The City of San Antonio set a goal to perform 700 homeless encampment cleanups this year after residents ranked “homeless outreach and encampments” as the top priority for the city’s fiscal year 2024 budget.
Six months into the year, 520 cleanups had been performed by the city and the Texas Department of Transportation, both separately and jointly, since October.
If this pace continues, the city will perform an estimated 1,100 cleanups by the end of the year, Human Services Director Melody Woosley told reporters Thursday. In 2023, the city anticipated performing 500 homeless encampment cleanups, also known as abatements or sweeps, but the city and TxDOT ultimately performed 680.
“We’re moving at a faster rate,” Woosley told reporters after City Council reviewed and discussed the city’s homeless prevention and mitigation strategies.
In November, it took the city two months on average to respond to a reported encampment. Now, it takes about two weeks, as pledged by city management last year.
Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito (D7) filed a policy proposal in November that would prioritize encampment sweeps near schools, neighborhoods, drainage infrastructure and other “sensitive” areas. According to city staff, abatements are already prioritized that way.
“Encampment cleanups are not the end-all-be-all solution to solving homelessness,” Alderete Gavito said. “But the city does need to ensure that they don’t become permanent fixtures in our community.”
Teams of outreach workers will typically visit several days before an encampment is abated to offer shelter or other services to the people living there while informing them of the scheduled sweep. Once the area is vacated, a biohazard crew ensures harmful substances are removed and machinery is brought in to scoop up trash, which, in some cases, is hauled away in dump trucks.
Throughout this process, some people experiencing homelessness accept the offered services, others move on to a different location and others just wait for the dump trucks and crews to leave before returning to the camp, Woosley said.
The city has placed 32 sites on a list that receive cleanups every two weeks regardless of whether an encampment is reported to 311.
The originally planned 700 sweeps were estimated to cost the city $3.6 million between Solid Waste Management and the Human Services Department’s budgets. As of Thursday, it was unclear how much the additional 400 sweeps will cost or where the money will come from.
In an email sent the following week, Solid Waste Management spokesman Marcus Lee said the abatement goal was “underestimated” but the department is within budget.
“We became more efficient — we can abate faster and more camps now than when we started,” Lee said. “We are doing this work within our budget.”
Ongoing concerns
The emphasis on increased sweeps hasn’t reduced homelessness or the number of encampments, Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) said.
“We conduct abatements or encampment sweeps and that may provide the immediate gratification to those in our neighborhoods who want to see the problem go away,” McKee-Rodriguez said. “But the problem does not [go away]. Instead, people without shelter are swept away like trash and they grow in their distrust of our city and become more and more resistant to the support that we say we want to provide.”
He urged city staff to come up with more creative, compassionate solutions such as more low-barrier shelters or camping areas.
Through its strategic plans for housing and homelessness, the city has begun to make significant investments in the homeless response system over recent years, Assistant City Manager Lori Houston said. New permanent supportive housing projects and low-barrier shelters have added to the list of options social workers can offer people experiencing homelessness.
“We are going in the right direction,” Houston said.
According to data provided by the city, San Antonio has already surpassed its goal to get 400 people into shelter or housing this year. Between October 2023 and March 2024, the homeless response system helped 934 individuals move from the streets to shelter or housing, the city’s new data dashboard shows.
Added to those who moved from shelter to housing, a total of 2,207 people “moved to a better living situation in the first half of the fiscal year,” Woosley said.
However, more than 1,450 people became unhoused or returned to the street for a net of 751 people who found shelter or more permanent housing.
Ultimately, San Antonio needs more shelter, housing and rehabilitation options, Nikisha Baker, president and CEO of SAMMinistries, told the San Antonio Report after the meeting.
If every unsheltered person said they were ready today to go to a shelter, housing or treatment, “we wouldn’t have the beds,” Baker said, even now that SAMMinistries’ 200-bed low-barrier shelter is fully operational after maintenance issues prevented a full opening.
She credited “significant strides” made in housing more people to the enhanced coordination of local government and nonprofits rather than the increase in abatements. Encampment cleanups are “a response to community concern” more so than a tool to mitigate homelessness, Baker said, though there is some value in the outreach efforts that take place ahead of a sweep.
“Even if we get 20% of the people from an encampment to accept services for the first time, that is significant,” she said.
