by the river instead of in one of the city’s shelters.
Monday night’s East Rock Community Management Team meeting.
Davis explained to the 15 ERCMT neighbors present at Monday night’s meeting that the city does not just bust into a homeless encampment and clear out all of the people and their belongings on the same day.
First it sends in outreach workers, not the police. The workers talk with the campers and try to arrange for temporary shelter and other social service needs. After the campers have been provided with options to relocate and have been given a few days to collect their personal belongings, the city comes in and throws out the remaining trash and discarded items.
East Rock management team chair David Budries (left) and East Rock resident Rob Rocke.
ERCMT Chair David Budries, East Rock neighbor Rob Rocke and Cedar Hill block watch Captain Kenya Adams-Martin praised Davis for the city’s imminent action on this homeless encampment.
Adams said that new campers have already begun to return to the Rice Field river encampment that the city cleared out around this time last year.
“They are back,” she said. “I’ve had conversations with them. I know them by name. I’ve given them information about getting shelter help. But one person asked if I could give him some mattresses. They’re recruiting other people, too.”
Budries said that he had recently gone kayaking down the Mill River, and saw three people in an orange tent not far from the Blatchley-Willow highway exit.
Rocke said that, even though he had mentioned this encampment at previous ERCMT meetings, several blue tents remain by the Mill River off of the White Trail that connects Orange Street and Rice Field. He said that the tents do not look like they are currently occupied. But they are still there alongside the river, and have been there for months.
“I’m not unsympathetic to the plight faced by the people in these encampments,” he said. “But the trash and garbage and the health issues involved with that, it just seems like a cycle that keeps repeating.”
The Board of Alders Human Services Committee will be holding a public hearing on homelessness on Thursday at 6 p.m. in the Aldermanic Chambers at City Hall.