Where Will They Go?
This is the question we as homeless outreach workers at the Regional Outreach Cooperative (R.O.C.) get asked often and find ourselves asking very often these days.
It is not an exaggeration to say that homeless encampments in Hamilton County are being decommissioned, evicted, shut down, removed, abated, destroyed, or bulldozed on a weekly basis. Currently drones are being utilized on a weekly basis by law enforcement to locate and evict encampments. The extreme danger of this is that these methods will be replicated and eventually set as a standard. This is how using excavators and other heavy machinery has become the go-to method to clear a homeless encampment. But no one used to revert to such extreme measures until someone went that far for the first time with a large encampment in the Rossville area in September 2020. It was a major news story that day, but now it happens so often that this form of cruelty is now commonplace.
“Where will these individuals go?”
This is a much different question than the question:
“Where can these individuals go?”
The places where these individuals CAN go are not the same places that they likely WILL go. The places that are most commonly recommended that individuals CAN go are either already full, already too far away from the resources that individuals rely on to survive, already have barriers in place that have kept these individuals from staying there in the past, or are deemed unsafe options by these individuals.
Someone told me this week when it was mentioned to them about staying at the CHATT Foundation’s Cold Weather Warming Station:
“I won’t stay there. The time I did, people watched me the whole time and waited for me to fall asleep so they could steal all my stuff.”
So instead that individual sleeps under an abandoned pavilion in an old BBQ pit.
So that is why we must ask, where WILL they go?
And the answer could be farther down the road, where they will likely be told to move again in another two weeks. If my counting is correct, this is now the 12th time in the past 2 months that individuals experiencing homelessness in Hixson have been asked to move.
Other answers to this question could be deeper into the woods, farther out of sight, farther into areas already considered flood zones, putting them at risk of being flooded out; some will be forced to move to locations that leave them more susceptible to being victims of violence and theft; some will leave the city altogether; some will end up in jail out of desperation; some will end up in the hospital; some, like those I encountered today, will find warmth, safety, acceptance, community, and a place to stay, not in a church or a shelter, but a bar; and some will unfortunately end up in their graves due to being left in a situation that exposes them to the deadly elements.
But wherever the answer to this question becomes, we at the ROC will be there. We will be there with whatever we can supply them with that is helpful and is needed, whether it be material or immaterial.
We unexpectedly found one of these individuals from a recently decommissioned encampment, and they said:
“Dang, y’all are everywhere, aren’t you?”
That’s where we want to be. We want to be everywhere that those experiencing homelessness in Hamilton County are.
#ROCAndRoll
#ROCRetrospective
#WhereWillTheyGo
