Stored for Safe-Keeping, Never To Be Seen Again

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

When Stephenie came upon workers in Portland, Oregon, who had bagged up all of her belongings in a homeless encampment sweep, she desperately pleaded to get one item back: her purse. It contained her cash and food stamp card — what she needed to survive.

The crew refused to look for it, she said. The items workers had put in clear bags were headed to a city warehouse. Those in black bags were headed to a landfill.

They handed her a card with a phone number to call if she wanted to pick up her things.

Pregnant and hungry, Stephenie was supposed to rest and avoid heavy lifting. She now had to start all over. In the days that followed last September, Stephenie slept on a sidewalk for the first time. She said she attempted suicide.

“I had nowhere to go — no place, no tent, no nothing. I couldn’t even feed myself,” she said. “The lowest point I’ve ever been in my life was after the sweep.”

As homelessness has reached crisis levels, more cities are clearing tents and encampments in operations commonly called sweeps. Since a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June allowed cities to punish people for sleeping outside, even if there’s no shelter available, some have made their encampment policies more punitive and increased the frequency of sweeps.

Some cities have programs to store what they take, sometimes created in response to lawsuits. In theory, these storage programs are supposed to protect people’s property rights and make it easy to get their possessions back.

In reality, they rarely accomplish either objective, according to a ProPublica investigation of the policies in regions with the largest homeless populations.

ProPublica obtained records from 14 cities showing what was stored following encampment clearings. In Los Angeles and San Diego, thousands of encampments are removed each year, but the belongings taken from them are rarely stored, the records showed. San Diego, for example, removed more than 3,000 sites during 2023 but only documented storing belongings 19 times. In Seattle, the city removed nearly 1,000 encampments during a six-month period last year and stored belongings from just 55 of them.

Even when possessions are stored, the records showed, people are rarely able to reclaim them. In Portland, which stores the most among the cities ProPublica reviewed, property was reclaimed 4% of the time during a recent 12-month period. In San Francisco, property was reclaimed roughly 12% of the time over 18 months; much of what the city stored was collected after contact with police. Records provided to ProPublica by Anaheim, California, showed nothing had been retrieved from January 2023 through May of this year.

Some cities did not address ProPublica’s questions about the low rates at which people are able to retrieve their belongings. But they broadly defended their encampment practices, saying that they balance the rights of people experiencing homelessness with public health needs.

In Portland, officials said they manage an extensive database of stored belongings and “share in the collective frustration in the difficulties in managing a system that works well for everyone.” When asked about the sweep in which Stephenie’s items were taken, they acknowledged that camp removals are harmful to unhoused people, but that they must also maintain city property and natural areas.

ProPublica heard from at least 95 people who had experienced encampment clearings in cities with programs to store belongings. Thirty said they tried to recover their belongings but hit obstacles, such as being unable to reach anyone at the facility or the site not having everything that was taken. Only one person got back all of his items.

The rest said they didn’t try, often because they didn’t know how to go about it, lacked phones or transportation, or thought, and in some cases saw, that their belongings had already been thrown away.

The storage programs offer only an “illusion of compassion,” said Barbara DiPietro, senior director of policy for the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. People experiencing homelessness often endure encampment clearings multiple times, which “wears a human being down,” DiPietro said. “I’ve never heard anyone say they got their stuff back.”

Dozens of outreach workers and advocates in cities with storage programs echoed DiPietro’s statements. Advocates and people with lived experience said this deprives homeless people of belongings they need to survive on the street and forces them to reconstruct their lives and obtain new identification documents when they are taken.

“The loss of property was the harshest punishment many people felt they could face on the street,” said Chris Herring, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, who researches homelessness.

When Stephenie called to retrieve her belongings last October, no one answered the storage facility phone number. The line was staffed for limited hours. She left a message but couldn’t always keep her phone charged in case someone called back. When she finally reached a person, they provided the address and an appointment time. She had to take multiple buses and walk to get there.

As she sorted through the large clear bags at the warehouse, she realized her tent, most of her tarps and her cooking stove weren’t there. Nor was her purse or prenatal vitamins. Her engagement ring and the notes from her late fiance were also gone.

She left the bags behind.

“To go through all that trouble to get my stuff back and then to have nothing that I needed there, and to have that decided by somebody else who doesn’t even know me, it was traumatizing all in itself,” she said. “It was heartbreaking. It felt like losing everything all over again.”

A response to lawsuits

Nearly half of the cities ProPublica examined created storage programs in response to lawsuits alleging they had violated people’s property rights by destroying belongings during encampment removals. Yet some of those cities, including Phoenix, continue to throw away possessions, according to advocates and people who sleep outside.

In December 2022, after a local advocacy group and unhoused people sued the city of Phoenix for violating the rights of homeless people, a chief U.S. district judge issued an injunction against seizing their property without advanced notice and ordered the city to store belongings for at least 30 days.

The city began storing belongings in May 2023. Since then, it has responded to 4,900 reports from the public involving encampments, according to city records through May. The city of Phoenix said workers, trained to assess which items are property and which are trash, found storable property at 405 of the locations it visited, and not all of those cases required storage because people may have removed their belongings prior to their arrival. The city stored belongings 69 times.

In June, the Department of Justice issued a report following a nearly three-year investigation, finding that the city and its police department destroyed belongings without providing adequate notice or an opportunity to collect them. Before property is destroyed, the city must provide notice, catalog the property and store it so people can retrieve their belongings, federal investigators wrote.

Benjamin Rundall, who represents the plaintiffs in the ongoing lawsuit, said he has never encountered anyone whose belongings were stored by the city. “It’s just giving this appearance that they’re doing something when they’re not doing anything,” he said.

Over the summer, Mike Leeth was helping a friend move their things from a Phoenix alley, leaving his own camp unattended. He rushed back to find his own belongings — clothing, canned food and canopies for shade — were gone. “All of a sudden, I’m down to one set of clothes, and I can’t even wash them because I’m currently wearing them,” he said.

Leeth said the city has thrown away his belongings at least five times. He said he has never been told that his property would be stored.

The city said in a statement that workers give notice and store unattended property, and that it’s “confident” its processes address encampments in a “dignified and compassionate manner.”

In other cities, lawsuits have continued long after storage programs were put into place.

Los Angeles, with the nation’s largest population of people sleeping outside, has in the last 30 years faced nearly a dozen lawsuits over the destruction of property in homeless camps, according to court records.

A 2019 lawsuit brought by seven people experiencing homelessness and two advocacy groups alleged the city has “codified” seizing and destroying belongings, rather than investing in bathrooms, hand-washing stations and trash cans for unhoused people. In April, a federal judge overseeing the case found that the city had altered documentation of what crews removed during cleanups.

The city declined to comment on the ongoing lawsuit.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the city of Los Angeles provided data showing that it stored belongings only 4% of the time during a three-month period in 2023. A spokesperson said the city recognizes the “importance of ensuring people have their personal belongings” and “works to not unnecessarily remove anyone’s belongings during cleanings.”

In April, when crews came to move Ismael Arias from where he was living on a sidewalk in a Los Angeles suburb, they took his plumbing tools, a Mexican coin collection given to him by his father and a baseball card collection he was planning to give to his son.

A friend drove him to reclaim his things. At the storage facility, he was given items to look through. “I said, ‘This is not my stuff,’ and they said, ‘Well, this is all we got,’” he said. “I was like, ‘What do you mean this is all you got?’”

ProPublica spoke to three others who attempted to retrieve belongings from Los Angeles storage facilities and found some or all of their things were missing.

Evidence in an ongoing lawsuit in San Francisco revealed that workers were not instructed how to distinguish between personal property that is unattended, abandoned property and property that’s mixed in with biohazards, Chief Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu wrote. Workers’ decisions “appear to give rise to the most disputes,” Ryu wrote in August. The city agreed to better train workers who handle the belongings of homeless people at removals.

The ruling came weeks after Mayor London Breed promised “a very aggressive” crackdown on encampments. Breed lost her race for reelection.

In August, two ProPublica reporters observed San Francisco public works employees clear an encampment of tents, plastic bins of clothing, a cot and bikes. Nothing was set aside to be stored. One employee did slip into his uniform’s oversized pocket a tin of baseball cards taken from the encampment; he then placed it in the cab of a work truck rather than the back, where other belongings were stacked. The city said it is investigating the incident.

Barriers to claiming property

In Portland two years ago, workers took Errol Elliott’s tools, clothing, electronics and makeshift tent near the church where he stayed. He was given information about storage but didn’t have a way to carry his things.

“How are you going to pick it up when you have no car and you’ve got nine bags of stuff or two big trunks of tools?” he said. “How are you supposed to get that back? They act like it’s so easy to go and get it, but it’s not that easy.”

Portland officials said in this kind of situation, property was probably taken to storage.

But people in Portland and other cities told ProPublica that even if local officials promise to store belongings, they’re often difficult to retrieve. The programs don’t take into consideration the challenges of experiencing homelessness, which include lack of access to transportation and not having a phone, they said. It is further complicated by requiring an appointment to retrieve belongings or not widely distributing the address where items are stored.

Some cities — such as Seattle; Portland, Oregon; Anaheim, California; and San Jose, California — don’t publicize the addresses of their storage facilities because of concerns about security. Phoenix says it delivers belongings to people, but records show people there are rarely reunited with their property.

When people do figure out where to go, the journey can be long and require multiple trips.

In Denver, for instance, the storage facility is only open for limited hours. Some people have trekked to the warehouse only to be told their belongings were stored off-site and have to be retrieved, said Andy McNulty, an attorney who sued the city on behalf of people who live outside. When they return they’re told that their belongings weren’t stored, he said.

“It’s pretty common knowledge to folks on the street now that if the city takes your stuff, even if they say they’re going to store it, it’s gone,” McNulty said.

The city of Denver said that people receive a claim slip when their items are stored after an encampment removal. Flyers with contact information are also widely shared so people can arrange a pickup, the city said.

In Los Angeles, a sign giving notice of a June encampment clearing in the San Fernando Valley directed people to call or retrieve their items from the Bins downtown, which is about two hours away on public transit. Multiple people said the distance prevented them from getting their things back or that they were unable to reach anyone for more information on how to retrieve them.

The city stores belongings at 10 locations across Los Angeles, making it even more challenging for people to find their things.

People who experienced encampment removals and researchers who study homelessness said the programs could be more effective by giving clearer notice, providing trash cans and garbage pickup and making sure people have detailed instructions on how to retrieve belongings.

Sonja Verdugo-Baumgartner, an advocate in Los Angeles who said she has experienced sweeps herself, said storage programs could be more productive if cities put effort into them. “But I don’t see the city or anybody being willing to take the time to do that,” she said. “And they can’t just do it for a few people, they need to do it across the board, for anytime they do a sweep.”

Stephenie, whose belongings were taken in Portland, said the experience was crushing.

“It keeps you in what we call a ‘homeless rut,’ where we can’t focus on anything else except being homeless,” she said. “We can’t focus on getting out of it and moving forward.”

She now lives in an RV, which makes it easier to haul her belongings when city workers show up. But she has to move the vehicle every few weeks to avoid being towed, and finding a spot to park is challenging. She has noticed more cement blocks cropping up in parking spaces along the roadsides.