Transient trouble close to home

“Tent City,” as its denizens called it, wasn’t much of a city.

Tucked into the cottonwood groves and grassy meadows on the edge of Lawrence Park, it consisted of about a dozen makeshift shelters, from new-looking camping tents to tarp-and-pole lean-tos and piles of bedding and trash simply pushed up against alcoves in the shrubs along the Stillwater River.

Yet those who called the transient camp home — some for months at a time — saw it as way for the valley’s growing homeless population to keep out of sight and thus out of trouble.

“We all help each other out, it’s not just one person. We’re pretty much a family,” James DeVera said. “If someone needs clothing, or food, or an extra tent, we give it to them.”

Until Kalispell police cleared out the camp late last month, DeVera had lived in his tent on the wooded outskirts of the park at the bottom a hill rising up to Whitefish Stage Road. He described life in the camp as relatively peaceful, aside from the steady sound of traffic above.

Born and raised in Kalispell, he said he’s homeless by choice. He gets a Social Security check each month, and had spent the past seven summers living in the park in order to afford temporary housing when the cold sets in. His occupation, fixing up bicycles, is more of a hobby than it is a job — he said he gives the bikes away to whoever needs one.

But he also admitted that Tent City, which averaged about 15 transients during the summer months, also attracted less desirable elements. He said a dispute over money between a pair of his neighbors had culminated in a stabbing the previous week.

June Thomas, who was living out of a Ford Bronco parked nearby, viewed the encampment as a practical response to a community that doesn’t exactly want to advertise the increasing presence of transients during the tourist season.

“They say, ‘We’re donating, we’re taking care of the homeless,’ but if you’ve got one in your parking lot, they call the cops and tell you to move,” Thomas said. “I’d rather be in a parking lot, where I feel safe. .... I’ve been booted out of about every parking lot here.”

In the Flathead Valley, law enforcement officials and social workers say the number of people without stable housing is on the rise.

While he’s unsure what’s driving the increase, Kalispell Police Chief Roger Nasset has noticed a dramatic rise in the number of area residents without housing this year.

“Unequivocally, this has been the busiest year that we’ve ever had with homeless, vagrant or transient individuals,” he said prior to his department’s eviction of the Lawrence Park campers. “There’s not even a close comparison.”

Sherry Stevens is the executive director of the local United Way, which works to help find resources for those fallen on hard economic times. The lack of affordable housing in the valley is evident to anyone who has looked for a cheap rental house, and she says it’s the main driver behind the growing homeless population.

“Based on the fact that we also have a housing shortage in Flathead County, there are people now renting places that we used to use for temporary shelter,” Stevens said.

In response, her organization this year began a program to address the more immediate problems for those with no shelter: free tents and sleeping bags to anyone who needs them.

Since January, the United Way has given out more than 60 sleeping bags and about three dozen tents. Another 50 people are on the waiting list for sleeping bags, along with 32 waiting for tents.

“That kind of shows you the unmet need that going on in the valley,” Stevens added.

January 2014 is the last time the state published the findings of its annual Montana Homeless Survey. That year, it estimated Flathead County’s homeless population at 759, the first time since 2010 it had sunk below the four-digit mark.

The United Way’s annual survey earlier this year found 428 people in the Flathead Valley who considered themselves “unsheltered” out of 958 respondents. Another 358 considered themselves “in an emergency state,” which Stevens said could be someone living temporarily at a relative’s house or otherwise sheltered, but without stable housing.

“What we’re seeing in the increase is just all the people flocking in, saying, ‘I don’t have a place to stay, I don’t know what I’m going to do tonight,” Stevens said.

For some, the Flathead Valley’s shelters provide a chance to secure enough of a foothold to become self-sufficient. But the demand for emergency housing is far in excess of the supply, which is mostly limited to the Samaritan House and A Ray of Hope in Kalispell.

Chris Krager, the Samaritan House’s executive director, says his organization can provide more than 100 beds on any given night. His clients’ average stay is several months, enough time to find work and get on stable financial footing.

“Eighty-six percent of the time, when someone leaves the Samaritan House, they are no longer homeless,” Krager said. “My approach is to grow the Samaritan House to address homelessness in our area.”

But increasing demand for emergency housing coupled with shelter policies requiring sobriety and a relatively clean criminal background leave many in a cycle of instability. The availability of local drug treatment programs is in similarly short supply, so those struggling with addiction are left often without the resources to address either of the often-intertwined crises.

Morgan Tate works for the Sunburst Community Service Foundation’s Kalispell Village, a drop-in center where she directs those in need to help to what community resources are available.

“We try to check Craigslist, go to people renting out rooms in their homes, and we resort to trying to be their advocate if they have a felony that’s years and years old and wasn’t anything too bad,” she said. “Sometimes we can get them into an apartment, but it’s not always guaranteed.”

The Village also provides housing applications, job postings, a snack bar and “blessing bags” containing basics such as razors and shaving cream, shampoo and blankets. Like DeVera, she notes that for some, homelessness is a choice: no landlord or rent payments and the freedom to sustain themselves without having to answer to an employer.

But for many, the homeless situation has deeper roots in mental or physical disabilities, drug addiction, a checkered criminal history, relationship problems or simply a couple poor decisions compounded by bad luck.

“Things happen in a flash,” she added. “It’s not always people who are homeless that are panhandling and looking for money.”

June Thomas, who had only recently begun living out of her truck in Tent City, said her life has been marked by frequent instability.

Growing up in Ogden, Utah, she and her brother were sexually abused by their grandfather, she said, and she links their troubled upbringing to her sibling’s regular stints in prison and her past drug addiction.

She said she has been diagnosed with multiple mental conditions and was left physically disabled by leg injuries from vehicle accidents.

Thomas lives off of a welfare check, but said it isn’t enough for her to afford housing. She doesn’t see the Flathead Valley’s recent spike in job availability as any help to her.

“You don’t get it. It’s not that easy,” she said with a look of exasperation. “I’m mentally ill, man.”

Nasset’s officers routinely respond to complaints about vagrants throughout the city, but he said they generally try to take a live-and-let-live approach.

“If they’re out of sight, generally they’re out of mind as far as we care, as long as they’re not bothering somebody and their health and welfare is fine,” he explained. While it’s not ideal, he added that the police sometimes allow them to catch a few hours’ sleep in the lobby of the police department.

Tent City, however, eventually began generating concerns from park visitors and nearby residents. Nasset said it had been the subject of multiple nuisance complaints ranging from noise emanating up the hill and large bonfires at night to petty theft and trash strewn throughout the premises.

Ben Long, who lives adjacent to the park, said that while he doesn’t blame the people residing in the park, the spillover effects of the semi-permanent settlement had created a “black eye for the community.”

“It has gotten amazingly extensive. It’s a village,” Long said about a week before officers cleared it out. “I feel for the people that are living down there, but the sanitation is atrocious. ... You can hear them fighting in the middle of the night.”

Extensive piles of trash required a team of volunteers to remove it in the days after the transients’ ejection.

Nasset said that he had no choice but to respond to the growing number of complaints he was getting.

“Unfortunately, we can’t say, ‘go here’ or ‘go there,’” Nasset said. “We don’t have a good placement for them, but private landowners have asked that we do something.”

Short of solving the valley’s chronic housing shortage, local advocates and social workers say there are ways for the community to help reverse the homelessness trend.

“I think the right thing to do is to get to know each person, and figure out the causes and motivations,” Krager said.

“That’s why homelessness is not such an easy issue to tackle. It’s complex, and you should tackle it on a person-by-person basis.”

The Samaritan House, United Way and the Sunburst Foundation are always accepting donations and the help of volunteers.

And while Tate said that homelessness is less frequently tied to drug addiction than many people think, expanded treatment options in the area could help address one underlying cause.

“There’s a lot of drug-induced psychosis, and basically they want to get help,” she said. “I’ve taken people to Pathways, and they won’t accept them if they’re currently high or coming down, because they don’t have the staff for that.”

Tate commended the work being done at the Samaritan House and A Ray of Hope, adding that the growth of those organizations has helped many local residents get back on their feet. But she admits that for the time being, working to support the valley’s growing homeless population can feel like an uphill battle.

“I feel like we’re maybe making a very small dent because the homelessness in the Flathead Valley is huge. There’s a huge problem with it.”

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.