LANSING, Mich. — We’ve been talking about homeless encampments in Lansing for a few weeks now, and through the numerous interviews we’ve done, it seems like most residents have one solution to address the problem.
“I would suggest they start looking at sanctioned encampment areas,” said homeless prevention advocate Jody Washington. “Setting aside a couple places, where people could set up their tents, live safely, and we could take the services to them.”
While Washington supports creating a designated area for the unhoused population, city leaders say it’s not that easy.
“We have an ordinance that doesn’t allow overnight camping in the parks, so at the very least, we would need an ordinance change that says in this area we would allow for overnight camping,“ said Lansing’s Parks and Recreation Director Brett Kaschinski.
Aside from changing an ordinance, Kaschinski said there are other things that need to be ironed out before creating sanctioned encampments, such as funding and maintaining the area.
“Then, it's a matter of who’s taking that matter on,” he said. “Who is going to be cleaning up the trash, who's going to be enforcing rules. Those are all items that would need to be addressed.”
We wanted to see how common were sanctioned encampments in Michigan. After doing some digging, we found three, in Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids and Detroit.
However, they were all closed down in recent years, and while it didn’t work in other cities, Washington still thinks Lansing should try it because it may smooth out the transition phase that most unhoused people have to go through before finding a home.
“It’s very difficult to take someone from a tent to an apartment and keep them there,” she said. “So this will help with the transition to keep people housed permanently.”
