With plans to extend Safe Harbor into a year-round shelter off the table for 2024, community leaders are gearing up for another busy summer season at the Pines, the burgeoning homeless encampment off Eleventh Street. Traverse City Manager Liz Vogel briefed commissioners Monday on recommendations she’ll make in her upcoming budget to help address the situation, while numerous community leaders shared updates about the city’s Quick Response Team and other local agencies partnering to provide solutions.

Vogel said she’ll include several items in her draft budget – which will be presented to commissioners on May 6 – to “strengthen the city’s response to homelessness.” Those will include adding a second community police officer and a second social worker on staff at the Traverse City Police Department (TCPD). The North Boardman Lake District (NoBo) – the neighborhood in which Safe Harbor is located – has also requested more garbage cans throughout the district, which Vogel says she’ll include in the budget.

“Additionally, City Attorney Lauren Trible-Laucht has taken the initiative to bring back the community court, which provides a pathway to housing,” Vogel said in in her update, adding that evidence shows community court “works” and “helps with recidivism.” Vogel told commissioners she’ll be presenting a “more complete picture on efforts underway with respect to our response to homelessness” in the coming weeks.

TCPD Chief Matt Richmond said 35 volunteers showed up each day on both Saturday and Monday to help in a major clean-up effort at the Pines, collecting three garbage trucks’ worth of trash from abandoned campsites and gear ahead of the upcoming season. “Hopefully this is a good start going forward into the summer, that we can keep tabs on the Pines, regulate behavior, enforce some of those ordinances we’ve agreed upon...so we that we can keep this in an orderly fashion,” Richmond said.

The police chief outlined other efforts the city has made to alleviate issues at the Pines. Those include creating a fire lane into the center of the Pines to provide for emergency access, installing GPS wayfinding signs to help quickly pinpoint someone’s location, adding fences and no parking signs by the paved dumpster area, trimming low-hanging branches and overgrown vegetation, and installing street lights and cameras. TCPD will soon be installing signs warning Pines residents about the city ordinances that will be enforced at the Pines this summer. As with speeding and other laws, police officers have discretion in how they enforce ordinances – such as the alcohol ban on the Men’s Trail – and can either issue a warning to bring about compliance or escalate enforcement if behavior isn’t stopping or is out of control, according to Richmond. “City staff has worked very hard on (the Pines) over the last two years,” he added.

Representatives from among 50 agencies that partner with the TCPD’s Quick Response Team (QRT) also detailed their efforts to help individuals at the Pines in an extended discussion at Monday’s commission meeting. The QRT is a grant-funded program that was initially designed to provide an overdose response team on the TCPD and get Naloxone (Narcan) into the community, said TCPD Social Worker Coordinator Jenn Holm. However, “it’s blossomed into something much bigger than that,” she said. “We have a prevention focus with our program, and individuals can actually be a part of it before they ever overdose.”

The QRT now partners with dozens of agencies to provide a “huge supportive web” for program participants, many of whom come from the Pines, Holm said. To be eligible, individuals must meet two of three criteria of experiencing homelessness, substance misuse, and mental health issues. Anyone can refer anyone else within city limits to receive help from the program, which is voluntary for participants. Holm said the QRT has received 275 referrals for service to date, with 205 of those individuals eligible to participate. Of those, 88 percent – or 180 – have been individuals experiencing homelessness. The 205 eligible individuals represent 8,238 law enforcement reports, Holm said, including arrests, trespassing, and other responses. “We are definitely targeting some of the most vulnerable people in our community,” she said.

One hundred and forty-six individuals have elected to participate in the QRT program so far. Holm says partner agencies tailor help to whatever each individual’s needs are – from treatment to harm reduction to employment to housing, when possible. The goal is “interrupting the cycle of arrest and addiction,” Holm said. She noted the program is successful because of how many local agencies are involved in coordinating care and sharing information, including primary partners like Addiction Treatment Services, Goodwill Northern Michigan, Northern Lakes Community Mental Health & Jail Diversion, Northwest Michigan Supportive Housing, Safe Harbor, and Traverse Health Clinic. Dozens of secondary partners are also involved, from Father Fred to Jubilee House to Harm Reduction Michigan to Munson Medical Center.

Several of those partners shared their experiences Monday working in the Pines. Roger Gerstle is with Street Medicine, a full-equipped mobile medical unit that helps bring healthcare to unhoused individuals. Starting next month, that will include weekly Friday visits to the Pines for the duration of the warm-weather season. “We can do most of what the Traverse Health Clinic does out of that van,” Gerstle said, including distributing vaccinations, splints, medications, and more. “Part of the power, I think, of what we do is we are there regularly there every Friday for five or so months every summer. People can count on it, and they come to trust us.”

Paula Lipinski of Addiction Treatment Services said the QRT has been responsible for bringing what were previously siloed services together to better serve people at the Pines and elsewhere. “You have an abundance of amazing service providers in this community, and so many people don’t know what we do,” she said. “Jenn and the city police department got us all together and really started the process of getting it melding and getting the services for people throughout the whole community to be better serviced. The people who reside in the Pines are the primary focus.” Lipinski added that criminalizing individuals experiencing homelessness – or who struggle with mental illness or substance abuse disorder – is not the answer, a belief she said was echoed by TCPD leaders. “I think they’re looking for other options, and the creation of this team was their first step,” she said.

Community leaders continue to acknowledge that the Pines is not a long-term solution. Multiple neighbors from both NoBo and the Commons shared frustrations Monday with the city’s lack of enforcement against unhoused individuals and illegal behaviors they sometimes witness in that group. Some suggested the city was content to concentrate the problem in those neighborhoods rather than look for other solutions. Operating Safe Harbor year-round in the future could help alleviate issues at the Pines, but Vogel previously told The Ticker even that isn’t a silver bullet solution but one of many options that should be explored as part of a coalition of community partners.

Director Ashley Halladay-Schmandt of the Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness reminded audiences Monday that the region’s homelessness issue is one faced by “almost every major city across this country” and ultimately has its roots in the nation’s housing crisis. She warned that “we have not seen a community successfully manage large encampments, ever. Like it has not been done.” What has worked, she said, is prioritizing “emergency shelter while at the same time investing in the housing that will reduce homelessness. These are concrete investments we as a city can make and as a region to dramatically reduce the number of people experiencing homelessness – not only manage it.”