A year after the Fayetteville City Council adopted an ordinance banning homeless encampments on city property, advocates for the area’s unhoused population are calling for the policy to be scrapped.
During the public-comment period at Monday’s council meeting, speakers raised concerns about the city’s treatment of the homeless, emphasizing over-policing and a lack of emergency shelters in Cumberland County.
“We watched like it was a slow train wreck as this council debated the ‘no camping’ ordinance back in 2020,” community activist Shuan McMillan said. “The issue came up again last year with the council, and foolishly this council criminalized homelessness by reinforcing that ordinance. And I think you have an opportunity to right that wrong. You should repeal that ordinance and then bend over backward to help people that are suffering in the city instead of criminalizing (them).”
Lisette Rodriguez, outreach and engagement organizer for Common Cause North Carolina, a nonprofit organization that advocates for government accountability, said the ordinance in question — and a similar countywide ordinance — have had a “devastating impact” on the homeless people she has spoken to around Fayetteville.
“They aren’t wanted anywhere,” Rodriguez said. “Businesses won’t let them use their bathroom unless they buy something. They can’t sleep on city and county property without the police coming after them. So, my question to you all is: Where are they supposed to go?”
The concerns were delivered a week after the opening ceremony of the Day Resource Center at 128 S. King St. The newly completed center, operated by Cumberland HealthNet, aims to centralize resources for unhoused people.
The center has showers and laundry facilities; a kitchen for lunch service; office space for social workers and case managers; a family and children’s room; medical offices for preventative care and health services; a quiet room for meditation and rest; and space for people to gather to escape extreme heat or cold.
The Day Resource Center will not provide overnight shelter, but it will operate as a shelter in emergencies.
When asked how unhoused people can find non-emergency shelter with the city’s assistance, city spokesman Loren Bymer said the city funds several programs that can help people afford housing.
“The city does not have a program to pay the rent and utilities for any private citizen,” Bymer wrote in an email to CityView. “The city did expend in excess of $12 million during the height of the pandemic to prevent mass evictions. City Council has been steadfast in its commitment to financing a multitude of affordable housing projects like the ones approved last week.”
Council members and city administrators expect the day center to be an integral part of the city’s efforts to help the homeless. Results of the 2023 point-in-time survey of the number of unhoused people in Cumberland County have not been released, but in 2022 the countywide survey counted 475 homeless people.
“Let us remember that this is not the end of a journey but the beginning of a new chapter in our ongoing commitment to fostering a more just and compassionate city,” Mayor Mitch Colvin said at a ceremony last Tuesday marking the center’s opening.
Some homeless people are skeptical the center will be the promised silver bullet. Joseph Wheeler, a longtime advocate and member of the homeless community, said Shelley Hudson, executive director of Cumberland HealthNet — the organization tasked with running the center — is unfit to oversee the resource center’s services.
“As a group in the homeless community, we are actively looking and asking for the resignation of Shelley Hudson because she cannot do the job that she’s been put in place to do with the new Day Resource Center,” Wheeler said. “(Cumberland Healthnet has) an entire office building downtown right now that is only open to the phone line, or they move over to the Day Resource Center. Nobody can get any physical attention or help. … Nobody’s getting the services that they’re promised.”
Bymer, responding on behalf of the council, did not comment on the specific accusations made by Wheeler.
“The city values residents’ opinions and welcomes all residents to participate during the public forum portion of our council meetings and other events hosted by our local government,” Bymer said in his email. “This empowers residents to have the opportunity to speak directly to the mayor and City Council on issues that concern our community.”
Extreme heat dangers
Common Cause’s Rodriguez also mentioned how recent heat waves — including one this past weekend that saw heat indices well above 100 degrees — have exacerbated the dangers of living without a roof overhead.
“We’re going through a record heat wave, and roughly 50% of the people who die in heat are unhoused,” Rodriguez said. “And this ordinance is inhumane. I’m asking you all to pause and reverse this ordinance.”
Neil Colbert, a homeless man with a disability, told CityView he has been hospitalized twice recently with heat-related illness. His health problems prevent him from staying inside the Cumberland County Library downtown for too long, one of about a dozen cooling shelters open sporadically during heat waves. Eventually, Colbert says, he has to go back outside to warm up.
Colbert has been waiting to get approved for disability for his medical conditions and worked his entire life until recent health problems, which confine him to a wheelchair most of the time. Yet his family has not been able to get any assistance that would lead to permanent shelter, other than food from local organizations that provide meals to the homeless community downtown.
“It just seemed like we got one door after another just shut in our face, but we get back up,” Colbert said. “My wife gets frustrated. I tell her we got to get back up and keep fighting. I said, there’s no ifs and buts about it.”
Colbert stays with a small group outside the Cumberland County library downtown, which he describes as a “safe haven” for many in the homeless community. However, he says he is aware of at least four recent incidents when deputies from the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office have removed people from the property. He said bad actors or people with mental illnesses can attract unwanted attention to the group.
Bùnicca Raino, an unhoused woman with a disability, has also been sleeping outside the library downtown for the past two months. She told CityView that Friday’s incident happened “because someone said the wrong thing to someone earlier that day, and that was (the cops saying), ‘Well, we’ll show you. We’ll make you leave here just because.’”
Raino emphasized, though, that police generally don’t bother her group and said she’s heard unhoused people have been sleeping outside the library for the past 20 years.
“They drive by all the time, and they know that we sleep here,” Raino said.
Her small group shares meals and support each other the best they can. She said many of them have jobs elsewhere and are not from Fayetteville, but they don’t have a way to get back home.
Raino herself lives in Philadelphia and is originally from Brazil. She is also an attorney, veteran and private detective, but she has been stranded in Fayetteville since having her identity stolen while she was in a coma for four years at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center. She has a lifelong medical condition that leads to comas and seizures and says she could not remember how she got here when she woke up from the coma.
She has been unable to get assistance from the Veterans Affairs hospital since she can’t prove her identity after it was stolen.
“What we need are Greyhound bus passes so that, whether we’re on these grounds or other grounds, if we’re asked to be moved and shuffled around, that can displace us further. And then we’ll be pushed into an unsafe environment here,” Raino said. “There are cameras here so people can see our whereabouts and see that we’re OK. They can watch us daily and nightly.”
Police interactions
Speakers at Monday’s meeting also said over-policing of unhoused people is an issue.
Angela Tatum Malloy, CEO of Momma’s Village Fayetteville, described an incident she recorded on July 28. In the video she took, four Fayetteville police officers can be seen surrounding a homeless man who is leaning against a tree and eating. According to the footage, Malloy questions the officers about their intentions, and they tell her they are trying to get him to move and sit on a nearby bench.
At one point, one of the officers abruptly takes the food away from the man and places it on the ground several feet away. Malloy intervenes and questions the officers’ actions. She asks about the ordinance that would allow for this treatment.
“I don’t know the exact ordinance off the top of my head,” Westbrook says in response. “There’s a city ordinance that he can’t block the sidewalk.”
Bymer, speaking on behalf of the City Council and Police Department, said officials are reviewing the incident.
“The city of Fayetteville and the Fayetteville Police Department are aware of a video where Fayetteville police officers responded to a call and had a discussion with a homeless individual,” Bymer wrote in an email to CityView. “It was determined by the officers on the scene there was no violation and the police officers continued to patrol the area. Currently, the incident is under review.”
Malloy said the incident demonstrates over-policing of the homeless community.
“It did not take four police officers standing over one of our community members while he was eating,” Malloy said. “I see him every single day. As I said on the video, many business owners see him, and he literally does the exact same thing every day. … It was just not appropriate what we witnessed, seeing the food placed on the ground and the denial of that taking place.”
Overall, Raino said, many homeless people in Fayetteville have been contributing members of society and continue to work. Disabilities have left them immobile and vulnerable to forced evacuations. She is hoping a kind stranger will be able to help her get a bus ticket back to Pennsylvania, where she can restart her life. She does not have family in the country who can help.
“I could change my own life and everybody and all the rest of my family’s life as long as I can get home,” Raino said. “That’s all I need. I just need bus fare to leave.”
Bymer said the city used to have a “reunification program” that would provide unhoused people with transportation to reunited with family elsewhere, but “it was determined that this service is better suited to be offered by a nonprofit partner.”
“As we enter the new fiscal year, contracts are being finalized for Cumberland HealthNET to offer this service through coordinated entry at the Day Resource Center,” Bymer wrote in his email.
“City Council takes all resident feedback seriously and considers multiple courses of action when determining what steps to take to progress Fayetteville forward to become a better place to live, work and recreate,” he said in the email.
Evey Weisblat can be reached at eweisblat@cityviewnc.com.
