Allentown will clear more homeless encampments that have cropped up along the Jordan Creek, Mayor Matt Tuerk confirmed Friday.
Public works staff will clear out an encampment under the Hamilton Street bridge along the Jordan Creek on Nov. 10, with signs to be posted notifying people on Monday, Tuerk said.
The city also will continue to clear out other encampments that are in flood zones across the city, Tuerk said, including ones near the Union Street bridge and south of that area along the creek, which all are home to dozens of people.
More notices will be posted throughout the month in different areas where encampments have cropped up, Tuerk said, but the city is pacing out the clearing process because it does not have the resources to clear out all camps at once.
“That process is beginning right now, we are aware of the fact that it’s in a floodplain, so we’re preparing an operations plan to clean it up,” Tuerk said.
The announcement comes about three weeks after Allentown cleared out a large encampment along the Jordan Creek Greenway trail, citing concerns over its location in a floodplain. The eviction, however, spurred backlash from homeless people and their advocates who said they have nowhere else to go.
City Council member Ce-Ce Gerlach, who has spoken out about being homeless herself in the past and has criticized Tuerk’s approach, wants to see changes in how the city evicts encampments.
She has proposed an ordinance that would set procedures the city must follow while clearing out a homeless encampment, including: conducting risk assessments of each homeless encampment, maintaining a database of each encampment across the city and giving homeless people at least 90 days notice before having to evacuate a camping area.
“It won’t matter if it’s an encampment at Jordan, or an encampment somewhere else in the city, encampments will be treated … with some level of protocol, instead of just chaos and kind of just willy-nillying it,” Gerlach said.
But Tuerk has indicated he would not support such a move, saying Gerlach’s ordinance goes “far beyond reason.” He said City Council should not dictate city staff procedures, and believes that responsibility lies only within his office.
“This is an ongoing struggle with City Council — the failure to understand the responsibility of the Council and the responsibility of the administration, and fundamentally before we get into any ordinances, we are creatures of the charter, the charter is very clear about whose responsibility it is to execute administrative policy, and that is the executive branch, the mayor’s office,” Tuerk said.
The clearing of the first encampment on Sept. 29 coincided with the early opening of the warming shelter at the Allentown YMCA to provide residents a place to stay overnight.
However, some of the encampment’s residents said they would not use the shelter, and have moved elsewhere.
Gary Ward, owner of Ward’s Oriental Rug Service on Union Street, said a homeless encampment in the woods behind his business has grown in the past month, and suspects the reason for that growth is former Jordan Greenway residents relocating there after being displaced.
Ward owns the building his business is located in, which also rents out space to prominent nonprofit Promise Neighborhoods. The growth in the homeless population has put an undue burden on him, his staff and his tenants, he said: He has cleaned up trash and human waste on his property, heard conflicts and fights break out among the encampment residents and claimed the smell of drug use is sometimes noticeable in the area.
He makes frequent calls to city police, fire and public works, asking for their help to remove people from their property or handle any illegal activity.
“I have an investment to protect,” Ward said of his building. “I don’t want them here.”
Ward said in an interview he is relieved that the city plans to clear out the area.
Tuerk said the city will approach clearing encampments as compassionately as possible. City Health Bureau staff will set up a resource hub to connect homeless residents to case management. He also said the city will only intervene to clear out a homeless encampment if there is a safety risk like flooding.
However, he said that he does not see relocating people into housing as the city’s responsibility. The city has given nonprofits and Lehigh County notice of the upcoming sweeps and is coordinating with them to try and relocate people into housing or a different safe location.
Abigail Goldfarb, executive director of the Lehigh Conference of Churches, said that overseeing the late September encampment closure has taught the organization a lot about better ways to coordinate helping people through sweeps in the future.
The goal is to get as many people into permanent, stable housing as possible, Goldfarb said, as encampment sweeps can cause trauma and instability for people who already are in difficult, precarious situations.
“What if I came home to note on my door, ‘You have to get out’? You are talking about the same thing, you are talking about people already in an emergency before this extra thing happened to them,” Goldfarb said.
The city has encouraged homeless people seeking shelter to stay at the Allentown YMCA warming station. Michael Reisman, spokesperson for the River Crossing YMCA, said that around 60 people are guests at the warming station per night, out of a total capacity of 80 beds.
Still, Gerlach criticized the city’s approach to sweeps, and said she would continue to push for a vote on her ordinance even without support from the mayor.
“How do we expect people to get their lives together when all we do is keep tearing their lives apart?” Gerlach said.
Reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at Liweber@mcall.com.