Advocates gathered at Providence City Hall on Wednesday to pressure Mayor Brett Smiley and other officials to delay plans to evict the residents of two encampments in the city.
“This is a violent process,” said Karen Andes, director of the Master of Public Health program at Brown University. “Removing people by police and bulldozer is not the way we want to treat people in Rhode Island.”
Last week, The Public’s Radio reported that on Friday, May 10, the Providence Police Department (PPD) plans to order the roughly 50 people living in two homeless encampments to leave within 48 hours.
“Somebody making these decisions somehow [does] not understand or appreciate what it’s like to be outside, what it’s like to have no resources,” said Kimberly Simmons, executive director of the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness. “These folks have no options.”
According to the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness, more than 500 people sleep outside on a given night across the state.
“You want to come down and tell us that we got to leave and have no place for them to go,” Angelo Dwyer, 43, who lives at one of the encampments, said in an interview earlier this week. “You want the homeless sleeping on the sidewalks downtown?”
Dwyer said he and other residents of the encampment where he’s been living have formed a community. He’s set up one tent as a community kitchen, and planned to grow vegetables outside another this summer. The pending disruption has left that future uncertain.
“What I want is the same thing as anybody would want,” he said. “Just a safe place to live that we can live our lives.”
At the press conference, advocates outlined six demands to the city, chief among them granting residents more time to relocate, and offering people living in the encampments somewhere to go.
“We need to step forward with possible solutions that do not put people on the street in worse situations than they already are in,” Brown’s Andes said. “And allow our outreach workers an opportunity to get them housed before this happens.”
In a letter PPD sent to outreach providers last week, the department said the people living in an encampment off I-95 were doing so “at great risk to their personal safety and the safety of the public.”
The other site the city plans to clear contains contaminated soil and is undergoing active remediation, according to PPD.
Reporters questioned Mayor Brett Smiley at a separate press conference Wednesday, according to a recording shared by journalist Steve Ahlquist.
“There will be individuals, it’s usually single-digit individuals, who will find a different, better solution,” Smiley said. “Then, many will not.”
Smiley rejected the notion that the city could provide services to encampments, like dumpsters and trash collection, that might improve health and safety conditions.
“It is not my policy, and I don’t believe it is an acceptable solution, to allow for permanent or semi-permanent encampments in the city of Providence,” he said.
