Short-Lived Camp Shameless 2 Draws Attention to the Cracks in Columbus’s Shelter System
Written by Andy Downing - Matter News
Homeless advocate Ben Colburn described these short-term tent communities as a form of ‘harm reduction’ that offer temporary aid and connection to unhoused people who exist outside of Columbus’ current shelter system.
The site of the short-lived Camp Shameless 2, located on a parcel off of Mound Street on the Near East Side.
In early August, Ben Colburn, one of the activists who helped to establish the original Camp Shameless – a tent encampment founded in March 2022 that became a flashpoint in the larger conversation about caring for the unhoused in its five months of existence – helped to erect a handful of tents on an unused parcel off of Mound Street on the Near East Side.
Dubbing the site Camp Shameless 2, Colburn said he hoped the new encampment could take root in a similar manner as its predecessor, describing these short-term communities as a form of “harm reduction” that offer temporary aid and connection to unhoused people not currently served by Columbus’ shelter system, including unmarried couples, people with pets and in some cases people who use drugs.
“If we’re going to expect everybody to be indoors, then we need to create an indoors that works for everybody,” Coburn said in an early August interview near the site of Shameless 2, which was cleared by city officials on August 9. “That’s why I wanted to do another Camp Shameless. That’s why I wanted to do another spot here.”
Colburn also said there is a small fraction of the homeless population who live outside of the shelter network by choice, using as one example a man nicknamed “Big Baby” who has been unhoused for so long that he has more comfort with life on the streets than in any sanctioned space. Mike, a resident of the short-lived Camp Shameless 2 who joined Colburn for the interview, counts himself among this group, alternately describing himself as “nomadic” and a “tourist in this little misadventure.”
“I don’t want to establish any sort of base for myself, because the second you do that, you lose the benefit of being homeless, which is not having a home – this thing, this liability,” Mike said. “When I lived in an apartment, it became cluttered as fuck, and there became a point it was stressful to manage. … I was overwhelmed with stuff. So, for me, this is liberating.”
Colburn started the new iteration of Camp Shameless with an awareness it would be temporary – “I don’t want people living out here in the winter,” he said – but expressed frustration that city officials moved with a speed to clear the site that left those living there with few options to find immediate shelter.
“We had an eviction notice giving us three days [to clear out], and nobody is going to be able to get in a shelter within three days – you need a week or more,” said Colburn, who received a trespassing notice from the city on Friday, Aug. 6, with officials informing him the camp would be cleared the next Monday.
In most cases, officials give those living in an encampment on public land 14 days’ notice before conducting a sweep, providing those on the site with information on shelters and other available services. And Colburn said he believed the minimal notice given in this instance reflected a new, more severe tactic being undertaken by the city in the wake of a June decision by the Supreme Court that makes it easier for cities to remove tent encampments.
The 6-3 decision overturned a previously upheld 2020 lower court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case that invalidated anti-camping ordinances established by a city in southern Oregon. In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, officials in states such as California have moved more aggressively to clear encampments.
Responding via email, Cameron Keir, a spokesperson for the City of Columbus Department of Development, said officials have not changed any policies in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, and that the 14 days’ notice given before clearing an encampment remained in place. In this instance, however, Keir said authorities moved more quickly to remediate the site because on a visit a staff member “was informed by an individual at the location that they had been recruiting campers to come stay on the parcel with the promise that by camping at that site they would be given immediate access to housing. … It is for this reason that we posted the notice and moved quickly to offer the campers other options so that they can utilize the correct channels to access safe shelter and connect them with additional resources.”
Colburn denied this charge, saying, “Nobody was promised anything other than supplies and support through mutual aid like the first Camp Shameless and to say otherwise is pure fiction.”
Additionally, Colburn said city officials had no response when he asked them where they expected the half-dozen unhoused people living at the site to shelter after the encampment was swept but before they could access a bed in the system. “They had no answer,” he said. “The [Department of Development] knows camps will just move up the way a bit only to have the process repeated over – a process that keeps eating up tax money that could be used for actually effective practices.”
Critics of the practice have long said that camp sweeps do nothing to address the root causes of homelessness and come at high financial costs to taxpayers. In the first eight months of 2023, for instance, Columbus spent $173,776 on sweeps at a dozen sites, according to public records obtained by the advocacy group First Collective. Beyond the associated costs, studies have also shown that these forced removals can be detrimental to the health of the unhoused, leading to an increase in life-threatening infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
“We did thousands and thousands of simulations across 23 different cities worth of data, and what we showed is that in no scenario were encampment sweeps or involuntary displacement neutral or beneficial to the health of a person experiencing homelessness,” Joshua Barocas, associate professor at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and the author of the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said in a September 2023 interview with Matter News. “At the very least, municipal leaders have a responsibility to not harm their citizens. … And what the data shows is this policy is not achieving even that bare minimum.”
And yet, the practice continues unabated. On Monday, Sept. 16, Columbus officials are expected to clear an encampment located behind Fairlane Mobile Home Park on the Far South Side; the advocacy group Heer to Serve will be on site to provide breakfast, in addition to helping those impacted navigate to new spaces.
“The city told me they will never sanction camps, but I keep trying to argue and find some middle ground with them, where they’re at least not doing any harm. If they did nothing, it would be better than what they’re doing now,” said Colburn, who added that when an encampment is swept, its residents typically scatter and then eventually resettle on increasingly remote parcels. “They know there are hundreds of people on the waitlist for the homeless hotline at any given time, and that there are more people on the streets than there have ever been in Columbus. … The winter is going to be a disaster if we don’t get out ahead of it.”
Fueled by rising rents and increased evictions, the number of homeless residents in Columbus has climbed to record levels over the last two years, with the annual “point-in-time” count conducted by Community Shelter Board (CSB) in January finding that there were 2,380 people experiencing homelessness in the city – up 1.8 percent from 2023, which counted 2,337 people.
City officials expressed awareness that, as constituted, the current shelter system has gaps. “Thinking a shelter system will solve all of this is no longer the way we should be thinking about housing destabilization and homelessness,” Shannon Isom, president and CEO of CSB, said in a late-May interview with Matter News.
Responding via email, Department of Development spokesperson Keir said that the city recognizes that there are a variety of reasons that a person experiencing homelessness might not access traditional shelters, and that officials would continue to work with CSB to explore alternative options.
As one example, Keir pointed to a pilot program established this past winter that offered motel rooms to people with pets and unmarried couples. But that program has been plagued with issues, with participant residents at the Loyalty Inn citing issues with everything from how the program has been managed to the conditions at the East Side motel, claiming cockroach infestations, faulty wiring in the rooms, inoperable door locks, the presence of mold, and a malfunctioning HVAC system, among other concerns.
Beyond the conditions, the short-term prospects for the pilot program remain an open question, with Isom pointing to high associated costs. “What I’m trying to create is a space that doesn’t allow people to be on the land, where they’re assaulted by the elements, and that ultimately helps people move faster into housing,” she said. “If that’s not happening, we can’t have two congruent shelter systems moving along, with one (hotels and motels) being more expensive than the other.”
But as long as these gaps in the system exist, Colburn said, so will encampments, which offer the unhoused a form of shelter, a collective sense of safety, and needed connection in a world where they’re so often isolated and forgotten.
“And that’s what [the first] Camp Shameless and everything I’ve done since then has been about,” he said. “It’s about those people who fall through the cracks. We don’t get to pretend they don’t exist, and you don’t get to sweep them out deeper into the woods somewhere where nobody ever has anything to do with them. It’s like, you have to deal with this, Columbus. And you’re doing a terrible fucking job.”
