Alexander Graham woke up Thursday morning to sounds of heavy machinery rumbling down a nearby street. The 44-year-old realized he had overslept on the day that Vancouver Public Works employees and police would be cleaning up the streets around Share House.
“They started around the other end of the block, which was a blessing,” Graham said while sifting through what he would keep and what he would throw away. “For the most part I can’t complain. It’s tedious.”
People camping outside the men’s homeless shelter in downtown Vancouver had been given three days’ notice of the cleanup. Graham said he doesn’t have a lot of garbage but keeps stuff that he can give away to people.
Some people had wheeled carts of their belongings down Jefferson Street, out of the pathway of the backhoe.
Coming Sunday
>A three-day series on homelessness in Clark County
Columbian reporters Patty Hastings and Katie Gillespie explore homelessness in more depth.
• Sunday: Homelessness pervades despite year-old law legalizing camping in public.
• Monday: Families and service providers grapple with a lack of shelter space.
• Tuesday: Local school districts are reporting elevated numbers of homeless students.
“The city is working hard to try to be sensitive to the situation,” said Randy Scrivner, a city code enforcement officer.
But, he said, a line has to be drawn at some point when the accumulation of stuff becomes a hazard to everyone. There are signs on the fences along West 12th Street and Lincoln Avenue stating that it is illegal to store personal property in public between 6:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m.
“It’s not about being homeless, it’s about saying that the city’s right of way is not a place to store things — just as well as you can’t store your inoperable cars on the street. That’s why the city has an ordinance about junk cars in the street,” Scrivner said.
That’s not to say the encampment won’t regroup, but Thursday was a chance to purge the trash that’s collected between cleanups.
“I think it sucks,” said Shannon Riddell, who is homeless. She acknowledged that people keep a lot of stuff down here and some hoard belongings. “I think that we need counseling services or advocates to come out here.”
The 27-year-old was trying figure out what do with her stuff. She had already thrown out a bag of dirty clothes. By mid-morning Riddell had moved her belongings down the street and got help pushing her broken car down the road. Riddell said she became homeless around September after leaving an unsafe housing situation.
People’s property that wasn’t claimed Thursday will go to the city operations center, where it will be stored for 60 days, said Vancouver police Officer Tyler Chavers.
“Washington State says that you have to store people’s property, you can’t just throw it away. You have to give them an opportunity. Sixty days is plenty of opportunity for folks to make arrangements,” Chavers said.
After past cleanups, some people have retrieved their stuff and others have not.
Chavers said the issue on the streets around Share House is not a homeless problem, but rather an accumulation of property problem.
“These people did not have these items before they were here. They’ve accumulated this stuff and that’s the problem,” he said. “It’s not helpful when people come down and donate items that folks cannot legally store. There’s a barbecue. It wasn’t stolen. It was donated by somebody who didn’t want to pay the dump fee.”
What’s he seen happen is somebody will donate a bag of clothes, only for those clothes to end up abandoned, wet or trashed. And then residents living in the Esther Short, Hough and other nearby neighborhoods call to complain about the trash.
Many homeless people also camp along Burnt Bridge Creek Trail, but Chavers said those people tend to accumulate less belongings than the people living outside of Share House.
“They travel light. They want to be able to break down. They know if they make too much of a scene or mess people are going to see it,” he said.
The city’s unlawful camping ordinance allows homeless people to sleep in public between 9:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m., but it doesn’t allow them to store property in public.
The regular cleanups — weekly or biweekly — are essentially a type of housekeeping. But, it’s necessary because of the sanitation and health issues that would develop otherwise, Chavers said. So, he said, staying on top of the mess helps the homeless, even if they may not feel like it does.
Proposition 1, the affordable housing levy passed by Vancouver voters, is the real long-term solution to the problem, Chavers said. The levy is aimed at creating more affordable housing. In the meantime, “there’s got to be a better way to manage this,” he said, adding that the city recently formed a work group to address the issue.
Chavers would like police to be able to work with mental health, public health and outreach workers to make the cleanups more constructive.
“That’s where we’re headed,” he said.
