Anyone else have deja vu when perusing the headlines of The Sun? I refer to this: "Homeless cleared from encampment" (June 27).
I observed my first encampment closure in Baltimore in the early 1990s when city leaders erected a steel cage over a steam grate to keep people from staying warm near a fast food store. Countless heavy-handed closures over subsequent decades have shuffled vulnerable people from place to place — prolonging their homelessness, destroying identification, medications and personal belongings and fracturing fragile relationships established over months or years by outreach workers.
A notable shift came in 2005 and 2007 when city leadership collaborated with service providers to move encampment residents into their own homes with the supportive services necessary to keep them there. More than 85 percent of these individuals — most still supported by Health Care for the Homeless — remain housed and off the streets today. Similar approaches all over the country are now considered best practices. But as housing divestment and wage and income disparity fuel increases in homelessness, Baltimore has returned to this reactive and ineffective policy.
Friday's encampment closure seemed both out of step and out of touch the same day of the Supreme Court's ruling on marriage equality, the day after the court upheld provisions of a law signed by a black president that gives most low-income people access to health insurance and just two months after violence in Baltimore laid bare the same devastating poverty and structural racism that drive contemporary homelessness.
We can all agree on this: No one likes homelessness, not businesses, not government, not service providers and least of all, those experiencing it. But the forced closure of encampments without housing and support simply doesn't work.
Baltimore, we know — and must do — better.
Kevin Lindamood, Baltimore
The writer is president and CEO of Health Care for the Homeless.