Executive Summary of Encampment Resolution Suggestions to City of Santa Cruz
Executive Summary
In the weeks following the Coral Street encampment closure in June 2024, Housing Matters held several listening sessions with team members and frontline staff to better understand how encampment resolution impacts our staff, their work, and the unhoused and unsheltered neighbors we serve. Staff identified ways that encampment resolution can delay rehousing and traumatize encampment residents. Their feedback also highlighted areas where encampment resolution can be done more constructively.
As the city of Santa Cruz moves forward with new encampment resolution funding, we propose working together using the approaches rooted in evidence-based best practices proposed by the Housing Matters team. These ideas and suggestions come from people who are seeing encampments every day and witnessing encampment closures firsthand, some of whom have lived experience with homelessness and all of whom have been impacted by resolution practices. Our ideas are echoed in the best-practices research, recommendations from the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) and California Interagency Council on Homelessness (Cal ICH), and conversations we have had with other local governments working to address encampments.
The ideas generally fell into the following categories:
● Ensuring people have safe places to sleep and viable low-barrier alternatives to existing sites. We cannot ask people to leave a place if we cannot also tell people where they can go.
● More time and notice ahead of encampment closure, including dates repeatedly communicated to encampment residents and the entire services sector.
● Coordination across agencies ahead of and during encampment closures, including scaled and persistent outreach presence in the days leading up to a closure.
● More compassionate approaches to closure activities, including reduced reliance on law-enforcement agencies and trauma-informed care training for police and city workers.
● Greater collaboration and communication with encampment residents ahead of closure, including helping people move.
● Better approaches to storing possessions, especially vital documents and medications.
People Need Safe Places to Sleep
Santa Cruz desperately needs more spaces where people can safely sleep and stay while they are working toward stable housing. Staff suggested that to the full extent possible, we should avoid asking people to leave unless we can also tell them where to go. There was significant frustration that the encampment closure on Coral Street involved giving people notices, but not solutions.
Beyond matters of dignity, having additional safe sleeping spaces makes encampment closure more successful. Staff shared that it is much easier to ask people to leave if people have an alternative place to go. This idea also came up in conversations with other jurisdictions dealing with encampment resolution. Voluntary movement is much more likely if outreach workers can, in advance of a closure, direct people toward specific sites and offer help moving to those sites.
Without viable alternatives to sleeping on sidewalks and streets, the encampment resolution process tends to be impermanent, expensive, and cyclical. Research has demonstrated encampment closures that are not accompanied by sufficient shelter and housing capacity are ultimately ineffective for displaced residents.
Notice: Longer Timelines, Greater Awareness, Greater Predictability
Many staff shared that outreach workers and encampment residents need greater notice ahead of encampment closures. Some experienced staff members pointed out that at least two weeks is needed to successfully mobilize staff, service providers, and encampment residents.
In addition to giving notice earlier, it was also evident that more effort needs to go into spreading awareness of timelines; staff reported varying degrees of personal awareness about the encampment closure, and separately shared that many residents learned of the closure as it happened or only in the days immediately beforehand. Improvements could include coordinated and advanced notice to the entire service system, and not just to individual organizations or encampment residents.
Additional suggestions included regular and repeated notice to outreach workers and encampment residents, using verbal communication as well as written notice, and working with encampment residents to spread information about coming closures. Colleagues in other jurisdictions shared that in addition to repeatedly sharing information in the weeks before a closure, “blanketing” encampments with communications 72 hours before closures communicates the deadline is “serious,” encouraging voluntary moves.
While artificially imposed timelines are undesirable, some staff and officials from other communities shared that it is also important to ensure that deadlines are predictable and that people believe closures will happen once announced. When individuals believe a closure deadline is a hard and set decision, they are more likely to engage with outreach workers.
Persistent and Scaled Presence, Full Cross-Sector Collaboration
Many staff members shared that they felt local service agencies (government and non-profit) should have an ongoing presence near encampments ahead of any closure actions. Suggestions ranged from regular outreach visits to setting up temporary service navigation stations, with an emphasis on helping people move in the safest, least disruptive manner possible.
The recurring message from staff was that persistent presence could help encampment residents identify and access what they need to move voluntarily, in addition to mitigating some negative impacts that encampment closures have on residents (particularly property loss and loss of connections with service workers). Officials in other jurisdictions recommended pairing outreach efforts with mobile healthcare services, estimating that encampment residents’ willingness to engage with or seek out service workers was up to ten times higher when efforts were paired with mobile healthcare access.
Staff also encouraged significant mobilization of outreach/services presence immediately before and during closures, with a heavy focus on storing personal property and creating contact plans for caseworkers and outreach staff. Scaling staff and asking residents what they need to move in the 72 hours before enforcement actions can reduce the chance of interactions with law enforcement, which can be traumatic even when officers do their best to observe best practices. In the words of one staffer, “assertively, all day long, we need to be asking people what they need to move.” Staff repeatedly highlighted a gap in adequate support for storing and returning personal belongings during and after enforcement actions.
Staff asked that the city coordinate with the entire sector ahead of encampment closure, so that providers and local government can collectively provide persistent and scaled support to residents before and during closures.
Compassionate Approaches to Resolution
Staff observed police action on Coral Street that was out of line with trauma-informed care and the best practices recommended by Cal ICH and USICH, being unnecessarily triggering for both encampment residents and staff. Staff requested trauma-informed care training for law enforcement and partnering more with other agencies during closures. Specific police behavior that staff noticed during the June 2024 closure included the use of crime scene tape, unnecessary photography of encampment residents and their belongings, and aggressively handling belongings (such as kicking property). Officials in other jurisdictions said recurring meetings with law enforcement agencies and educational work with law enforcement officers had promoted more compassionate and collaborative outcomes.
Supporting and Communicating with Encampment Residents
Staff also recommended more immediate action from the agencies providing services, ranging from basic needs support (including repeated suggestions for sanitation stations) to open communication with encampment residents. Staff suggested a greater emphasis on asking residents what keeps them in an encampment and in a particular area, so that residents’ answers drive policy and service responses. Best practices recommendations from Cal and USICH include communicating with residents to discuss shared use of public spaces and request they take action to mitigate externalities that an encampment may pose. Staff also shared that encampment closures should include advanced efforts to explain why people are being asked to relocate.
Regular communication with encampment residents allows residents to identify and address concerns about the encampment’s externalities and can improve awareness of impending enforcement actions. Staff repeatedly mentioned improved and early access to sanitation, including hand washing stations, trash disposal, and toilets (such as a portapotty). San Jose has explored paying encampment residents to collect and dispose of community trash, which helps mitigate some of the community concerns tied to encampments.