On Sept. 16, the Des Moines City Council passed a pair of ordinances designed to prevent unsheltered citizens from sleeping or living on public property. The first ordinance will make sleeping in public places like sidewalks, streets, doorways, pedestrian and vehicular entrances punishable by a $15 fine, and bans camping under bridges, in parks, and on benches, sidewalks and streets.
The second ordinance lowers the number of days before the city can clear an encampment from the previous 10 days to three days, and the city must post a 24-hour notice before removing a campsite and store the items in a yet-unidentified location for no less than 30 days. Then within that 24 hours, the city must inform a local service agency of the campsite removal.
City officials said the new measures are intended to urge unhoused residents to use services such as shelters, but opponents of the plan, like the ACLU of Iowa, argue fines and removal of possessions is “inhumane.” Although the ordinances were passed in September, they’ve yet to take full effect, and won’t until the city finishes a set of necessary preliminary steps, and the Des Moines Police Department has been trained on how to enforce and carry out the ordinances.
In this interim, advocate groups have been scrambling to prepare, including Iowa Homeless Youth Centers (IHYC) and its Ames-based parent nonprofit YSS, which serves approximately 800 clients ages 18 to 24 from Mason City to downtown Des Moines. Austin Neal, a lead youth advocate with IHYC, said they weren’t involved in early discussions of the ordinance proposals, and now must hustle to keep ahead of their effects, alongside other outreach orgs.
Before the announcement of the ordinances, Neal’s organization saw on average 12 to 20 clients a day. Since, they’re seeing 40 to 50 clients a day.
While the council’s stated goal for the ordinances is to drive more unhoused residents to utilize shelter services, the bigger problem, Neal says, is that there aren’t enough shelters and available beds. Beds have long waitlists, and organizations are chronically underfunded and understaffed.
Lack of affordable, available housing alone is really just one piece of a much larger, complicated puzzle of chronic homelessness, and none of the pieces are being meaningfully addressed.
The demographic of clients at YSS is young people who have aged out of the foster care system, have no meaningful family support, deal with substance abuse, mental health issues or past trauma, and/or have experienced a recent job loss and can’t make ends meet. Ordinances like the ones just passed, from Neal’s experience, create more problems than solutions for both individuals and organizations trying to help them.
When campsites are forcibly removed or demolished, birth certificates and Social Security cards are often tossed with other items deemed to be “trash” — vital records and documents that are required for housing and job applications.
Joe Stevens, CEO and co-founder of Joppa, another longtime Des Moines nonprofit agency that serves unhoused citizens and connects them with critical resources, echoed much of what Neal said. Joppa operates with a small paid staff, and primarily relies on dedicated volunteers and donations. Like YSS, it is already experiencing more visitors to its Homeless Resource Center on Euclid Avenue in Des Moines, and are bracing for the full effects of the ordinances.
Joppa also operates a unique “feet on the street” outreach program where volunteers make in-person contact with unhoused citizens every single week and document locations and other useful demographic information through a dynamic mobile app Joppa developed. After the implementation of the ordinances, Stevens anticipates it will become even more difficult to locate unhoused individuals who were forced to move, and Joppa staff will have to develop new strategies to find them.
Neal said YSS employs an outreach person who goes out into the community to alert unhoused citizens about the new ordinances, and help bring belongings into storage at YSS if needed. YSS also offers transportation services to individuals whose belongings were put into storage by the city at locations inaccessible by public transit, and it works closely with the Des Moines Police Department on behalf of its clients.
In October, YSS held a “Know Your Rights” class to help prepare clients for interactions with police and others in authority. YSS will continue to offer drop-in services, including assistance obtaining lost vital records and documents, in-house therapy and twice-a-day meal service.
Joppa continues its weekly outreach program, its free mail and vital records storage, as well as its Homeless Nutrition Program both at their center and in the field. It also has “move teams” to assist individuals who need to quickly gather their belongings in order to check into a shelter.
Joppa operates with three basic questions, Stevens said: Why are people homeless? Why does it pay to care? And what can I do?
Right now, he said, there are no real incentives for business organizations or individuals to build affordable or low-income housing, so it continues to fall to nonprofits and faith-based groups operating on severely limited budgets to try to fill that gap.
Neal said YSS starts with its own pair of questions: Are we here to equip, or enable? And what can we do to equip?
Those answers, he said, aren’t with city ordinances.
Supplies needed by IHYC
- Sleeping bags
- Cleaning supplies
- Unused men’s & women’s underwear
- Unused bras
- Full-size body wash, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant
- Belts
- Backpacks/suitcases
- Handwarmers
- Chapstick
- Totes for clients that live here to store things
Apart from those items, IHYC always encourages folks to volunteer. Come serve or prepare a meal, talk with clients or play board games.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s November 2024 issue.
