National Park Service clears Union Station homeless encampment

• U.S. Park Police and some officials from D.C.’s Department of Behavioral Health were on site as NPS maintenance crews in hazmat suits loaded abandoned tents into a garbage truck.

State of play: D.C.'s sweeping of homeless encampments has accelerated in recent months, but Wednesday's was different. Since Columbus Circle sits on federal land, the cleanup was led by federal officials and was separate from a D.C. pilot program that pairs clearings with some housing outreach.

• According to a sign posted two weeks prior to the cleanup by NPS, the agency paused its enforcement of no-camping zones during the pandemic unless “in cases of imminent threats to public health and safety.”

For many people living in the encampment, the clearing meant packing up and moving to a different piece of public property.

• “We’re kind of like a little family. We watch out for each other,” encampment resident Smalls Chin, 47, said as she prepared to move her tent and sleeping bag to another park on city land with the help of a mutual aid group.

Flashback: D.C. officials began clearing homeless encampments in earnest last September as part of a pilot program to clear encampments and house some residents with one-year leases.

• The program has garnered praise as encampments have grown in recent months, but also criticism after one resident in NoMa was lifted by a bulldozer being used to remove tents.
• Last year, several council members called on the city to pause clearing encampments until everyone in them could be housed, but a bill to pause the program did not pass.

What they’re saying: Chin says she understood why they were cleaning the area. “There are rats everywhere,” she said. “It smells horrible.”

• But, she has also been in three shelters, including most recently the Patricia Handy Place for Women, and called conditions at the shelter “horrific.”
• “The mayor needs to walk through these shelters. That’s why I’m on the grass,” she said.

Encampment resident Vicki Paige, 51, was not ready to leave. “You can’t touch my stuff,” she said, adding that, unless there was a fence or constant policing, people would continue to camp outside Union Station.

• As the cleanup wore on and NPS began telling people within occupied tents to leave, volunteers helped Paige pack up her tent to move to another park.

Zoom in: Outreach to those being uprooted included volunteers from The h3 Project DC, which helps connect unhoused people to services.

• Ami Angell, the organization’s founder, criticized the cleanup for not being paired with housing services. “There is no plan in place. It’s an unjust situation,” she told Axios. “Being told you have to pack up your entire life ... there’s a lot of fear.”

Yes, but: Christy Repress, executive director of Pathways to Housing DC, a city contractor that helps connect people to housing vouchers, said they'd been in touch with residents in the lead-up to the closure and helped them think through alternative plans.

• Some people, she says, are eligible to move into Bridge Housing, a temporary housing program, and PEP-V, a pandemic program that houses medically vulnerable people in hotels.

In a statement, the deputy mayor for Health and Human Services Wayne Turnage said D.C. over the past three months had been connecting encampment residents with housing assistance programs, mental health services, and item storage.

• They did not provide exact numbers on how many people had moved into some form of housing.

What’s next: NPS spokesperson Mike Litterst tells Axios that NPS and Park Police are prepared to enforce the no-tent zone in Columbus Circle but would not be using fencing.

• Another encampment at 12th St. and New York Ave. NW was also closed.

Housing advocates would like to see voucher matching for everyone within the encampments whenever there’s a closure.

• “One of our concerns with [encampment clearings] is: not everybody has a housing plan at the end,” Repress says. “It's not just this encampment, it's other encampments that were cleared as well.”