I experienced homelessness. Camp Resolution eviction is just a glimpse of the trauma | Opinion
The scene at Camp Resolution on Tuesday, where the city evicted 50 of residents from the site that served as a shelter for two years, was gut-wrenching. We saw a woman on oxygen in tears, not sure of where she would end up. She was pleading with someone to ensure that her dog, who she couldn’t keep with her, would be safe.
The North Sacramento lot is now vacant, and the former residents must look for a home.
Sadly, most homeless folks moved by the city didn’t shed tears or anger. They packed up their belongings and left without incident. They have been told to leave before and it will probably happen again.
Humanity seems lost in the city’s decision to strip Camp Resolution residents of their homes.
There is a fear that lingers in every person experiencing homelessness when they gain housing or some sense of stability. It’s a fear that everything will go wrong in an instant.
The trauma of homelessness
Homelessness is more than just a label, it’s a feeling that never escapes you.
I am privileged to be known as Sac Bee opinion columnist LeBron Hill. It’s not a title that I came to have easily. Twelve years ago I was LeBron Hill, an 18-year-old with no money and only two trash bags of clothes, waiting for someone to come to the door of the homeless shelter in my hometown Tullahoma, TN.
My life at that point was made up of crumbled pieces left from a life before my mother kicked me out of the house and out of her life. I stayed in the shelter for a little over a year. It was not easy. We had chores every day, a curfew and if we didn’t hold up our end of the bargain we would be kicked out. The entire time it felt like I was falling. I had no foundation to ground me and no safety net to catch me. At any time I could’ve been told to leave for any reason and forced on the streets.
It was not a huge celebration when I finally left the shelter and moved to a one-bedroom apartment. I knew that I had to get to work to create a foundation for myself, but even then I would be worried about my future.
I would return from work to my unlit home and often forget that I had turned off the lights myself. More times than I care to remember, I worried that my lights had been cut by the utility company.
Knocks on my door brought fears of encountering someone delivering an eviction notice. The moments I would have a conflict with my boss, I would immediately think that I was getting fired and would have to go back to the shelter.
When you go through homelessness, the feeling of instability feeds the notion that something could go wrong at any time and you will have to go somewhere else. There are no guarantees for me and for the thousands of people who experience homelessness in the country.
The eviction carried out by Sacramento Police and city officials demonstrated a lack of concern for the toll of being homelessness on the individuals experiencing it. What we saw at Camp Resolution cannot be the norm for how we treat homeless people in Sacramento.
A huge failure, plain and simple
The city and county of Sacramento, the entire Sacramento region, should be unified in providing shelter for unhoused people. The city gets the blame for these situations but the entire region - and the state of California - have failed, and failed miserably. Sadly they don’t see it that way.
California, in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s command, is getting more aggressive with its treatment of people experiencing homelessness. What we saw at Camp Resolution is what happens when governments fail. Policy lapses become blame games. Bureaucrats order cops to prevent journalists from documenting human suffering. Cops threaten to arrest journalists. This is where we are in Sacramento and it will continue to happen if don’t correct our moral compass.
The former residents of Camp Resolution and the rest of the unhoused community in Sacramento are not the least of us.
Fear should never be goal of government. Sacramento city officials carried out the most abrasive acts against homeless people that I’ve seen in my lifetime.
This is not what Sacramento should be known for.
The truth that we do not want to tell ourselves is that any one of us could hit hard times and become homeless. The society that we live in commands us to show up every day without fail, no matter illness or hardship. But sometimes we can’t always show up and when that happens we need a government that helps us keep our home, not shut it down without a place to go.
We all deserve humanity.
