SANTA CRUZ — Rain is in the forecast for Christmas Eve, but a large tent encampment spread in the grassy space behind Ross Dress for Less was dry and sunny Friday afternoon.
Cyclists and walkers passed the more than 70 tents filling the mostly Caltrans-owned property abutting Highway 1 and the Santa Cruz Riverwalk path, and Santa Cruzans Dean and Julie Okins of the Eating with Jesus ministry rolled their carts full of bagged lunches, featuring ham and cheese sandwiches, down worn pathways.
Camp denizen Ashley Yracheta said she had been living in the area for the past two or three months. The 28-year-old former Scotts Valley resident said initially, it was just her and her boyfriend in a camouflaged tent in a gully. Then, a “really popular” friend joined them after getting out of jail, and soon others followed.
Yracheta said “the city’s not tripping too much” about the camp, and besides, she said, she had nowhere else to go without meeting resistance. Police officers do make visits to conduct criminal searches, she said, and in recent days had ordered campers to move 15 feet back from a chain link fence along the Gateway Plaza property line. The city owns part of the campground property, while the remaining portion is a state Caltrans right-of-way.
Familiar grounds
The riverside camp echoes a similar concentrated homeless encampment that sprung up in the city’s San Lorenzo Park benchlands area in November 2017 and eventually prompted the city to convert its own utility yard into the River Street Camp. Yracheta said she doubts the city will empty her camp out regularly to clean and paint individual campsite boxes on the grass, as the Parks and Recreation Department did in the benchlands, due to the high level of city manpower needed for last year’s operation.
“We’ve been managing, somewhat, but not actively involved” at the camp, Assistant City Manager Tina Shull told the Santa Cruz Council during a homelessness update to the Santa Cruz City Council on Dec. 11.
The camp began to take shape before the city shuttered its first sanctioned and multi-jurisdiction funded homeless encampment, the River Street Camp at 1220 River St., in mid-November. This month, Shull explained part of the camp closure rationale — timed to coincide with the opening of a 60-bed emergency overnight winter shelter.
“All the jurisdictions were talking about this and the very strong preference was to have indoor shelter,” Shull said. “Thinking about the rain and the cold, and you have an option where we think vulnerable individuals should be and also the public health officials were very concerned about the camp and the wet and the cold. And we were very concerned about how we were going to keep the camp in tact, keep it dry, keep it warm.”
Looking ahead
In its last meeting of the year, the council endorsed city management staff’s proposal to return to the council with cost proposals in January for several homeless service-related projects. Those efforts include reopening a winter shelter at a Salvation Army facility on Laurel Street, but initially limited to 40 women, children and mobility challenged individuals as early as the end of January. Neighborhood complaints had helped to keep the site from reopening for the third winter last month, and a new operation model and increased security would be expected with this year’s shelter model, Shull said. On a related note, the city will consider opening its Freight Building at Depot Park for twice weekly Laurel Street shelter intake and meal service.
City officials also plan to return in January with spending plans to jointly contribute regional funding to expand Warming Center Program operations and to allow use of the city’s Harvey West Clubhouse/Scouthouse as an overflow shelter site for the Laurel Street Shelter and/or the Warming Center for as many as 15 nights this winter. Finally, the council agreed to spend $100,000 from its general fund for some of these efforts, as well as to keep the already existing and struggling year-round emergency shelter at the Paul Lee Loft operating for four additional months, through May 31.
Meanwhile, at the new encampment, the city Parks and Recreation Department is overseeing trash pickup and maintaining four on-site portable toilets and hand-washing stations, while county health officials pay regular outreach service visits to the technically unsanctioned camp. When asked by outgoing Councilwoman Richelle Noroyan why the city is shouldering sanitation service costs, instead of the county, Shull said, “I think we want to step in, the city, because we want to be better. It’s our Riverwalk, as well, it’s our community members traversing the path there.”
“We think that people need a place to go, it grew, it felt safer,” Shull said of the camp’s growth in the wake of increasing park camping enforcement elsewhere in the city.