Suburbanizing Homelessness: Ontario’s Tent City Provides Relief, Not Solutions
In an area of Southern California where homelessness is illegal in many surrounding towns and the only homeless shelter for miles hosts a whopping fourteen shelter beds, where housing prices and rent are exorbitant and jobs are hard to come by, a unique community of individuals has formed on a land plot owned by the local airport. Clusters of tents blow in the wind on this patch of dirt between railroad tracks and a small run down neighborhood. The San Gabriel Mountains jut up picturesquely along the horizon. This is Tent City, also known to many as Camp Hope, in Ontario, California. It is a city that has been a talking point in national debates because of its stark resemblance to the Hoovervilles that popped up during the Great Depression. According to officials, it is a place where people who have fallen homeless can reside safely. Those who live there, however, know that it is a place for them to go where they will be out of sight of the rest of the neighboring communities.
Camp Hope was anything but a spontaneous irruption: A few years back, the City of Ontario began the Hope Project in an effort to “solve” the homeless problem. However, instead of circulating the money locally and involving the entire community in this effort, it contracted the work out to developers from Orange County. The building that sprang up was eventually torn down and was never rebuilt.
Homelessness continued.
Pastor Augie of the First Lutheran Church in Ontario, decided to take things into his own hands and began a project called New Hope about three years ago to try to help people get off the streets. According to him, many people who are homeless in Ontario grew up there and are either mentally ill or mentally handicapped. With no one to take care of them, they wind up in the streets.
“We as a society have to take responsibility for our people, for the poor,” he says. However, without affordable housing, it is hard to end homelessness. Though Pastor Augie has helped over 500 people on a budget of just $14,000 in the basement of his church in the last year, homelessness cannot be lessened through the work of just one group.
Around the same time, the City decided to use its Federal funds for emergency shelters and housing work in conjunction with Mercy House, a local group that offers assistance and a rest area for poor people. They developed a Continuum of Care program that offers shelter beds, transitional housing, and temporary housing. However, according to those who have gone through the continuum of care program, the people receiving this temporary housing are raffle winners—a lucky number means a bed for a few nights. Also, due to the lack of permanent affordable housing in the area, the winners receive more of a respite from sleeping outside than a transition. It is a three million dollar project with a high overhead and few results.
Homelessness continued and the police began cracking down on homeless residents of Ontario as if they had chosen to sleep on the streets.
According to a former mechanic at Camp Hope, before the encampment came into existence, he had to hide behind garbage bins and in parking lots to get a moment’s rest; he could barely even eat his lunch sitting down before being moved and shuffled around the city.
“I felt like my human rights had been violated,” said the man. “We need a place at least to rest.”
Some people found that place to rest in one of the city’s parks. However, about the same time that the city decided to revamp the downtown area and develop upscale housing, it began to crack down there as well. Marcy, Shelley, and John, members of a church in Cucamonga (one of the cities that has outlawed homelessness) had set up a food ministry through their church and took that ministry to the park to make sure none of their fellow citizens went hungry. Instead of being thanked for providing for Ontario’s poorest citizens, these selfless church members began receiving tickets. Apparently, the City did not want its homeless problem made visible. The church was expected to foot a bill for $750 every time they gave out food.
This last June, in response to this, two members of the Ontario police force helped set up the first tent city, deeming it a sort of safe zone for homeless people to set up camp without being fined. Marcy, Shelley, and John moved their food ministry to the camp—it was a place where they, too, would not be harassed by police.
Once the camp grew a little, it was moved to its current location near the Ontario airport. Since then, its numbers have grown steadily. “When people find there’s a place where they can come and not be harassed, they’ll go there,” says Pastor Augie, who has now extended his ministry to tent city.
Tent City, or Camp Hope, now has almost 350 people living in it. Though I did not know what to expect from my visit, after talking with the people living there I cannot help but hold a certain sense of awe and admiration for the tight-knit communities that have been formed there in these past seven months. Groups of tents form clusters around the plot of land, often with a common area in the middle. Though Marcy stated that, “people are forced into communities for safety,” it is also important to acknowledge that they have been forced into communities for solidarity as well.
Camp Hope is not an easy place in which to live, though this is not because of the apparent lawlessness that is attributed to it by the Daily Bulletin, the local paper for Ontario and all of the Inland Valley region. In fact, from what I noticed while walking around the camp and what I heard from its residents, it is in actuality rather tame. David, one of the residents, leaves his tent open all day—with his computer in it.
“I don’t worry about it,” he says. “We take care of each other.”
Bobby Duke, another resident and a very close friend of David’s, lost his tent because of the high winds that had come through earlier in the week.
“What can we do for you, buddy?” said Richard “Blue” Montgomery after hearing about the incident. “Just say the word and we’ll help.”
While the Daily Bulletin reports on theft and publishes letters to the editor saying “tent city” will most likely turn into “crime city,” the residents who live there and the organizations helping with donations are actually working to make life at least a little bit easier at Camp Hope without the aid of the City, the other residents of Ontario, or that of police officers. In fact, it was the police officers themselves who unwittingly engaged in the only large-scale acts of theft to take place at Camp Hope:
In one unplanned effort to “clean up” the camp, they came into the camp without warning just after a heavy rain to pick up any articles not stored in a tent. Of course, the residents of Camp Hope had, like any rational people, placed their belongings outside of their tents to dry. In the course of the sweep, the police officers took a multitude of belongings and, in an act of ultimate degradation, made the small group of people that became upset do push-ups in the street as punishment. That, of course, was not reported in the Daily Bulletin.
The actual lives and hardships, the daily struggles and the moments of joy, are also not covered. For example, David owns his own computer business, which he can no longer run. He is a divorcee with a son who he loves so much that he scraps together all the money he can to get a room at a motel every weekend to see him. He had been taking care of his father who had Parkinson’s, high blood pressure, and a host of other medical conditions requiring expensive prescriptions. He made sure that his father had a place to stay and moved to Hope City two months ago. Now, with the computer industry fluctuating and his belongings in storage, with a city that spends $3 million on a program that still leaves hundreds homeless, he is not sure what to do.
“It’s hard to get a step to get out,” he says. “There are no jobs.”
Bobby Duke is a veteran from the war in Viet Nam. He was affected by Agent Orange and has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and has seen eight psychiatrists, four of whom broke down crying during their sessions with him. He receives money, but apparently his PTSD is not quite bad enough to warrant more.
“No one can live on $900 a month,” he says. “The landlords will only rent to people making three times the rent.”
Richard “Blue” Montgomery’s parole officer sent him directly to Camp Hope after release, using $54 of Richard’s stipend to buy the bus ticket and never sending him the remaining $146.
The stories go on and on, and it is apparent, as Pastor Augie says, that, “there has been a complete breakdown of services.”
Though it seems like the officials of Ontario, California are not doing much, as almost any local resident will attest, at least they have come to terms with the fact that simply displacing homeless people and pushing them around will not work. It’s a telling sign of the times that compared to the prevalent attitude of San Francisco and the neighboring cities that criminalize homeless people to keep them invisible and drive them out, Ontario looks like a shining beacon of tolerance and compassion.
Though we can appreciate the City of Ontario for its relatively humane treatment of those who are down and out and have been sucked into the overwhelming and seemingly unending cycle of homelessness, we must also ask ourselves what sort of society we live in: How do we justify criminalizing poor people? How do we look at this small plot of land that hosts about 350 people and resembles a third-world refugee camp and see it as a good thing? How have we allowed homelessness and poverty to come to this in one of the world’s wealthiest countries?
Right now, as everyone from reporters for The Economist to one of the top officials at Countrywide Mortgage will admit, our economy is facing some of its biggest downturns since the Great Depression. The rates of foreclosures are through the roof, unemployment is on the rise, and many states, including California, face massive budget cuts in the coming years.
It is, unfortunately, not a surprise that something like Camp Hope has sprung up in an area that is at the top of the list of locations affected by foreclosures. It is also not surprising that tent cities like this have sprung up around the country, though many have been closed down.
What is surprising is that we as a nation are not more concerned about the spiraling effects of our economic decision-making and people that have, quite literally, been left in the dust by our attitudes and policies.
The City of Ontario did not give this tent city the name “Camp Hope,” nor did any of the numerous organizations providing the people living there with food and clothing. Neither did any news reporter: The people living there named it. They named it “Camp Hope” because it was one of the only places where they were not constantly harassed, where they could set up a tent and live in a community, where they could sleep for an entire night without being jostled awake by a police officer.
What sort of nation leaves its people with such a bleak definition of hope?
Katy
