Tent Encampments and the Right to Public Space

Whose rights should prevail in places like public parks?

It used to be, I’d never see tents in Cleveland.

About six years ago I traveled to Portland, and I was stunned to see tents everywhere. They were way out in the suburbs, when I first got on the train from the airport. They were covering the sidewalk in a section of town near the Amtrak station.

I thought it was mainly a west coast thing, a symptom of the housing crisis there. Honestly, it was always sort of mysterious to me, even though in my field the “housing crisis” is basically top of the agenda, understandably.

I thought, since Cleveland has lower housing prices, maybe it wasn’t such a problem here. In the last few years though, for the first time, I was passing tents right in the middle of popular urban parks in Cleveland. First, I noticed a single tent on the bike ride to school. There’s even one right on the highway embankment now right along Dead Man’s Curve. That one especially worries me. If I’m being honest, they all do.

I don’t understand what has caused the rise. The pandemic? Housing costs? Did they clear out another encampment that was less visible? I’ve heard a lot of theories and don’t necessarily dismiss them. Perhaps it is all three. It’s not my area of expertise.

It’s hard for me to accept, to be honest. Downtown, there’s a man who lays face down on the sidewalk, right next to a busy street, day after day. Again, it doesn’t seem safe for him. He is not okay, it’s clear. The whole city, I’m not sure is okay. I asked a security guard about it, they said he’s there every day, even in the dead of winter. They aren’t allowed to ask him to leave, he said.

A few weeks ago, we had an Easter Egg hunt, a group I’m involved with. We’ve done it for years at a local park. We filed a permit. I showed up an hour prior to the event with 400 plastic eggs. As I’m rushing to set up, I noticed, there are three tents in the middle of the park, just a little ways from where we place the eggs every year.

I honestly did not know how to respond. I spoke with one of the folks living there. He said he would leave for a little while but seemed a little agitated. I called the police. I just didn’t want any of the families to feel intimidated, anything weird to happen.

The police said they could not move the tents. I don’t know that I wanted them moved necessarily, I didn’t know what to do. That was city policy, they said. Social workers had been coming out to try to get the folks in a new city program that would get them off the street.

Our mayor has been touting his program aimed at housing homeless folks as a success. More than 100 people housed. I’m supportive of this initiative. I like our mayor, for the record. I think he deserves a second term. I also really like his Department of Health head, who I consider a friend.

At the same time, I don’t know if it’s a good thing for the city that homeless people can take over parks that are important to neighborhood children. I tried to bring this up on Substack yesterday. And maybe I wasn’t clear, but it just devolved into this debate about housing first, or housing policy. I support housing first initiatives, and also zoning reform. I honestly feel a little bit ambivalent about how this is solved, but I want to see it solved and soon. We already closed parks in Cleveland for a year for the pandemic. It feels like our access to these amenities is more and more conditional, is evolving. Maybe it has already been lost, without even any objection being raised. So that’s what I’m trying to do here, in a modest way.