A Season of Sweeps
This week, we focused our reporting on interviewing people about to get “swept,” and on the beginning of those operations on Thursday. Carl was willing to give the new Cares Campus a try, but others we talked to off the record or via Facebook said they would try to find a discreet place to continue living in a tent. Ilya, an advocate for those without stable shelter, said of the people he talked to less than five percent were willing to even try the massive shelter unless they were “coerced” to do so. The vaunted Washoe County safe camp at the campus seems to be weeks away from opening, which gives the opening of the multimillion dollar Covid Cares Act funded project an initial sense of unfulfilled promises.
Sweeps are scheduled to continue up and down the Truckee River in the weeks ahead. This has led to lots of commentary on social media. There’s also confusion about what exactly the rules are at the new Cares Campus, including if people have to sign out / sign in every time they leave and reenter. Local officials have indicated they are working on fine tuning the current shelter FAQs. The next CHAB meeting in early June might offer some clarifications as well. Too bad notices to be swept don’t seem to include a pamphlet of what the new campus offers.
In our podcast episode, Carl explains in his own voice and in detail how he got the “poop end of the stick” and became a resident of tent city near Wells Ave. People had been encouraged to stay there in recent weeks, “corralled” some advocates said, making it in a way semi-legal before this week’s operations.
Some people commenting also wondered why there couldn’t be a range of legal safe camps, as well as safe parking spaces for RVs, where social workers could pay regular visits, and help lead people back into independent permanent housing, rather than the sense of “warehousing” in a massive structure with crammed bunk beds. Independence and freedom are important, as one commenter on Twitter pointed out: “There's not much freedom in being homeless anyway, but taking away that one little freedom - the ability to have a five-foot square that's kinda yours in a place that most other people don't even think about - seems like a cavalier way to treat humans.”