Afeni X and Robert "Pops" Downham serve breakfast to people at Seminary Square. The breakfast is part of mutual aid with Help Ourselves.
(Bente Bouthier, WFIU/WTIU News)
People stood in line last week at Seminary Park while volunteers with Help Ourselves served up breakfast.
Help Ourselves, a mutual aid group, serves breakfast there every Tuesday and has been around for a couple years.
Bloomington’s board of park commissioners passed a rule in August banning enclosed structures, such as camping tents, in public parks during the daytime.
Help Ourselves’ head comrade, Afeni X, said the daytime ban on tents increased stress for people experiencing homelessness.
“There's been radicalization, in terms of relationships, and just reactions to something so hard being pressed. So many people hang out here. And then you know, you're not allowed to have a structure out here anymore.”
But she’s also noticed an increased desire for unity among people coming for breakfast.
One person in line for breakfast, Roosevelt Hawthorne, has been homeless for seven years. He said the ban on tents affected his ability to find safe places to stay in the evening with his partner.
“Most of us already got mental health issues, or drug abuse issues and stuff like that,” he said. “So, to feel turned away, right? We've tried to, you know, overshadow the depression with some types of toxic stuff. Because we had that in our past.”
The ban disconnected Hawthorne and his partner from people they’d been in touch with before because people are going to different sides of town.
“I think it kind of broke a lot of our relationships because I don’t see a lot of people anymore that I used to in the winters,” he said.
Hawthorne said Help Ourselves’s breakfast puts an ease on what he’s going through.
Breakfast goes from 9:30 to 11:00 am on Tuesdays. (WTIU News, Ethan Sandweiss)
According to the Indiana Housing Development and Community Development Authority, unsheltered homelessness is on the rise statewide. This year’s point-in-time count was the highest since 2019, recording 804 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness.
Indiana Housing and community Development Authority 2023 Point-In-Time Count
The Indiana recovery Alliance reported an increase of accidental overdoses in Monroe County last week. It’s executive director, Nicholas Voyles says it doesn’t normally issue drug supply warnings, because it doesn’t have technology to test drug samples and must go off anecdotal evidence.
Outreach with the recovery alliance goes five days a week to meet people experiencing homelessness at encampments in Bloomington and provide services. Voyles said the ban’s made it harder to find people and worries that the ban makes it more likely for people to use substances by themselves.
“So, you have this interaction with other people, you have these people that bring services there that know where the people are. When you strip that and put it on edge, people are just left free falling,” he said. “They will have to find another place to use, which is scary.”
But said says you can’t attribute a rise in overdoses to any one issue, like the tent policy. A lot of factors need to be considered.
“You're disrupting a series of lives, right? So, you have a normal stream of lives that go into this park during the day, they might just be laying there, because all night long, they couldn't find a safe place.”
According to the B Square Bulletin, James “JT” Vanderburg, a 51-year-old man experiencing homelessness, died at Seminary Park in freezing temperatures on December 24, 2020. Bloomington Police did two welfare checks on December 23 and 24 with him.
Before August, the tents were already not allowed in parks after 11 pm. Voyles said winter is always a dangerous time for people experiencing homelessness. But because tents aren’t allowed in parks at all now, services and outreach will need to be ramped up to help bridge issues of sheltering during the day.
The Bloomington Board of Park Commissioners passed the daytime rule against tents in parks in August, siting almost 900 total incident report numbers at Switchyard and Seminary Parks.
Bloomington Parks Department’s interim director Tim Street said the rule was implemented to make the parks safer and more accessible to everyone. He said it does get incident reports still, and a few months is too early to quantify the measure’s effectiveness.
“We want to keep continuing to look at it and see if we feel like it's being effective and helping parks meet that goal of being open and safe for everybody.”
Street said they haven’t confiscated anyone’s tent yet, and if someone has a tent up during the day, resource officers with the Bloomington Police Department work with them.
The executive director of Beacon Inc. Forrest Gilmore said its nightly shelter has 40 beds and is typically full. Right now, they’re getting a lot of requests from people for blankets, tents, sleeping bags, and other cold weather gear.
Hawthorne said he and his partner argue regularly over where they’re going to sleep and move around nightly.
“And during this season, particularly, we try to stick together, because we don't want to freeze to death,” he said.
Hawthorne said the community needs more housing options with fewer requirements. He added, when someone applies for housing or services and is turned away, it would be helpful to receive more information and explanation.
