The city of Wichita is drafting two new anti-camping ordinances in response to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that held local governments can impose civil and criminal penalties on homeless people for camping on public land — even if the city doesn’t have enough shelter space to house those people.
City Manager Robert Layton said last week that the City Council has called for changes so Wichita can be “more aggressive” at policing homeless camps on public property.
While the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development considers Wichita one of the most affordable metro areas in the nation, the number of unsheltered homeless people in Wichita is increasing , with a 25% increase in the past year alone, amid rising rents , an affordable housing shortage and historically high housing and utility costs.
The off-agenda discussion of the plan to criminalize homeless camps followed complaints by Brad Marakian, general counsel for Intrust Bank, who addressed the council as a private citizen during the public agenda of last Tuesday’s council meeting. He said he is troubled by the sight of homeless encampments along the Arkansas River that he encounters while jogging on his lunch break.
Marakian said he wants the city to remove homeless camps, issue citations for camping on public land and send homeless people to shelters.
“This problem has been festering all summer long,” he said. “We are not San Francisco. We are not Portland. We are not Seattle. We’re Wichita. We’re supposed to be the bastion of common sense, right? And I’m asking for the city to take clear and decisive action now.”
Council members and Layton sought to assure Marakian that stricter enforcement is in the works.
“At the direction of council, we are preparing two ordinances that will recognize the changes,” Layton said. “We’ll be more aggressive in terms of encampments on public property as well as use of sidewalks.”
The council has never publicly directed Layton or his staff to draft a new ordinance. But a majority appeared to approve of such a measure at last Tuesday’s council meeting.
Layton said the proposed ordinances will also clarify “what the definition of valuables is and what’s considered to be junk or non-valuable property and also notification and storage timeframes are all in the ordinance as well.
“I can’t speak to when that will be coming to you, but I think we’re at least in the second or third draft of that document right now,” Layton said.
The city declined to provide a copy of those drafts to The Eagle or to speak to the specifics.
“So there are some action steps that will be coming forward, Brad.,” Mayor Lily Wu said to Marakian. “Thank you so very much for addressing the council. This is the exact reason why we opened up public comment for any individual to come and address their grievances or ideas with the council.”
Costs of clearing homeless camps in Wichita
Breaking up homeless encampments has been costly for the city of Wichita , paying a private contractor $835 to $5,585 per site. The city spends hundreds of thousands a year removing homeless camps, and has ramped up use of a private contractor to complete the work since 2021.
That year, the city spent $82,239 on outsourced homeless camp cleanups. Costs increased to $235,863 in 2022 and $352,252 in 2023.
In May 2023, Layton told The Eagle the city was planning to change course on its outsourced homeless camp cleanups program and “we’re going to have to deal with that issue in a way that still is respectful to those that are in encampments.”
“I don’t think the right way of dealing with this going forward is to continue to contract out,” Layton said at the time.
This year, the city increased funding for the outsourced cleanup program by 25%, allocating $440,000 — $300,000 from the Park and Recreation budget and $140,000 from the Wichita Police Department budget. That represented a 435% increase over outsourced expenses in 2021.
Eviction rates at Wichita campsites have also ramped up in recent years.
Wichita police posted eviction notices on 130 camps in 2021 and cleared 83 of them for a cost of $80,023.50; posted 144 in 2022 and cleared 125 for $143,015.35; posted 286 in 2023 and cleared 232 for $177,411; and posted 213 so far in 2024 for $149,136. A similar accounting was not available for Park and Recreation, whose director left his position earlier this month.
City Council split on timing of ordinances
The City Council appeared to be split over when — not whether — to implement more aggressive anti-camping ordinances.
A June decision by the U.S. Supreme Court called City of Grants Pass v. Johnson held that local governments can criminalize camping on public property, even when there isn’t enough local shelter space to house those individuals, as is the case in Wichita.
As a result of that decision, some council members want to pass new anti-camping ordinances immediately while others want to wait until the city’s Multi-Agency Center opens this winter.
“I know that we’re working towards a solution,” City Council member Dalton Glasscock said. “I’m hopeful for that, but I think that we must be implementing our ordinances now, and we need to make sure this is the number one priority because this is the number one priority I hear from citizens.”
“I don’t want to speak too much for the city, but I would say that we haven’t implemented the enforcement for the camps over the summer because we don’t have a shelter,” City Council member Maggie Ballard said. “... And we just don’t have the space, so that is why the MAC is so important because right now we’re not able to offer them a bed to enforce the camps. It’s kind of just shifting people around.”
Council member Mike Hoheisel shared a similar view, saying enforcement should not ramp up until a shelter is open.
“If you bust up a lot of camps along the river, they start popping up in the middle of neighborhoods,” Hoheisel said. “This is something that’s prevalent in my district, and we have options to go to the river or not currently. If it’s next door to you in an abandoned lot, an empty lot in my district where it happens quite a bit, that’s in the middle of a neighborhood.”
“As the MAC gets open, we are going to focus more on enforcement coming up,” Hoheisel said. “So, yeah, it’s just one of those situations; we’re doing the best we can.”
City Council member Brandon Johnson expressed doubt that stricter enforcement or new anti-camping ordinances would help the situation at this time.
“Until there is a place where folks feel safe going . . . we can’t legally make them stay there, so they’re just going to be outside,” Johnson said. “And, again, where we are right now, all of us working towards that one solution while it is some months away is a little more humane than just breaking up camps and taking things and throwing it away and pushing them to somewhere else in the city.”
Ballard said she believes the lack of shelter space is driving the growing number of encampments along the river.
“Although I do agree not every single person is going to want to go to the MAC, but I do think without even having an option right now, you know, that’s why many of them are unfortunately sleeping on the river, and I don’t disagree; that is not OK. And Wichita is better than that.”
Glasscock and Ballard, along with Council member J.V. Johnston, said they regularly encounter homeless encampments downtown.
“This weekend, I was running along the river at about 8:30 on Saturday, there was eight encampments — and when I say encampments, they were homestead encampments, they were not just encampments — between the Kellogg Bridge and the Lincoln Street Bridge,” Glasscock said. “We’re looking at maybe 0.2 miles, and there’s eight mass encampments.”
“So I echo your frustrations,” Glasscock said to Marakian. “It’s the number one frustration that I have from this position. I’ve expressed this every single week to the manager. I’ve expressed this from the bench multiple times. This is the number one call I get from people. And I don’t believe we’re actively doing enough now.”
“I ride my bike along that river and I see the same thing you see: trash and people camping all the time,” Johnston said. “My wife will not go with me because she doesn’t feel safe.”
Ballard, the council member whose district includes much of the Arkansas River in north Wichita and downtown, said she has chosen to take matters into her own hands by organizing “river cleanups” and removing trash with her father.
“And rather than waiting for the contractor, sometimes my dad and I just went and loaded up his truck with some trash,” Ballard said.
Pushing the homeless out of downtown?
Chase Billingham, a Wichita State urban studies scholar who has studied — and been critical of — Wichita’s approach to addressing homelessness said it’s notable that none of the council members or Marakian had any stories where they were personally harmed or harassed by homeless people.
“These people don’t have a choice about whether they have to sleep,” Billingham said. “They have to sleep somewhere, that’s a bodily function that has to be fulfilled, and when you start issuing people citations for exercising that bodily necessity, you are essentially criminalizing the status of not having a home. And I think that’s exactly where Wichita is headed.”
The new anti-camping ordinances would be the next step in a long line of city decisions aimed at clearing homeless people out of downtown, he said.
Billingham — who regularly reports on City Hall decisions on his Facebook page and has contributed multiple columns for The Eagle — pointed to several city decisions, from the location of the coming Multi-Agency Center to relocating its downtown library branch and a planned transit hub to the west side of the Arkansas River.
Then there’s the “hostile architecture” at Naftzger Park, a formerly popular daytime hangout spot for homeless people with its shade trees, fountains and picnic tables in the heart of downtown. It was redesigned and reopened in 2020 with an open layout, no shade, artificial turf instead of grass and benches that make it impossible to lay down.
“The history of the past half century or longer of downtown homelessness — and services for the homeless and the poor — has been to push them further and further out,” Billingham said. “City leaders want nobody in downtown Wichita unless they are working or spending money.”
While the city of Wichita is drafting new ordinances to crack down on camping in the city limits, other proposals would eliminate alternatives to camping in city parks and under bridges — such as living out of campers or personal vehicles.
Sedgwick County in May raised rent at its Lake Afton Park campsites west of Wichita and moved to cut down on the number of long-term campers at the county park. Previous rules allowed campers to spend up to 300 nights a year at the lakeside campground, but now they’re limited to 56 nights a year.
A city proposal to mandate paid parking and impose time limits on all downtown parking could also discourage homeless people who live in their personal vehicles from parking downtown.
“That’s a very real thing,” Billingham said. “In high cost of living metro areas, many people who would otherwise be living on the street live in their cars or live in campers. And you do see that in Wichita, though not to the same extent as housing prices are not as high here, but the implementation of mandatory paid parking in the city of Wichita will also make that more difficult.”
Billingham said Wichita would likely have more success addressing homelessness by putting forward policies to address rising rent costs and increased evictions — instead of disposing of all of its public housing units and spending city resources harassing homeless people.
“What all of these things mean is that it is becoming harder and harder, even in this relatively low-cost metro area, to be a poor renter in the city of Wichita,” Billingham said. “And the decreasing number of affordable housing options is the most important factor driving people who are living in a state of financial, economic precarity out of their homes and onto the street. If the city wants to address the problem of homelessness, it needs to address the problem of creating affordable housing, and it’s not going to arrest its way out of this problem.”
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