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Sara Ferah: Living outside should be a human right.
A group of homeless people came to City Hall seeking an OK to set up a new outdoor camp. No can do, the mayor replied. It’s too dangerous.
Mayor John DeStefano said the city can’t be part of “enabling” people to live outside in camps that often “don’t meet minimum safety standards,” said Elizabeth Benton, who was present at the meeting, at 1:30 p.m. Wednesday in City Hall.
The mayor delivered that message at the meeting to Sara Ferah and two other people from “The Existence Group.” The group, which emerged from the ashes of Occupy New Haven (where Ferah is pictured in the above file photo), has been looking for city support for homeless people, like Ferah, who don’t want to live in shelters.
The discussion brought to the fore a larger debate about whether cities should require homeless people to stay in shelters. Homeless encampments have appeared in the past in the area near the West River, seen as either a “piece of heaven” or “befouled” crime magnets characterized by trash and human waste.
Ferah, who has been homeless for six months, takes the former view. He said camping is always better than staying in shelters, which are oppressive and “undignified.”
“Some people simply want to live outside and be more connected to nature,” Ferah said after the meeting Wednesday afternoon. “We think that that should be a human right, a civil right. People should be allowed to live outside if they want to.”
Most shelters have a curfew of 4 or 4:30 p.m., Ferah said. The curfew prevents people from taking part in all kinds of civic life. “There’s so many things that go on in the evening.” That includes speeches, political debates, theater events. “Things that are not frivolous. It really denies us full participation in society. It’s just a very undignified existence.”
Ferah said the existence group was looking for city permission to camp outside together. Housing programs tend to “individualize” people, Ferah said. It’s better to have a community, where people can support each other, Ferah said.
Ferah and two comrades met at 1:30 p.m. with the mayor, Benton, Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts, Community Services Administrator Chisara Asomugha, and Columbus House Director Alison Cunningham.
“I’m a little down,” Ferah said after the pow-wow. “The meeting didn’t go so well. … [The mayor] said he can’t support enabling homeless people to live outdoors.”
The idea of creating a “permanent outdoor community … is not something that the city is interested in supporting or enabling,” said Benton after the meeting.
“The mayor said he very much appreciated the desire to create sense of community and stability,” Benton said. But camps are not safe.
The mayor acknowledged that some people do choose to live outside and it’s important to provide them with support, Benton said. “But he drew the line at creating or enabling” a camp.
The meeting was a good step toward ongoing dialogue between people who live outside and homeless service providers, Benton said.
Ferah estimated that hundreds of people are sleeping outside in New Haven. Cunningham said it’s hard to estimate how many real campers there are. Encampments can range in size from five to as many as 30 people, but it’s hard to know how many of them exist.
Asked about the city’s policy on sleeping outside, Benton said, “the city doesn’t go up to individuals sleeping on a bench, wake them up, and tell them they have to keep walking. But we cannot accommodate encampments on park land.” The city makes case-by-case decisions about whether to break up homeless encampments it discovers, she said.
Columbus House has workers who go out to encampments and try to get people to come inside.
“Time after time, tent encampments have been shown not to be safe places to live,” Benton said.
“I’m feeling really crushed right now,” Ferah said. “I feel like [the mayor] doesn’t care if I die. He just would let me die.”
“I was at the meeting and I didn’t get that sense,” Benton said. “I didn’t get the sense that Sara felt that way. … That certainly wasn’t anything that the mayor said. I think quite the opposite. He had respect for what Sara was saying. … The mayor really didn’t feel like, and this is a view shared by many, that living in in a tent encampment is safe.”
Columbus House’s Cunningham shares that view. She said camps can be so unsafe that her agency’s policy is that workers should not set foot inside one.
“When people have gathered in encampments it has gone sour very, very quickly. People have been in danger and at risk,” Cunningham said. People assault each other in camps. They slash tents and set tents on fire, she said. People drink and do illegal drugs. “It just puts people at risk.”
“We really try to make sure people are connected to services” like health treatment, clothing, blankets. But “we don’t go into the encampments themselves,” Cunningham said. “We may try to set up a meeting just outside.”
Columbus House helps people who want to to transition into permanent housing, Cunningham said. “That’s for people who want to get out of homelessness and move on.” The Existence Group simply isn’t interested in that, Cunningham said.
“I think what they’re saying is they want to live outside.” That’s clearly not going to happen in New Haven, she said. “The mayor’s going to bust up any tent city.” So, she advised, the group needs to figure out how to find some land somehow.
“We don’t have what they’re looking for,” Cunningham said.
From the ashes of OCN, rise our theater loving homeless.