SAN ANTONIO – Juan Galvan sat barefoot on a crate Friday afternoon, fiddling with a lighter as the IH-35 traffic rumbled overhead.
The tent behind him was one of several clustered in the shade of the elevated highway on the near East Side, making up the homeless camp where he says he has stayed for close to two years. He has gotten used to packing up, though. By his count, the City of San Antonio and the Texas Department of Transportation come out weekly to clear the place out.
It doesn’t stay cleared out long.
“Not even about to an hour,” he told KSAT before people began coming back. “But this is the only place we got right now to stay at. We got nowhere else to go.”
The camp under IH-35 is one of more than two dozen the City of San Antonio has mapped out an encampment dashboard as spots for recurring homeless camp cleanups — or what it refers to as “abatements.” Others call them “sweeps.”
CHECK THE INTERACTIVE CITY DASHBOARD HERE
Whatever their name, the encampment cleanups have been a central part of the city’s homelessness strategy for at least the past year.
Human Services Director Melody Woosley said the city tackles 32 sites biweekly, though it tries to clean up others that are reported within two weeks.
The city set a goal of doing 700 camp cleanups in FY 2024, which runs from October 2023 through September 2024.
With a little more than a month left, the city’s interactive tracking dashboard shows it has performed 1,152. The numbers include TxDOT sweeps as well.
As the city prepares for the 2025 fiscal year, it’s planning to go further: 1,300 cleanups.
City officials said they’re doing other things to tackle homelessness, too. They’re incentivizing new housing so people have somewhere to go after the shelters, and staff have proposed a $4.7 million budget for rental assistance programs to help keep people in their homes.
But encampment abatements are something the city can do immediately.
“We have got to stay consistent, and it’s going to have to be inconvenient for those encampments,” City Manager Erik Walsh told council members at a Wednesday budget briefing.
“And the minute we let up – especially given the pace of of how we’ve changed over the last 24 months – I believe, professionally, the minute we let up it’ll get out of hand again. And we need to stay on top of that.”
The cleanups were the second-highest ranked priority in a city budget survey, behind streets and ahead of services to assist the homeless. But they remain a controversial measure.
“Abatements is violence, like plain and simple,” said Maria Phippen, the founder and executive director of the mobile street clinic Yanawana Herbolarios.
While the city says it does outreach and gives notice at least 48 hours in advance, Phippen said the abatements “often” happen earlier than they were scheduled. If someone is away from the camp at that point, they can lose “everything.”
The use of abatements, she said, “sends the message that, like, ‘we don’t actually care to invest in your well-being, to sit down and to see what needs it is that you need met.’”
Katie Wilson, the head of Close to Home San Antonio, said abatements are a response to the community, but they don’t reduce homelessness.
“All we’re doing is moving people around,” Wilson said.
“So we do offer shelter, but in some cases we don’t have shelter capacity,” Wilson said. “Right now, some people are interested in housing, but we don’t have permanent supportive housing for everyone who needs it.”
Wilson said Close To Home has a roughly 2,500-person waitlist for housing resources such as rapid rehousing, permanent supportive housing, or housing vouchers.
2,500 people.
City council is scheduled to vote on the budget on Sep. 19.
Before that, the city has public hearings on the budget on Sep. 4 and Sep. 12.