Christa Thomas-Sowers scrambled over an embankment behind a motel in Woonsocket, R.I. to a trash-strewn stretch of woods along the Blackstone River.
Slashed tents, empty food containers and even a pet carrier lay strewn along the sandy shoreline. This is a place where people who are homeless have been living.
“So on the one hand, this absolutely needs to be cleaned up,” said Thomas-Sowers, community outreach coordinator for the nonprofit Community Care Alliance in Woonsocket. “But the other hand is that these are human beings who are being forced to live out here.”
Woonsocket officials have joined with leaders of Keep Blackstone Beautiful and the Blackstone Valley Tourism Council to help organize “Zap 50” on Saturday, Aug. 27. Organizers hope to draw more than 10,000 volunteers to clean up areas throughout the Blackstone River watershed. They say it will mark the biggest cleanup effort along the river in 50 years. But Thomas-Sowers and other community advocates say they’re worried that the cleanup will displace the estimated 50 to 60 homeless people in Woonsocket living in the woods near the river.
“Whenever I hear cleanup, I always get nervous,’’ said Alex Gautiere, statewide outreach coordinator for the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness. He said he worries about cleanup crews “disposing of…property because they might see it as trash, even though it’s people’s personal belongings.”
Woonsocket Mayor Lisa Baldelli-Hunt did not respond to emails and calls for comment about concerns raised about the cleanup effort.
“The Blackstone River has meant so much to Woonsocket’s proud history,” Baldelli-Hunt said in an Aug. 17 media release, “and now we have this fabulous opportunity to help bring the River back where we can swim, fish and fully enjoy it as both a recreational resource and fish and wildlife habitat.”
Woonsocket Police Chief Thomas Oates said the police department and other city agencies plan to visit areas in which homeless people live before the cleanup to drop off flyers warning them that unattended items may be removed. The flyers also will connect them to city services.
“We want to put them on notice that, ‘If these are your belongings you need to secure them. If it appears to be trash or abandoned it may be disposed of,’” Oates said.
That raises the possibility that people’s belongings, or even tents, could be thrown out. But Oates says that’s not the goal.
“This is a trash pickup, not a move-people pickup,” Oates said. “The focus is on the cleanup, not on homeless encampments.”
A growing population without permanent housing
In Woonsocket, as in other communities across the country, encampments for people without homes have grown in recent years due in large part to a shortage of affordable housing and shelter beds, according to the National League of Cities and Towns.
In Rhode Island, nearly 600 single individuals and 190 families were on waiting lists for shelter beds as of August 2022, according to the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness. The state has 836 shelter beds, down from over 1,100 beds in February of 2022, due to many seasonal shelters having closed for the summer, the coalition reports. (The numbers do not include beds for domestic violence survivors or groups that don’t participate in the statewide Homeless Management System.)
Clashes between people living in these encampments and those who are housed are not new. Residents and businesses near the encampments complain about garbage, which can include used needles and other medical waste that presents a health hazard.
On the East Side of Providence, state workers last month bulldozed a homeless encampment behind the Salvation Army, not far from an elder care facility, according to the local media group Uprise RI.
In Woonsocket, community outreach workers say that periodically the tents they donate to homeless people living in the woods have been slashed when their occupants leave them during the day.
Last week, several tents along the river banks behind the Woonsocket Public Library appeared to have been slashed, according to photos the Coalition to End Homelessneess shared with The Public’s Radio. It remains unclear who is responsible for the destruction.
“We are extremely troubled by the recent incidents,’’ Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, said in an email. “We believe these actions raise concerns under the state’s Homeless Bill of Rights and also potentially implicate the constitutional rights of the individuals harmed by these actions.’’
Several organizations in Woonsocket have offered to store the belongings of people living in the encampments over the weekend, said Gautiere, of the Coalition to End Homeless.
Donna Kaehler, director of Keep Blackstone Valley Beautiful, said the cleanup effort is bigger than the one in 1972, because it will cover all of the communities in Rhode Island and Massachusetts that feed into the watershed.
“We’re trying to get the regular litter…the fast food takeaways, the alcohol bottles, those kinds of items,’’ Kaehler said. If volunteers encounter homeless people living in those areas, she said, “maybe we can educate and ask them while they’re there to put stuff into trash bags…just like we would do in our own homes.’’
Jeremy Bernfeld contributed to this story.
Lynn Arditi, health reporter at The Public’s Radio, can be reached at larditi@thepublicsradio.org. Follow her on Twitter @LynnArditi
