Tent City set to close, but questions remain

The self-governing Camden homeless encampment known as Tent City, which draws daily donations and has attracted international attention, is being shut down next week.

But with its "mayor" threatening to stay, Camden County officials desperate for a solution, and advocates for the homeless divided, questions about the residents' eviction abound.

County authorities say Tent City, down the block from the downtown police headquarters, has become an unsanitary haven for drug users and criminals. Officials want to use federal stimulus funds to find apartments, drug rehabilitation services, and mental-health support for the residents.

Tent City, also called Transition Park or Transitional Park, is to close April 15. What that means, though, no one is quite sure.

Some of the 50 or so people who live there, in the woods inside an exit ramp of I-676, say the county is bluffing. Many say they doubt promised services are available. Others say that because of post-traumatic stress and other mental problems, they need to live outside.

"I don't do inside," said Lorenzo "Jamaica" Banks, Tent City's founder and widely acknowledged mayor. "I'm staying."

Banks, who is treated with reverence on the state-owned patch of mud and grass, walks with a limp after suffering frostbite on two toes during the grueling winter.

"Where are you going to put 60 people?" Banks asked. "The crime is going to shoot sky-high. What are these people going to do to survive?"

Residents say they have developed a community that is safer, for themselves and the city, than if they were forced to live in abandoned houses, on the street, or in shelters.

Though advocates for the homeless have attended monthly Camden Tent City Task Force meetings since the fall, some who work with the Tent City community question Camden County's approach.

"Where do they go? A storefront? An abandominium?" asked Hal Miller, homeless coordinator for Volunteers of America Delaware Valley. There are more than 1,000 abandominiums, slang for vacant houses, in Camden. A man died Tuesday morning in a fire in one such building.

Miller said several Tent City residents whom he visits regularly do not qualify for public housing because they have felony drug convictions. Others have previous evictions, bad credit, or intractable drug problems.

"You kick them out of homelessness to more homelessness," Miller said.

In a way, he said, Tent City is "a safe environment compared to where they would be living."

Camden County's director of community development, Gino Lewis, a Camden native who said he grew up with some residents of Tent City, said he had worked for months with Banks to find a solution.

Through the task force, run by a Pennsauken nonprofit group called the Community Planning and Advocacy Council, at least 10 Tent City residents have recently found housing, Lewis said. Banks serves on the committee and suggested the April 15 deadline, he said.

But when the weather got warmer, the numbers at Tent City swelled. He said Banks did not keep his promise to prohibit new residents.

Many could afford to live on their own, Lewis said, but they prefer to live rent-free so they can spend their unemployment and veterans benefits on alcohol and drugs. "They don't want to give up their disposable cash because it will cut into their recreational funds," he said.

Lewis listed a variety of public, religious, and nonprofit organizations ready to help with rent, utilities, down payments, temporary motel stays, financial counseling, and inpatient drug detox.

"I'm holding [Banks] to his word," Lewis said. "They deserve better, and that's really what we're looking to do."

Banks said his plan all along was to stay past the deadline with just a few original residents. He said he would clean the place up and re-open it in July. Newcomers, he said, could stay only temporarily at Tent City before moving to stable housing.

He denied Lewis' assertion that the county had found an apartment for him. "Nobody told me to my face that they found nothing," he said.

Beginning Thursday, workers will visit Tent City to try to link residents with services before April 15.

And then what? Lewis says he has sleepless nights thinking about that.

"Are we going to save everybody? Is everybody going to be willing to do this? We're not foolish enough to think that's going to occur," he said.

Lewis said he did not want April 15 to "turn ugly, but we also recognize we do not want [Tent City] to continue the way it is."

Two other tent cities in Camden will be unaffected at first, but eventually also will be shut down, Lewis said. He said there were plans to construct a county shelter at an undisclosed location.

"If we allow [Tent City] to continue, then we're part of the problem, not part of the solution," Lewis said.

Camden Mayor Dana L. Redd would not comment. Gov. Christie, who visited Tent City during his campaign and was "very moved by what he saw," will follow up with those involved, spokesman Michael Drewniak said.

"It presents a real dilemma for people living there, for organizations trying to help and the state and county and local governments," Drewniak said.

There is a diverse population at Tent City, which houses residents ages 23 to 68, including a pregnant woman.

On several visits by The Inquirer over more than a year, no drug use was evident, although Banks said it was hard to stop people from doing as they like in their own tents.

"Any neighborhood you go to, there's going to be drugs," Banks said.

Drinking alcohol is permitted and commonplace. On a warm spring afternoon, with "Brick House" playing on a boom box and residents smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, Tent City felt more like a family campground than a last resort for America's most desperate.

Residents look out for each other. When a diabetic man passed out in his chair last week, his comrades rushed to help him.

"You're tough, you're mean, don't let this thing beat you!" James Boggs screamed at him.

After 15 minutes, the man came to, thanked Boggs, and lit a smoke.

Tent City has evolved since Banks moved there in 2006.

Trees have been chopped down for firewood. Grass turned to mud, which was then covered by wood planks for sidewalks. Donated solar-powered lights provide illumination and indicate permanency.

"They say we're high-profile," said Boggs, Banks' spokesman, who moved to Tent City after doing prison time for bank robbery. "Too many people know about us."

Documentarians from Europe have shot footage. Amateur photographers have spent the night. Churches have posted pleas for help online - and those pleas have been answered.

"Guess what?" asked Maryann Joyner, 46. "We never go hungry."

Joyner described the ox tails, collard greens, and chitterlings that she ate - and that was just the night before.

The sanitation facilities remain primitive. Still, residents say the experiment is successful.

Through media attention, at least three people have been reunited with loved ones. Some, such as Joyner, have gone to school while living at Tent City.

"I can't sit here and let my mind go to waste," she said.

Banks and Boggs have gotten city sanitation workers to pick up trash. They have developed relationships with police officers who drop off pizza, and city firefighters who have donated smoke detectors and fire extinguishers.

Boggs is part of a "leadership" team at Tent City. He has a cell phone, an e-mail address, and a password-protected online database of residents' names, which he can access at a day shelter in the city.

He also collects contact information for donors, whom he taps for specific needs: sanitary napkins, rope, Sterno.

"Closing the place," Boggs said, "is not going to solve a damn thing."