This week, a joint effort between the D.C. Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services (DMHHS) and the National Park Service (NPS) began to target and clear between fifty and seventy people from Foggy Bottom. This is the largest encampment clearing in the District since McPherson Square was cleared in February 2023. Wayne Turnage, who has headed DMHHS for the past five years, initially confirmed that these encampment closures were scheduled to proceed despite insufficient shelter vacancies. He has since stated that space has been made available at Emery and Adam’s Place shelters, but as these shelters were initially marked as full, they likely have inadequate space for fifty to seventy new occupants. Many of the residents of these Foggy Bottom encampments have already been displaced from McPherson Square, or perhaps another encampment.
It is not news that we at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless oppose the mayor’s practice of regularly clearing encampments. We have been raising concerns for years, including in a class action lawsuit. We have opposed the “no-tent” zones created by the Bowser administration from the beginning and advocated for legislation to create a more transparent and constitutional process for interactions with encampments. We signed onto an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court case, Johnson v. Grants Pass, and highlighted the stakes in that case here. We have always said that the better—more humane and effective—way to respond to any concerns about encampments is to provide low barrier and accessible shelter and housing opportunities. But we have, unfortunately, made little progress in convincing our elected leaders that there is a better way to respond to street homelessness.
Under Mayor Bowser and Wayne Turnage, the District has drastically increased encampment clearings. In 2023 alone, DMHHS’s Encampment Response Team (ERT) cleared over eighty encampments. While it is common sense that continuous displacement of people and destruction of their belongings does nothing to end homelessness, and in fact makes it harder for people to get connected to housing and services, the mayor’s proposed budget for FY25 actually invests more money in clearing encampments than it does in providing housing for people experiencing homelessness. As a result of the mayor’s failure to invest in real solutions to homelessness, the number of people experiencing homelessness in D.C. grew by twelve percent in 2023 and fourteen percent in 2024.
Recently, Street Sense covered a particularly distressing encampment clearing that took place on the northeast side of the city. The resident, Tavoncia, is a young pregnant woman with health conditions who had lived there for approximately six months. She said she had not seen the notice that the clearing was going to happen that day. Claiming that Tavoncia was having a mental health crisis, “officers…took hold of her arms and put her in handcuffs.” While they held her in a police van for an hour, “DMHHS staff and police officers disposed of all of the items at the encampment except for three trash bags full of [her] belongings.” D.C. claims they do not criminalize homelessness because they do not arrest people for sleeping outside. But when the police handcuff and hold someone in a police van for an hour to clear an encampment, that may be a distinction without a difference.
Over the last eighteen months, we have seen a dramatic increase in DMHHS’s use of their immediate disposition protocol. This protocol allows DMHHS to clear an encampment with no notice when there is an immediate risk to health and safety. DMHHS often uses this protocol to clear single tents or very small encampments, and then sometimes makes that little area a “no-tent” zone—where belongings can be destroyed immediately with no notice or ability to challenge, apparently forever. While creating black holes of due process throughout D.C.’s public spaces seems problematic, to say the least, it is also ineffective if the desired objective is to make homeless people leave the area—often the resident of that encampment just moves down or across the street. Unfortunately, the encampment resident has no legal recourse to challenge whether an immediate disposition is actually warranted—i.e., whether there is in fact any immediate risk to health and safety—prior to the clearing taking place. If they don’t move their belongings, they will be destroyed. This is a system ripe for abuse. (In fact, an immediate disposition was once used to clear a single tent so that Mayor Bowser could hold a press conference on affordable housing at a recreation center.)
A perfect storm is brewing. These continuous clearings, the closing of the PEP-V program, the District’s delay in opening the Aston (D.C.’s first non-congregate shelter), the lack of shelter vacancies, the looming termination of 2,200 families in rapid rehousing, and the lack of affordable housing funded in the FY25 budget, spell troubling days ahead.
We encourage you to take action to stop the Foggy Bottom encampment evictions, as well as do this action to stop the looming 2,200 exits from rapid rehousing before we end up with families living on the streets of D.C. We also encourage you to join us in:
- Asking the mayor to end all full encampment clearings and in their stead, conduct trash-only cleanings and reform D.C.’s shelter system so that shelters can be clean, safe, and accommodating environments for D.C.’s unhoused community.
- Asking the D.C. Council to:
- Fully fund permanent housing vouchers,
- Codify standards and due process to govern what constitutes an immediate health and safety risk for immediate dispositions,
- Dedicate more funds to bring low barrier, non-congregate shelters online, and
- Dedicate $1.5M to storage solutions for encampment residents.
Author: Joshua M. Drumming, Law Graduate, Policy and Advocacy
