Some say Fountain Square homeless camp closure conflicts with new housing push

On Monday evening, a full room of service providers, neighbors and interested parties gathered in the auditorium of Southeast Community Services on Shelby Street to hear from leaders of groups that work with the city’s homeless population. The main topic was the closure of an encampment on Leonard Street in the Fountain Square neighborhood just days earlier.

Chelsea Haring-Cozzi, executive director of the Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention, or CHIP, spent about 45 minutes telling the crowd about the Streets to Home program—an ambitious new cross-agency effort to house more than 300 people now living on the city’s streets.

But just after that, the city’s director of public health and safety, Andrew Merkley, spent just 3 minutes explaining why the 25-person encampment on Leonard Street had been closed by the city.

The presentation’s kicker—that those people would likely go to a shelter or relocate to another encampment rather than be rehoused as part of the new program—left some attendees and advocates feeling that the city’s decision contradicted the goal of the Streets to Home plan.

Rabbi Aaron Spiegel, executive director of the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance and an organizer for the initiative, told IBJ that the decision to close the camp “violates” the planned rehousing work, which he supports.

“Why not give us a little time to get this ramped up and give them what is a permanent solution, not a quick fix?” Spiegel said. “Streets to Home is about housing people, not moving them to another shelter.”

Rev. David Greene, president of the Indianapolis Continuum of Care Blueprint Council, said the decision to close the camp has caused frustration for all stakeholders in Streets to Home, who felt the work had momentum after it began.

“We announced this initiative just a month ago,” Greene said. “It’s disappointing. It’s like, what are we doing? And how does this ‘fit together?'”

Greene said he believes the camp’s population could have been rehoused within the next 60 to 90 days, had it not been closed. But now, outreach workers will be tasked with keeping track of, or eventually relocating, the camp’s residents.

Decision-makers in the Hogsett administration said the public safety concerns at the camp had become too great, and that the Streets to Home program does not yet have the capacity to service such a large camp.

That means people living at the Leonard Street camp will be referred to local shelters and service providers. 

Merkley said that public safety challenges at the camp “became intensified” over recent weeks and days. He called the decision “a heavy burden, and one that I don’t take lightly.” He said the decision was not motivated by media reports or emails to the Office of Public Health and Safety, or OPHS.

In a statement, OPHS spokesman Brian Heinemann said OPHS consulted with CHIP and a Streets to Home consultant before deciding to close the camp, after learning that Streets to Home wasn’t ready to take on a camp of that size.

OPHS shared police reports with IBJ highlighting three recent incidents involving the camp:

• Indiana State Police arrested a man living in the encampment for trespassing after officers spotted him digging a hole by the interstate on July 18 at noon.
• A driver in a stolen car struck a curb near the encampment on July 20 at 8:30 a.m.
• On Friday, July 25—the same day OPHS decided to close the encampment—police responded at 7:20 a.m. to a report of shots fired and arrested a man at the encampment for intimidation with a deadly weapon, pointing a loaded firearm and the unlawful carrying of a firearm with a previous felony.

What’s next?

The remaining residents of the camp will have to vacate by Aug. 11.

During the question-and-answer period on Monday, Merkley said there were enough beds at Wheeler Mission’s shelters for the residents of the camp, but acknowledged that it “is not a great option” because barriers to entry exist for some of them.

Those who have a reason not to go to a shelter—people with pets, couples, people actively facing addiction or severe mental health issues, or those who might not want to be in a faith-based environment—are likely to move to another encampment.

Heinemann, the OPHS spokesman, said that outreach teams did not share a breakdown of the situations faced by those in the camp.

Stakeholders are currently piloting the Streets to Home program by rehoming a camp of 11 people. The first members of the group moved into housing on July 29 and the rest should be housed by Aug. 7, Haring-Cozzi said Monday.

Aryn Schounce, the mayor’s senior policy adviser, said the Professional Blended Street Outreach team will help relocate and keep track of the Fountain Square camp’s residents, so they might eventually be housed through the initiative.

Haring-Cozzi estimated that the turnaround time for each camp that receives help in the Streets to Home program will be about four to six weeks. During that period, outreach workers assess the needs of each individual while housing navigators engage with landlords, pay holding fees on units, and conduct unit inspections.

She estimated it would cost about $2,800 for each household (single person or couple) served by the program. That amount would include case management based on 15 people being served per case manager.

City’s management criticized

Justin Jones, the owner of Bovaconti Coffee in Fountain Square and a vice president of the Fountain Fletcher District Association, organized a cleanup in which neighbors chipped in to haul a 20-yard dumpster to the camp. He worked with people living in the encampment and asked them to place any trash outside their tents.

He said during an hour-long public comment session on Monday that OPHS’s inability to provide a dumpster for the cleanup shows the city is unable to keep such camps clean and look out for residents’ well-being.

“There’s people everywhere. It’s not safe. It’s not safe for them. It’s not safe for the residents. That’s what we’re focused on,” Jones said.

But OPHS denied that, telling IBJ in a statement that the request from Jones was a timing issue. Heinemann said it came with one day’s notice, and OPHS could not get cleaning contractors out the next day.

“OPHS had previously sent our contractor to clean around campers and worked with DPW to provide regular trash collection at the location,” Heinemann wrote. “DPW cannot clean a camp until it is completely vacated.”

Other speakers advocated for similar measures. For example, one woman asked if the city was doing anything to provide bathrooms to unhoused people. Merkley responded that OPHS had installed the first public restroom for the homeless downtown since the early 1900s, which the office was attempting to move to Fountain Square. He said the office hasn’t found an appropriate place for the portable restroom.

Later, a woman told Merkley the bathroom was currently behind a fence due to construction at Old City Hall, which formerly hosted a safe distribution site for donations to the homeless in its parking lot.

“That’s why we’d like to remove it to Fountain Square,” he said.