Homeless Person’s Remembrance Day is a national event held on or near December 21st – this Tuesday – the longest night of the year. Recent initiatives for a permanent year-round full-capacity homeless shelter in our city of Columbia show promise, but on this occasion we would like to draw attention to our unsheltered homeless campers – people who sleep in vacant lots, under bridges, or in structures like parking garages – sometimes even without tents.
There are a myriad of reasons why some homeless will never use shelters, including: social anxiety; previous experiences of abuse in shelters; the requirement for photo-ID; strict requirements about drugs; forced abandonment of pets; and others. Since 2018 the John Brown Gun Club and allies have served homeless campers with weekly trash pickups and each winter with our JB Mobile Soup Kitchen, which serves breakfast 3 mornings each week (it has been especially gratifying to have been able to hand over the JBMSK to allies this year, who have kept it going year round). This past Summer and Fall, inspired by work by Huntsville’s Young Patriots, we also built a series of raised tent platforms from wooden pallets at Columbia’s largest current homeless camp; unfortunately the latter camp is directly in the path of a proposed recreational bicycle trail, and we expect them to be forced out by the city in 2022. Over the 4 years that we have been doing this work, we have seen campers forced to vacate camps along Columbia’s Providence Road, Fairview Road, Bernadette Drive, Ash Street, and Garden Drive, usually by private owners with the use of the police – the latter who, throughout history, have always worked for the wealthy (i.e., property owners), even though the humans harmed through eviction usually suffer greater direct bodily harm in greater numbers than the owners would through them using their property. In our society the rights of the few to own property and do with it as they wish surely trump the rights of the many to eat, sleep, and have shelter.
In our work we have seen that homeless people who might never use a shelter may gladly use a camp. We suggest that in addition to a brick & mortar shelter, Columbia consider a sponsored camp, and point to our sister city of Lawrence Kansas, which set up a camp of heated tents in a city park starting in 2020. In the Great Depression, many American cities had government-sponsored camps with tents and showers; in 1937, the Farm Security Administration operated 95 such camps in California, housing some 75,000 people; it was in one of these camps that the fictional Joad family in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath started to turn their lives around. In the winter of 2018-2019, at a property listed at 1601 Rangeline, two of our campers, Donnie and Raymond, lost toes and fingers to frostbite despite our efforts to help them; this site, formerly the location of the Rainbow Village Trailer Park, is now owned by Boone Electric Cooperative. Located away from residential neighborhoods and yet proximate to city and community services, 1601 Rangeline remains one of the most promising sites for a permanent city-sponsored camp, complete with concrete pads, shady trees, and potential sites for restrooms, an office, and community grill and picnic area. Boone Electric has told me that they have plans to use this as a commercial property space. Recently, on December 8th, about a dozen homeless campers were removed from this area while site grading occurred; their names include Billy, Raymond, Kenny, Saint, and Shane; at the time of this writing, we are not sure where they are sleeping.
In closing, we remember some homeless members of Columbia who passed away in 2021; the causes of their deaths range from pedestrian traffic accidents to metastatic cancer to drug overdoses to apparent suicide. Their names include James, Donnie, Raven, Cassandra, Denise, Matt, Corey, Crystal, Steven, George, and Myra. In addition to the ones who have passed, we would also like to recall the names of some formerly unsheltered homeless campers we have served who are no longer unsheltered, but who, thanks in part to our loving Columbia community, now have jobs and roofs over their heads; their names include Keith, Anthony, Nick, Derek, Shelia, Kimberly, Michael, and Angel.