Work for Rivka Reynolds started to look different a few months ago. As a peer recovery specialist for Thrive Behavioral Health in West Warwick, she used to spend her days visiting the homeless people she supports in their encampments. Now, she spends a lot more time driving around, looking for people.
“Before we had an idea — a better idea — where people are,” Reynolds said. “Now, it’s harder. It’s a lot harder.”
Reynolds and others who provide services to homeless people are adjusting to a new reality — one where it’s illegal to camp on public property in West Warwick. The town was one of several municipalities nationwide to adopt bans on camping following a U.S. Supreme Court decision last summer called Grants Pass, which ruled that such laws are constitutional even when municipalities offer no shelter space for unhoused residents.
In December, the town started issuing notices to vacate under the new law, clearing out homeless encampments. As a result, the people Reynolds supports have largely scattered — some to Coventry, others to Warwick. She has lost touch with some of them completely.
“I know they definitely don’t want us out here,” said Jenn, 35, who asked to be identified by her first name only. She is unhoused and was living in a tent when West Warwick passed the new law. “We just — I gotta figure out where to go.”
A new paradigm
Earlier this fall, between 40 and 50 homeless people were living in encampments in West Warwick, according to the town.For the past several years, dozens of homeless people have been living in West Warwick, according to the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness. Recently, tensions have been mounting between homeless people and other residents of the town.
“There’s no doubt people are struggling,” town councilor Mark Dennison said at a council hearing in September. “When I see the pictures of the needles, the trash, the garbage, the feces polluting our town land, it breaks my heart.”
That night, local elected officials started a series of conversations about what steps the municipality could take, citing the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Grants Pass case.
“I don’t want these encampments to exist on town property,” Dennison said at the September council hearing. “We don’t seem to have any solution for this issue.”
Grants Pass v. Johnson is named for the small city in Oregon where the lawsuit originated. Local advocates argued that a ban on camping on public property criminalized the status of homelessness and amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment” under the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. Anyone who violated the law could be fined, and if they didn’t pay those fines, end up in jail.
The Supreme Court justices disagreed and upheld the local law, giving the green light to cities and towns across the country to pass laws like the one in Grants Pass. In southern New England, Fall River passed an anti-camping ordinance last fall. Cranston considered the same approach last summer, but the measure did not move forward.
“You’re not going to solve the problem by criminalizing it,” said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island ACLU, which wrote a letter opposing an early version of the West Warwick ordinance.
Council president David Gosselin declined to comment for this story before the town council receives an “update” about the impact of the ordinance at its meeting on Feb. 25. Other town councilors did not respond to requests for comment.
Advocates like Brown argue such laws do not solve homelessness and serve only to punish people sleeping outside, who often have nowhere else to go. Tripp McCreery, lead case manager for housing with Thrive Behavioral Health, says the laws assume that people who are homeless will never be able to change their circumstances.
“Just because one happens to be experiencing homelessness at this moment in time,” McCreery said, “it doesn’t mean that they are going to remain homeless.”
Putting law into action
As West Warwick town councilors debated a new anti-camping ordinance, the town formally created an encampment response team. McCreery, his colleague Riv Reynolds, and other social service workers coordinated regular visits to encampments with Fire Chief Jeffrey Varone, police officers, and others. In early October, Chief Varone told the town council that during its first visit to local encampments, the team identified 44 homeless people living across 12 encampments.
“The team was well received, everybody was respectful,” Varone said at the council meeting. “We had good interactions.”
Over the course of the fall, Varone and other members of the response team notified homeless people living in West Warwick that they would have to leave their encampments in the coming months. The ordinance passed in a 3-2 vote on Nov. 19. Anyone living on town property had to pack up and leave by Jan. 1, 2025 — or face penalties.
According to records obtained by The Public’s Radio, the city issued one violation in early January to a 58-year-old man who did not pack up his tent despite advance warning. He will have to appear in Kent County District Court in March, where a judge will decide whether or not to issue fines.
To some homeless people, the law does little to help them address the conditions that caused their homelessness, or the factors making it more difficult to get back on their feet.
“I think it’s ridiculous, we all already have nothing anyway,” said Dawn, 47, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her family’s privacy.
Dawn had her tent pitched by the Pawtuxet River in West Warwick before the rats became too much for her to handle. She said she used drugs to cope with the stress of living outside — like not having running water or a place to use the bathroom.
“I was out there because of life circumstances,” she said. “And then just being out there, like you want to do drugs.”
In late January, Dawn said she was 32 days sober and hoping to get a spot in a sober living house in the near future. That feels like a compromise to her — what she needed when she most recently fell into homelessness was a place to live, not drug treatment. Sober living, she said, is what’s “going to show them that, I guess, I deserve a place.”
A temporary intervention
Winter has brought some immediate relief for unhoused people in West Warwick: local leaders have opened an emergency warming center. Open only on the coldest nights, the center has provided what many unhoused people would like to see on a permanent basis: somewhere to go, in their community. Still, they’re all too aware that it’s only temporary.
“Say, if like, one day the warming shelter is not going to be open,” said Jenn, the 35-year-old homeless woman. “Then where do they expect us to all go?”
The pop-up shelter has persisted on a temporary basis for two years now, using $37,517 in funding from the Rhode Island Department of Housing’s Municipal Homelessness Support Initiative, according to records obtained by The Public’s Radio.
The shelter is barebones: army green cots covered in American Red Cross blankets filled two small rooms, enough space for about 30 people to stay in close quarters. On a day in late January, 70-year-old Roy sat on one of them alongside Sarah, his four-year-old golden retriever.
Roy, who asked to only be identified by his first name to protect his privacy, said he and Sarah had spent the night prior, where temperatures reached 7 degrees, in his truck, idling to keep the heat pumping overnight.
“You’d be surprised how much gas it takes to keep warm,” he said.
Roy fell into homelessness after an eviction. He said he tried to find an apartment or a room to rent but couldn’t find anything he could afford with his monthly Social Security benefits. The warming center was a lifeline. But he was acutely aware of its impermanence.
“There’s what, 30 people in here?” Roy said. “30 people are going to be out on the street, myself included, and Sarah too.”
This story was reported by The Public’s Radio.
