tent city
The center that houses the homeless in Ann Arbor is big, but it can’t hold all the homeless. And Michigan winters are cold enough that my dogs don’t even want to go outside. The homeless center in Ann Arbor, I’ve heard, houses only 10% of the homeless population here. That’s a lot of people who have nowhere to sleep. And those who are allowed entrance to the homeless center, only a portion of those get a bed: many have to sleep sitting up in chairs (no one is permitted to sleep on the floor for fire code reasons).
One of the homeless men created a tent city: a collection of tents, heated with kerosene, with a no-drugs policy. It’s not permanent — it’s a place for people to stay while they save money and find a solid job. The goal is for the tent city to rotate around the town so that no one piece of land is overburdened. But who will house the homeless on their lawn?
The tent city coordinator is looking for churches to offer their lawns, which frankly is a lot to ask of any church, but who else would they ask? In the meantime they stayed for awhile on a plot of land behind Arborland, behind the Toys R Us, a 50-acre no man’s land that has no function but to be a woodsy gap between the shopping center and a new neighborhood. The owner of the land, when asked by the homeless if they could stay there, said he didn’t necessarily allow it but he wouldn’t call the police. But when the police called him, the story changed. And so Caleb Poiroir, the tent city coordinator, has been arrested for trespassing and is going to trial next week. (Some of the story is posted in this article in the Ann Arbor Chronicle.) These people now have even fewer options on where they can sleep, and this morning I scraped frost off my car.
I don’t know what the answer is. But at the homeless writing workshop I lead on Tuesdays, I gave one of the men the opportunity to think of a prompt for us to write about. Usually we write something abstract or something that has more to do with the mechanics of poetry and language, but he chose the topic of Caleb Poiroir. Homelessness in winter. Conversation has never been so active.
It made me realize how many logistics are involved in homelessness. When I have to pee, I use my bathroom. When I have to brush my teeth, my toothbrush is right there. I shower, I wash my clothes, it doesn’t create any stress inside of me. But these men don’t know where to shower or where to brush their teeth. They have to plan carefully when and where they can go to the bathroom. And they have to figure out how to sleep without getting snowed on. If I had to figure out all those logistics each day, I’d want to drink, too, at least to keep warm. And I’d have trouble thinking about holding down a job. I’ve seen from these people and even from Steve’s past: when you get knocked down, for whatever reason, it is exponentially more difficult to get ahead. Each burden is linked to another burden — you can’t get a job if you can’t wait for the phone call because you don’t have a phone and you can’t apply for a job when you haven’t even had a shower besides — and the road back to civilization takes so long and has so many weights holding you back, reminding you of your past, cutting wounds into prior wounds. And when life is that hard, the things that to others seem so easy — looking presentable, being on time, being socially attuned — take so much energy, and it’s easy to let people down and fall behind again.
The tent cities have worked in other communities. There has to be a way for it to work. We can’t let people who are less fortunate freeze to death. Protection from the most severe elements seems like a basic right. Especially when these people are organizing it themselves, not asking for any money, only a place to kill a little grass for a month. And grass is a pretty silly idea anyway.
