Advocates seek aid for unhoused people in Alabama’s ‘Rocket City’
Homecoming weekend at Alabama A&M University is always a busy one in Huntsville. But earlier this month, while undergrads and alums celebrated the big game with parties, concerts and a parade, a much smaller group of people huddled in the shadow of the Interstate 565/Highway 431 interchange, trying to figure out where they were going to live in the coming days.
The morning was quiet except for the hiss of tires from the nearby roadway. The wood smoke, tainted by the smell of burnt plastic, created a haze over the dew and burned both eyes and nostrils. For the fourth time in as many years, the city of Huntsville was giving notice that they were closing a homeless encampment. City administrators had determined the treed lot, known as “The Slab,” had become dangerous for the 75 to 100 people living there after a fire tore through the camp in September.
This time, they were moving 100 yards down the road, so city workers could clean up the old encampment – or conduct what is commonly called a camp sweep.
In the video: A representative from Love Huntsville, a grassroots organization that works to end homelessness, talks about the city's response to the Derrick Street encampment fire.
At the new site, a woman named Danita, who said she was in her 60s but did not want to provide her last name, was trying to get her belongings together, sitting in the middle of a pile of clothes and bags, a shopping cart full of belongings next to her. While sorting through her things, she related how the housing authority, without explanation, denied her request for affordable housing.
“I went to the housing authority and tried to get an apartment,” Danita said, adding that they took her information but would not provide a place for her to rent. “So now I’m back to square one.”
Although she had tried to find housing within her means through the authority, Danita had nowhere else to go but the piece of ground that the city had provided for the campsite.
Duane, who also did not want to share his last name and splits his time between The Slab and a house his mother shares with her sister, was sorting out Danita’s belongings, trying to create some semblance of order. He had already set his orange nylon tent up on the other side of the new compound, along the hurricane fence that bounded the site.
“She’s my friend, so I try to look out for her,” he said.
This time, the trek was short. But the new site offered nothing but a gently sloping field of grass. The hastily constructed chain-link fence and three city trash cans were the only infrastructure, aside from the tents and belongings starting to fill the space.
“There’s no water trucks or U-Hauls or anything,” said Josh Roberts, a local cameraman volunteering with Love Huntsville, a grassroots organization that works to end homelessness and intergenerational poverty, to help with the move. “There’s nothing. There’s a 150-by-150-foot square and a fence.”
When the topic of Danita’s experience being denied housing came up amongst the volunteers, Love Huntsville Executive Director Emma Steelman reacted with recognition and resignation.
“It’s awful,” Steelman said. “It’s really hostile. Three years ago, we faced a significant shortage of affordable housing units that were available, and I don’t feel like that number has gotten any smaller. In fact, the situation has worsened with rising rent costs driven by corporate investments, making Huntsville one of the most expensive rental markets in Alabama. Around 40% of renters are now cost-burdened, paying more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. So, no one can leave because there is nowhere to go to get back on your feet.”
Homeless encampments in Huntsville
Homeless encampments like The Slab in Huntsville have become both a refuge and a last resort for people with nowhere else to go.
“Many of our unhoused friends find stability and autonomy within these camps, where they can connect with others experiencing similar challenges,” said Tia Turner, Love Huntsville co-founder. “Homeless shelters serve an important role in responding to homelessness, but we understand that shelters often impose restrictions that don’t work for everyone. Shelters may be full, offer only short stays, charge fees, or may be unable to accommodate people with disabilities. Some shelters require sobriety; deny entry to people with criminal records; do not accommodate people unable to separate from their children, partners or pets; or may limit the amount of possessions that a person can bring. People experiencing homelessness often feel unsafe and dehumanized in shelters or prefer the autonomy, companionship and community that encampments offer.”
Turner also said, “Encampments may not offer a permanent solution, but for many, they provide a vital sense of community and stability until they can access safe, affordable housing.”
A history of camp closures
The city of Huntsville has a long history of closing homelessness encampments and conducting sweeps – the forced removal of people experiencing homelessness and their possessions from a homeless camp on a temporary or permanent basis.
The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the only federal agency with the mission of ending homelessness, cautions that camp closures can harm people experiencing homelessness and disrupt efforts to connect people to support services. In April, it provided guidance to cities about approaching encampments to minimize the trauma and harm that camp residents often experience when being dislocated from their property and communities.
As a result of prior sweeps, people experiencing homelessness in Huntsville report a lack of trust and confidence in city government and service providers. In prior camp closures, police have made arrests and used bulldozers to clear the area, destroying what property the residents may have had.
In 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center partnered with Love Huntsville to raise concerns about the city’s decision to close the Derrick Street homeless encampment without sufficient notice or efforts to accommodate people with physical and mental disabilities.
“Criminalizing unhoused people who sleep in tents, sleeping bags or bedding on public property without providing individual housing units just displaces people experiencing homelessness, risks the destruction of property, and inevitably leads to subsequent encampments,” Miriam Gutman and Micah West, two attorneys with the SPLC’s Economic Justice litigation team, along with other representatives of organizations that are coming to the aid of unhoused people, wrote in a letter to Huntsville officials at the time.
After receiving the letter, Huntsville officials agreed to delay the camp closure and to provide additional notice to residents about the camp closure.
Gutman and West then spent two days working with volunteers at Love Huntsville to move dozens of residents to The Slab, which the city is now temporarily closing following the September fire at the camp.
The best and worst of times
Huntsville, known as Rocket City, is seen as a city on the move. Long a center for tech industry activity thanks to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal, it came in second in U.S. News and World Report’s list of top cities to live in for 2023-2024.
But in the area west of downtown, which is where The Slab is located, the outlook has less glimmer. Interstate highways, railroad tracks and flood zones combine to disrupt neighborhoods. The area surrounding Derrick Street is part of what has been designated the Mill Creek Redevelopment District, a blighted area that is getting a $350 million influx of capital for a mixed-income housing development that will include health care, child care and senior care. In theory, it will also provide shelter for many of the nearly 600 unhoused people who continue to call Huntsville home.
Meanwhile, the Derrick Street residents have been told they will return to The Slab by January after the city cleans the camp. Completion of proposed residential units, public parks, retail spaces and other amenities in the area are years away, and neither the advocates nor the residents of The Slab feel that people living there will be able to afford to live in the new developments.
According to its website, the Mill Creek development is envisioned for an area that underperforms economically in almost every way. According to 2020 census data, more than two-thirds of the households in its footprint earn less than $25,000 per year. Almost 70% of the 676 families are single-parent families. More than half of the existing housing inventory is small apartments, with single-family dwellings making up slightly more than a third.
By comparison, across the state, more than 68% of the homes are single-family dwellings, with 15% of the families having a single parent, and only 28% of the households earning less than $25,000.
Rent soared
Although some redevelopment has already occurred, residents of the Derrick Street camp say it has happened to their detriment as rent soared.
“They didn’t even slowly do it,” said Nicole, a single mother living in the Derrick Street camp who said the rent suddenly skyrocketed. “Just one day you walk in and it’s like exactly two times the price. It was affordable and, next thing you know, it wasn’t affordable.”
Isaac Williams, who is the recognized “governor” of the camp, said he tried to get a studio apartment at a development on the other side of the highway from the encampment.
“The city is not broke,” Williams said. “They are not broke. They are building up every day, all day. I mean like crazy. I don’t understand how they are filling up these apartments, how they are filling them up because it’s getting ridiculous in Huntsville. I applied through the housing authority for a studio apartment. One-room studio. And it was $2,097 a month.”
Love Huntsville’s Steelman agreed with Williams’ assessment.
“All the apartments that are being built are like really expensive,” Steelman said. “They’re luxury apartments. They’re building some things downtown that are not of that nature, but they are in areas that are food deserts or that aren’t near public transportation, which is terrible here.”
Roberts, the Love Huntsville volunteer who was helping unhoused people move their belongings, expounded on the city’s lack of public transport.
“Buses will run later for events, like if the amphitheater has a lot of paying customers,” he said. “But if you work a night shift, you’re screwed. Service-industry people aren’t using the bus to get home. No. And there’s no bus stops in neighborhoods. It’s another thing that serves the merchants, not the people.”
Finding a ‘livable path’
By the time the Saturday, Oct. 12 workday was done, the bulk of the residents had been moved from the old camp to the new enclosure. But about a dozen tents remained at the old site. At the new site, a freight train rumbled past less than 50 yards away. A blast of its air horn deafened those in the camp as it cut through the city.
“The [city] homeless coordinators are not on their side, I’ll tell you that much,” said Steelman. “They hate homeless people. They want them to earn it. God forbid if you’re disabled, depressed, traumatized or have learning disabilities. They’re like, ‘You deserve to be here because you clearly want to be here, and if you didn’t want to be here, you wouldn’t.’”
The move was the latest chapter in an ongoing struggle between the city administration, community advocates and the unhoused population that has left those who are most in need, literally, in the middle of an empty field with little or no support. And after years without results from political leaders, there is little trust that any change will be coming. Even as the city moves to rejuvenate the area, advocates say they are not convinced the work will help those who need aid as much as it will help developers, business owners and more affluent residents.
“They have torn down several low-income housing structures already,” Steelman said. “They’ll add a few lower-rent places, but the prices will be higher and there won’t be enough.”
On a positive note, she said this latest move is the first time that the city has designated a place for the tents, even if officials will not commit to providing water or sewage service for the camp.
“This is different because this is the first time the city has ever conceded and not done a full sweep through the park with bulldozers and police,” Steelman said. “We can’t force people to move. We want to make sure we got consent, but we were able to move the people that I was worried about, those who had disabilities.”
On Oct. 15, the day before the 6 a.m. deadline for residents to have vacated the old site, police checked to make sure no one was moving any of their belongings back onto the old campsite.
Williams, however, was looking forward to a time when the effort to help the unhoused community moves beyond offering a few square feet of open ground and access to a trash can.
“This family, this community, can’t keep going without any kind of support,” he said. “First, it takes somebody to come in and recognize us. Someone who has the advocacy tools to be our voice, that has the passion in their heart to say, ‘Well, these young men and young women, they need us.’ Step two is talk to whoever they have to talk to in order to open some doors for us.”
Beyond that, Williams said sometimes it just takes giving someone a break.
“There’s a problem; we need to address it,” he said. “One way is to make a livable path for the people here, you know. Give me a jump start and let me get a job. Let me get started, let me get out.
“I’ll be happy to do it.”
Picture at top: Isaac Williams, “governor” of the Derrick Street homeless camp in Huntsville, Alabama. He said he is open to leaving the camp but cannot see a way to earn enough money to stay in traditional housing. (Credit: Dwayne Fatherree)
