"This has never been a solution to homelessness."
Those words, spoken by Wheeling resident and homeless advocate Kate Marshall, unfortunately have never been more true. Evicting people -- homeless or not -- from where they live does not solve the problem of them being homeless. It does not force them to possibly reevaluate why they're living on the streets, or to seek a different path for their lives.
It simply moves them elsewhere.
On Wednesday, the last of the homeless population that had been living under an overpass on 18th Street in Wheeling moved on. The Wheeling Police Department facilitated the camp's closure after the West Virginia Department of Transportation asked the city to enforce the "No Trespassing" signs at the site.
It's now up to people like Marshall and Wheeling's homeless liaison, Melissa Adams, to help many of these folks pick up the pieces.
"They are grieving the loss of their neighborhood and their home. ... I think this is the same way people in Kentucky are feeling right now," Marshall said.
The encampment's breakup has essentially been a trial by fire for Adams. On the job for just a few months now, Adams has been working to help facilitate mental health care for some of the camp's residents, and also worked with Youth Services Systems earlier this month to have the Winter Freeze Shelter open early so folks would have somewhere warm to sleep.
As we've noted previously, helping the homeless is a complex matter. In this case, though, those living at the 18th Street site had been there, in some cases, for more than a year.
That allowed them to experience some semblance of community, with services such as Catholic Charities and the Soup Kitchen of Greater Wheeling nearby. The state simply did a poor job in addressing this.
At the end of the day, this truth remains: those displaced from the encampment will find another underpass or other safe place to go until they are told again to move along. Evicting them from the 18th Street site does not solve that.