We’ll be back.
That message comes through clearly when you talk with homeless persons encamped along the Los Angeles River trail: We’ll be back.
They’ll be back, they say, even after they are once again displaced from the ad hoc campgrounds they’ve created under the bridges branching eastward of the L.A. River and the 710. A series of signs posted along the trail spells out the coming upset: ON 8-27-12 THIS AREA WILL BE CLEANED OF ALL DEBRIS BY THE L.A. COUNTY DEPT. OF PUBLIC WORKS. ALL PERSONAL BELONGINGS SHOULD BE REMOVED FROM THE AREA PRIOR TO 7 AM.
“They keep making us move so they can come out and clean up,” says Jennifer, one of about a dozen people at an encampment. “They want to keep us as the unseen homeless. […] It’s really not fair to us, because they keep asking us if we’re going to come back. If we had somewhere else to go, we wouldn’t come back.”
There are other options in Long Beach, but for various reasons they are less desirable to many, who would rather form their own home(less) bases, however fleeting they may be.
“I can’t just up and go into transitional housing, because my animals are like my kids,” says Jennifer, referring to Kaia and Snowy, her canine twosome
“The [Long Beach Rescue] Mission does help,” says Tim, one of Jennifer’s campmates. “But I’ve been there before, and, honestly, the reason why I stay down here is because there’s more freedom. There you have to go to bed at, like, 8 o’clock at night. You can’t do anything. Sometimes to me it feels a little like jail, you know?”
The Long Beach Rescue Mission offers the most extensive transitional housing alternatives in Long Beach, with programs varying in length from 30 days to one year. But aside from a limited number of beds, waiting lists, and the need of referrals for various shelter opportunities, many potential candidates for aid are deterred by the religious aspect inherent to the programs. “Our New Life Program offers the education and spiritual training many need to overcome the challenges and addictions that keep them in bondage, with the aim of returning as productive members of their homes, families and communities,” reads a description on the Rescue Mission’s Website. “In this year-long residential program participants build a lasting relationship with Jesus Christ.”
While encampment members say they just want to be left alone (“We’re not bothering nobody,” Tim says. “We are out in the view of people walking by or riding bikes [on the bike trail], but we don’t bother nobody”), the various governmental agencies with jurisdiction over various parts of the river trail and environs claim safety as the main reason why they cannot leave the people staying there to their own devices. The August 27 clearing, for example, is one of a series of regular actions undertaken by L.A. County in advance of the rainy season (inasmuch as Southern California has such a thing, at least), since the encampments are susceptible to flooding—an eventuality whose dangers would be augmented by the amount of debris in the area.
“It’s something that needs to be done from a maintenance perspective,” says Susan Price, manager of the Bureau of Community Health, under whose purview the Multi-Service Center for the Homeless operates. “And it’s just not a safe place to live.”
The City also has additional concerns, such as risk of fire posed by the camps.
“A lot of people out there cook with gas stoves,” says Michael Johnson, a manager at the Health Dept. “That’s really a safety concern. Should there be a fire, that could injure people and damage structures, such as the overpasses.”
But those at the encampments claim the City’s actions go beyond such concerns and include a litany of strategies to make the campers’ difficult lives ever more uncomfortable. They say the Long Beach Police Department, for example, told a nearby warehouse to turn off a water source at the back of the property. They show me an overflowing trash receptacle and claim the City recently stopped trash collection in advance of the forthcoming clearing. They direct me to a tunnel they say the City flooded out in order to keep them from using it as shelter for themselves and supplies.
A flooded tunnel near one of the encampments
Trash collection in the area is clearly behind, and the hundreds (thousands?) of gallons of standing water in the area in question—water with no apparent source—is alarming, no matter how it got there. Matthew Veeh, director of government and public affairs for the Long Beach Water Department, researched the matter in response to the Long Beach Post‘s request for comment as to whether such flooding could occur unintentionally in the absence of a broken water main.
“Initially I would have thought no, but after talking to a guy out there, he said it started after the bike path there was put in, and he’d receive calls every so often about that area,” Veeh says. “My guess is that it’s a combination of sprinkler runoff and seepage from the [nearby] pump station. […] Apparently it’s been a problem off and on for the last couple of years, at least.”[1]
City Public Information Officer Ed Kamlan adds that apparently a sump pump that usually clears water from this natural low point broke down, and that it is now being replaced.
But such explanations will ring hollow in the minds of the campers, who feel persecuted.
“They stopped messing with us for a while, but recently they started messing with us again,” says Tim.
Johnson confirms that recently the City has stepped up the frequency of its clear-outs.
“We’ve done a significant amount of removals as of late because we’ve identified quite a few [encampments],” he says.
“[During a previous removal] a lot of people lost their tents,” Jennifer says. “Some people didn’t even have time to get their medicine, their stuff out. The Long Beach Police Department was part of it, making us hurry up and go. We tried to explain that we still got important stuff in there, but they didn’t care. It was: ‘Either leave now or get arrested.’ […] They brought a bulldozer and literally scooped up everything that was left and put it in a trash truck and threw it away. […] Some of us have animals. They don’t care. It’s like, ‘Grab your stuff and go.'”
Whatever the reality of governmental actions, another apparent reality is that nothing the City or County is doing currently will keep the homeless from reclaiming the verboten real estate.
“If they come [on August 27], we’ll probably have to load all our stuff on a truck and just wait and see what happens,” says Jennifer.
“I am actively looking [for other options], trying to get up,” says Keith, another member of this “family” of campers. “But with this, it just displaces everybody. […] I told [one of the government officials who oversees such removals]: ‘Instead of wasting all that money and manpower on doing this stuff, why don’t you get rid of the problem instead of trying to move it, and give us housing, help us with that?’ Instead of wasting that money on trying to clear us out, when they know we’re coming back again, help us with housing.”
Jennifer looks toward the river trail. “We just wish that the people in the community could actually see that we’re human beings, too,” she says. Her family of campmates nod thoughtfully, and for a moment in that exposed living room the only sound is little Snowy scrabbling at the loose ground, oblivious of the struggles of the human world.