People living under two Route 95 overpasses in Pawtucket were evicted by the State of Rhode Island on Monday morning. Uprise RI has learned that Joey Lindstrom of the Rhode Island Department of Housing, with assistance from the Diocese of Providence and Crossroads, moved five people into a hotel, pending being relocated to four-bedroom apartment. All five are receiving case management services which will allow them to access medical, legal and public services help.

This is a positive outcome. Uprise RI is happy to see people, who were formerly living in such rough conditions, receive proper shelter and support.

However…

Similar to the way people were evicted from the State House encampment last December, the people living under the overpasses were moved to the front of the line for housing and services, bypassing established best practices and both state and federal regulations.

As mandated by HUD (United States Department of Housing and Urban Development) unhoused people are prioritized for available, federally subsidized housing through a dynamic database called the Coordinated Entry System (CES). A person experiencing homelessness is entered into CES by outreach workers, that is, people who have training and experience helping people deal with homelessness. After a person, couple, or family is entered into CES, they are paired with the next available housing unit that meets their needs. Unfortunately, due to the lack of available low-income housing units, hundreds of people awaiting housing – and some have waited for years. Just like last December’s State House eviction, CES was bypassed so that those living under the overpass could be fast-tracked into housing. Once again, and at the hands of many of the same government officials, unhoused people in a “high-profile” location were prioritized over unhoused people who had been waiting months – or even years – for suitable housing, strictly because it was politically expedient to do so.

In both cases, special deals were cut with service providers. Money was “found” to house people that isn’t available for those at the top of the CES waiting list. In the case of the underpass eviction, the money is from a private funder that the state will not identify. Getting the money in this way allows the state to disregard CES, because it’s not federal money. That said, many of the people being housed with this private funding were waiting on CES and did not rate high enough on the system’s metrics to receive immediate housing consideration. This funding allowed the Department of Housing to bypass CES and immediately house people in need, but not necessarily people in the most need.

The use of private, anonymous money being provided to the state opens the question of special favors called in and perhaps promises made for some future consideration.

The McKee Administration and the Department of Housing did not answer questions from reporters about the process in December – and when Uprise RI put in an Access to Public’s Record Act (APRA) request for documentation, we were told that the government would comply, with heavily redacted documents, once we paid them $930. Why does the McKee Administration refuse to share information on the process? This question is ignored.

The people from the underpass who have found housing and services under these new, secretive policies have been instructed, for the moment, not to talk to the media. [Note: The Department of Housing takes issue with the word “instructed” and says that they were “requested” to not talk to the media.] This is not to say that the formerly unhoused have been told that they will lose access to housing and services if they do talk to the press, but so far no one – not the formerly unhoused, nor outreach workers, nor anyone from the McKee Administration – will talk openly about what exactly is happening in these high profile homeless encampment cases.

Low profile homeless encampment evictions follow a very different script. In Woonsocket, for instance, residents of a homeless encampment were told that they were going to be evicted, and their property was bulldozed and sent to the dump within days, with no recourse and no services offered other than a free trip to the Armory warming center in Providence. In Warwick, an encampment was deemed “empty” by the Mayor and torn down. Outreach workers and news media are unable to confirm that the encampment was indeed as empty as the Mayor reported it to be. In both cities people who were unhoused died during the winter cold.

The different patterns regarding the treatment of unhoused people fortunate enough to have located themselves in a “high-profile” encampment as opposed to a “low-profile” encampment provide perverse incentives for people who are unhoused. Rather than wait patiently on systems like CES that promise housing that doesn’t exist and may never come, unhoused people are being incentivized to set up their encampments where they will be noticed so that government officials will be motivated to bend and break the rules to provide unpeople the services they so desperately need.

No matter how violent and uncaring the state actually is when dealing with unhoused people, government officials don’t want to look like they are violent and uncaring. They still feel the need to maintain a caring facade. A caring response provided to a very few, highly visible members of the unhoused community can provide cover for the business-as-usual brutality and displacement the majority face on a day-to-day basis.

It bears repeating that in no way does Uprise RI begrudge the good fortune the Department of Housing bestowed upon five of the individuals formerly living under the overpasses in Pawtucket. But in the interests of fairness and equity, we need systems that bestow good fortune upon all people experiencing homelessness and eviction. Bestowing special favors undermines trust in the system, and hurts the relationships unhoused people build with outreach workers and those in the media who treat their issues with compassion and humanity.