The City of San Antonio is renewing its approach to addressing among the community’s most persistent homeless encampments. This strategy, modeled off other communities, combines weeks of intensive outreach with more enforcement after selected sites are cleared.
Last fiscal year, San Antonio performed more than 1,440 homeless encampment abatements.
But city officials said some locations are repeatedly being cleared, only for encampments to return.
“The number of recurring sites has been growing over the last several years,” said Patrick Steck, assistant director of Homeless Services and Strategy with the City of San Antonio. “We are removing encampments and then folks are coming back, sometimes very quickly. And so that is what this pilot initiative is looking to address.”
The city has record of 33 encampment sites that have generated enough activity to be placed on a recurring abatement schedule. At some locations, crews return every two weeks for months at a time. A dashboard online details where these encampments are located throughout the Alamo City.
Under the pilot program, outreach teams will increase the number of times they go out and interact with community members who live at the encampments before the abatements take place.
“We’re expecting four to six weeks of outreach and instead of the two or three times that we may go out before we remove an encampment right now, we’re going to go out every single day for those four to six weeks,” Steck said.
During that period, Steck said outreach teams will identify the people living at each encampment, work to build trust and develop individual plans aimed at connecting them with housing, shelter or other services.
Corazon Ministries is among the nonprofit organizations assisting with those efforts.
“We’re just happy to be a partner and kind of trial some of those efforts and start building really strong relationships with the individuals that are located in these encampments,” said Morgan Handley, associate director of Corazon Ministries.
Handley said outreach workers have to consider a range of options depending on each person’s circumstances and the resources available.
Those options can include emergency shelter, rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing, transitional housing and voucher programs. Corazon also specializes in connecting people with other options, including inpatient treatment for substance use or mental health disorders, sober living homes, group homes, assisted living and potentially reconnecting people with family.
Finding enough housing and shelter capacity remains one of the biggest challenges facing the pilot.
Steck said the city plans to more strongly enforce restrictions at those locations with the goal of preventing the reestablishment of the encampments.
Steck said the city and SAPD will determine how to respond when people return to locations that have already gone through the extended outreach and abatement process.
Existing enforcement tools include city and state restrictions on public camping. Steck said criminal trespass can also be used in cases involving private property when a property owner has prohibited people from being on the site.
The enforcement component essentially creates a two-part strategy: give outreach workers substantially more time before an abatement to connect people with services, then take additional steps afterward to keep the targeted location from becoming an encampment again.
The city will initially focus on smaller encampments before potentially applying lessons learned to larger and more complex sites.
The first locations will be selected from the city’s list of 33 frequently recurring sites. Steck estimates the city could address around 10 sites during the fiscal year, although the final number has not been determined.
The pilot is expected to get underway this month.