It’s not that the neighbors hated homeless people, or couldn’t relate to being poor and desperate.
“I’ve been in these people’s shoes,” said John Leach, who’s spent time in prison. “It took me a long way to dig myself out.”
What they did hate, residents of the area near some woods at Northeast 18th Avenue and 82nd Street say, was the commotion at all hours; the wasted-looking strangers walking in and out of the woods and sometimes peeking in their windows; the pollution and destruction of these publicly owned, forested wetlands; and the cars that line up on this out-of-the-way street and flee again, quick trans-actions completed.
“There is definitely drug dealing happening in there,” said Mike Knox — who added that he has no problem with booze or pot. “It’s the ‘white dope’ that really worries me. I’m talking about meth.”
Maybe most of all, neighbors hated hearing what sounded like gunshots in the dead of night. They used to be rare, Knox said, but by early November they weren’t rare enough anymore.
“The police came with their SWAT gear and stuff on Saturday (Nov. 15). It’s really getting out of hand,” said Knox, whose manufactured home edges up against a patch of publicly owned forest that cradles the headwaters of Cougar Creek. “They went out there and arrested one person and told the rest to move, but they ain’t moved. You can still see ’em right out my back door.”
The day before that, Knox, Leach and other neighbors explored the Hazel Dell woods where this homeless camp has been thriving. It was a problem for years, they said. This is the area where 13-year-old Alycia Nipp was stabbed to death in early 2009 by a sex offender who was squatting in an abandoned house — which has since been razed.
The sound of people hurrying off in the opposite direction was obvious as the neighbors approached a well-hidden but extensive network of tents and tarps. Knox said he was “shocked” to discover how big the tent village was. Drug paraphernalia was easily spotted inside; piles of trash were strewn far and wide throughout these woods.
Hands tied?
Over the past year, residents of Sifton and south Hazel Dell have pulled together with the Clark County Sheriff’s Office to clean homeless camps out of the edges of their neighborhoods. Since the Nipp murder, sheriff’s spokesman Shane Gardner told The Columbian previously, both neighbors and law enforcement are less tolerant of such situations.
But until this week these Northeast Hazel Dell neighbors, who say they’ve been calling the Sheriff’s Office and county policymakers for months, heard little but “Our hands are tied” — reportedly because unincorporated Clark County does not have a “no-camping” ordinance aimed at stopping homeless people from living in public spaces like sidewalks or parks, as the city of Vancouver does.
CCSO Deputy James Naramore, who is assigned to the county’s Public Works department and public lands like these, said such a law is frankly beside the point.
“I’m not sure enacting another rule, another no-trespassing or no-camping rule, will be all that effective,” Naramore said. “You’re just citing people who may not care. If they end up in jail for a few days, they’ll come back out” and go looking for a similar well-camouflaged place to be — if not the very same one.
If the county’s hands are tied, he said, it’s because there isn’t enough help available for homeless people. “Unfortunately, I guess the way things are with mentally ill and homeless, those agencies are lacking money,” he said. “Because their services get cut, we are seeing a rise in calls for our service.”
Shifting around
Andy Silver, the executive director for the Council for the Homeless, said there’s no easy answer to this problem. Stepping in with handcuffs and trash bins to wipe it all away may appease the immediate neighbors, but that’s about as far that goes.
“What you want to avoid, and what happens too often, is just tearing down a camp and having people with no place to go,” Silver said. “They’ll just move along and set up someplace else. You’re just shifting people around.”
Naramore said this Cougar Creek camp swelled to about a dozen residents just after neighbors, the county and the Chelatchie Prairie Railroad cleaned out a big camp along railroad tracks about 2 miles south earlier this year. Some arrests were made then, he said, but the county is more interested in helping these folks than penalizing them.
It’s difficult and messy business, he said.
“We can’t force them to do anything. We’d like to help them as much as possible. But the sad thing is, you offer a resource to somebody and they don’t take it,” he said.
Naramore said he’s accompanied outreach teams from agencies such as Community Services Northwest and Share as they get to know homeless people personally and try to connect them with shelters and other appropriate services. But that takes time and trust, he said. Eviction from the land makes it impossible — and almost guarantees that the same folks will set up similar shop again.
“Giving them a ticket and taking them to jail is not solving the problem. It’s everybody’s problem,” he said. “But it’s most frustrating for the people who live right next to it. They see a constant problem and think nobody’s helping. I truly understand their frustration.”
Silver doesn’t doubt that many of the folks in question would fail the drug tests that are the gateway to many services. But the idea that most homeless people choose their lot is a “complete fallacy,” he said.
“What people don’t understand is that the vast majority of people who are ‘choosing’ to be homeless are dealing with severe trauma and abuse and abandonment. They’re often people who were severely failed by adults in their life. That’s what they’re responding to. They are pulling back from society,” he said.
Naramore said he’s aware of a range of situations among the homeless he deals with. Some are mentally ill, some are addicted and some are choosing a “lifestyle,” he said, but others are simply neighbors who got knocked out of a home and a conventional existence by the Great Recession, and never did recover. “With the job loss … this is all they’ve got in the whole wide world,” he said.
The underlying problem, Silver said, is a society that doesn’t have enough resources and services for everyone.
“In a perfectly functioning world, we’d have the right resources available the very day the outreach worker makes the connection,” he said. “But we usually don’t. Usually, people have to wait on line.”
Salmon Creek next?
This past weekend, the Sheriff’s Office did step in; there were too many complaints about too much trouble not to, Naramore said. Several arrests were made, several more folks said they’d try local shelters, and one will be staying with a family member, he said. Meanwhile, arrangements were underway as this story went to print for Public Works personnel to clean up the remaining mess.
But some residents of these woods told Naramore they’ll simply move to similar hideaways nearby. He said he’s familiar with a couple of small camps in the Salmon Creek area north of here. Will they swell now, just as the Hazel Dell camp did?
“Unfortunately, when they show up at the next site, that’ll be near somebody’s neighborhood, too. I’m going to have to go looking. That’s my job,” he said. “I am going to continue doing what I can, on this end. Hopefully not just driving them out, but finding them something.”
