SALT LAKE CITY — While a group of protesters yelled profanities and shoved cellphone cameras in the faces of police officers and Salt Lake County Health Department staffers as they worked Thursday, Daniel Padilla kept to himself.
Padilla, his belongings piled onto a small wagon, scanned the sparse grass around him for trash, bending over to pick up old cigarettes, bits of plastic and whatever else he could find.
His eyes welled with tears. He had trouble finding words when he tried to think of where he was going to go next.
“That’s pretty much the thing,” he said. “Where do I go now? We’ll just get pushed out again, you know? I mean, that’s all that’s going to happen. We’ll travel 5, 6, 10 miles, 15 miles, and then we won’t be able to (stay).”
Padilla, 50, had slept in a tent on a patch of grass near 250 East and 700 South on Wednesday night. He knew by Thursday morning, around 9:30 a.m., the Salt Lake County Health Department would be there to conduct another one of their homeless camp cleanups.
He didn’t resent them for doing their jobs.
“I mean, they got to do what they got to do,” Padilla said. “It does get pretty messy out here.”
Padilla, when asked where he’d like to go, had the same answer as nearly all the homeless individuals camping on the streets the Deseret News spoke to this week before and during the Salt Lake County cleanup Thursday. He and other campers and protesters — and even a Salt Lake County Health Department official — said an established camping area could be a solution to public camping that has frustrated Salt Lake City neighbors and businesses, and led to health concerns that fester if the encampments are allowed to continue unabated.
“If they had a designated area for homeless to go, maybe that could ...” Padilla trailed off, his voice straining with emotion. He paused and looked around.
The scene unfolding around him was nothing new for Salt Lake City’s homeless camp community. Health department cleanups are a part of living on the street.
But amid the time of COVID-19 — while health departments have been overwhelmed, many public spaces have been closed, and more homeless individuals have wanted to stay outdoors to avoid crowds — encampments throughout Salt Lake City have seemed to steadily grow throughout the summer. While there was a lull in Salt Lake County camp cleanups from mid-April to May as the county scrambled to respond to the pandemic, county officials say their cleanups have since continued on a regular basis.
But the encampments and their health concerns persist.
A ‘Band-Aid’
Dale Keller, manager of Salt Lake County’s environmental health bureau who headed this week’s cleanup effort, said the cleanups are only a temporary solution to on-street camping and their health concerns — and that they tend to only push the problem around into other areas of Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County.
Meanwhile, especially amid today’s polarized political climate, protesters gravitate toward the cleanups, seeing them as unjust and inhumane treatment of people down on their luck.
“Of all of the incendiary comments and screaming and yelling and insults, the one real, legitimate argument was, ‘Where are they going to go?” Keller said. “I don’t disagree that is an issue.”
Keller, making it clear he’s speaking personally and not on behalf of the health department, said for years he has supported the concept of an established camping area, with bathroom amenities to prevent health concerns, that’s located somewhere away from neighborhoods and businesses.
“I would love it,” Keller said. “Because right now, the reasonable question for somebody that’s sleeping in a tent on Seventh South would be, ‘OK, where do you want me to go?’ For a number of reasons I’m not going to go to the shelter. ... Maybe I have an addiction problem. Maybe I just don’t want to keep the rules. Maybe I just want to be left alone.
“And so it’s a great question,” Keller continued. “And quite frankly ... there isn’t a good response to that.”
Jordan Talley, one of the protesters who showed up Thursday, called the health department’s cleanup a “Band-Aid that’s going to be criminalizing a problem that will just pop up again in another neighborhood.” He said he’d rather see established “safe zones” to allow camping in the city so people who don’t want to or can’t access a bed in the homeless shelters have somewhere to go.
It’s not the first time a managed homeless camp ground has been floated as a possible solution — but it’s hardly ever been met with open arms. Former Salt Lake County Sheriff Jim Winder made waves in 2017 when he released a potential plan to downsize the now-demolished downtown Road Home shelter and establish an “urban campsite” on 100 South and 600 West. That obviously didn’t happen.
But today, there’s still little support for a designated camping area.
“It’s not a solution I have any interest in for Salt Lake City,” Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said in an interview Thursday.
“I don’t think it’s a genie you can put back in the bottle,” she said, noting that it has gone “terribly wrong” in some cities across the country that legalize camping.
However, Mendenhall said she could picture a tiny home community that could bring the chronically homeless into a “managed housing situation.” She pointed to a community called Loaves to Fishes in Austin, Texas, as an example of what she would want to see in Salt Lake City.
It’s a concept Mendenhall said she wants to explore with state and county partners — one that wouldn’t be managed by any government entity, “but there’s a lot of support we could bring to that kind of initiative.”
Still, that’s a longer-term solution to a problem persisting today, every day, on Salt Lake City streets.
Cleanup day
About 24 hours before Thursday’s cleanup, health department officials had spent Wednesday morning and afternoon notifying people living in encampments in areas of Salt Lake City — verbally and with fliers taped to tarps and trees — that the health department would come by the next morning to ask them to pack up their stuff so they could clean up the garbage scattered around the camps.
The Salt Lake County Health Department invited the Deseret News, along with other local media, to observe the two-day effort, to show the process involved to prepare for homeless camp cleanups — and to show that health department officials don’t just show up without warning and start taking down camps and “stealing people’s stuff.”
Keller said the county isn’t legally required to post notices, but it’s his department policy to provide notices the day before as “the right thing to do.”
“Right now, there’s the perception that we just show up and start throwing stuff away,” Keller said. “That’s just not how we roll.”
But because of those notices, Keller predicted protesters would show up to try and stop the cleanup.
He was right.
A group of about two dozen protesters had caught wind of the health department cleanup through word of mouth from homeless individuals and social media. So they were ready Thursday morning, cellphone cameras in hand, to accost the cleanup crew and the police assigned to accompany them, accusing them of stealing the homeless’ possessions and forcing the homeless off the streets when they have nowhere else to go.
Padilla said he understood why the protesters were there, to defend the homeless and their rights.
“But they’re not out here doing what we’re doing,” he said, wiping away tears. “And there are a lot of cops out here that do care.”
Padilla, who said he’s been living on the streets since he got out of prison in February of last year, said he had been “kicked out” of every homeless shelter he’s been to. Plus, he said he “didn’t like the stealing” that happens inside those shelters.
“There’s more respect in prison than there is out here,” he said.
A handful of protesters screamed profanities at police as they stood watch. Police told protesters to stay back so county officials and their contracted cleanup crew, Advantage Services, could load garbage and other debris in their trailer.
“Your mama would be proud, hiding behind a badge and being a thief,” one man shouted.
At one point, some protesters started to help collect trash and debris. One protester, who walked from police officer to police officer to accost them, openly carried a gun at his waist.
The day wasn’t exactly going as planned.
Keller had expected what he called “third-party agitators.”
But Thursday started out rough. Salt Lake County’s Health Department, which has been overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic, was short staffed that morning, Keller said, so only a couple of staffers showed up to help with the cleanup.
Faced with fewer staff and growing tensions between police and protesters, Keller ended up telling homeless campers to only move their belongings momentarily so he and his staff could clean up around them. Keller and his team didn’t break down camps or throw away tents. And they didn’t stop homeless campers from setting right back up after they were done with their cleanup.
As tensions escalated between police and protesters, Keller said the decision was eventually made to pull police away from the area and “call it a day so that nobody got hurt.”
“That’s the Catch-22, guys,” Keller told reporters. “We post yesterday because we want to do the right thing. ... So what do you do?”
While Keller said his team went to a few other smaller areas Thursday to clean up abandoned campsites, they didn’t end up doing a larger sweep of the Rio Grande area, where a bigger conglomeration of homeless encampments has cropped up along 500 West, west of the Rio Grande Depot. Keller also canceled an order of pizzas he had hoped he could have shared with those experiencing homeless in the Rio Grande area.
Thursday’s cleanup took a gentle approach — different from past cleanups that have resulted in tents or blankets being thrown away despite protests from their homeless owners. Some homeless individuals told reporters that was only because the media was present — but Keller disputed that, saying the health department has always tried to be “low key” and stand by its policy to give campers every opportunity to move their stuff.
However, Keller said the county is following the lead of Salt Lake City leaders, who want a gentler, more service-focused approach.
“If this were another municipality, it may have been a little more regulatory in nature,” he said.
In her winter plan presented to the Salt Lake City Council earlier this month, Mendenhall announced a new, two-phase initiative, called the Community Commitment Program, which her administration is building to clean up Salt Lake City streets of biowaste and homeless encampments in 12 weeks, as well as increased outreach to connect those living on the streets with “on-the-spot” legal, social work, drug treatment and housing services.
In coming weeks, the mayor said she wants social services to flood city streets. She called the plan an “intensive,” 12-week process to not just enforce Salt Lake City’s no-camping ordinance, but an effort to connect those experiencing homelessness with the resources they need to get off the streets. The mayor compared the program to Project Homeless Connect, a one-stop-shop homeless services event that has previously been held in the Salt Palace Convention Center. But rather than asking the homeless to go to the Salt Palace, Mendenhall said legal, drug treatment and housing services will be brought to them.
“The (Salt Lake City) mayor’s office is working on a protocol to try to flood these areas with social services,” Keller said. “I’m trying to resonate with Salt Lake City’s approach.”
