Update, Feb. 3, 2025: This story was updated to add notecards from Rendi Weber, C. Paz, Terri Marley and Michael Switzer and, in Weber and Switzer’s cases, information from the cities that conducted the sweeps.
We offered cities an opportunity to respond to this story and have noted when they provided relevant context or disputed specific details.
Cities broadly defended their encampment-removal policies, saying they try to balance the health and safety of the larger community with the rights of people experiencing homelessness. Many cities told ProPublica that allowing people to live outside is not compassionate and characterized removals as a step toward getting people into housing.
Cities emphasized that they typically give people notice before clearing their encampment. If someone doesn’t move by the scheduled time, several cities said they may allow more time or leave items and come back for them later. Some also have policies to store certain kinds of items after a sweep.
Officials in Portland, Oregon, called sweeps a necessary but “imperfect fix” that can be “stressful and disruptive for an already extremely vulnerable part of our community.”
You can read more about cities’ policies in our previous stories.
Our transcriptions of people’s handwritten responses preserve the original spelling and punctuation. Capitalization has largely been standardized. Notecards that contained personal details that the writer did not want made public, such as a full name or contact information, have been edited to remove those details.
To confirm that sweeps did occur in a given geographic area around the time our sources said they did, we used additional interviews; media reports; and city or county data, records and encampment-removal schedules. We verified each person’s identity through public records. In one case, where a source had a common name and we had difficulty reconnecting with them, we confirmed that the name matched what was given to service providers. We published first names only or, in one case, a first initial and last name, when people said the publication of their full names would pose safety risks. In two cases that are noted, we published names by which those people are known but that are not their legal names.
We’re working on more stories about homelessness with local newsrooms in New York, Maine and Oregon. You can learn more about those projects and get in touch with our reporters.
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