Fearing a ‘sweep,’ people living homeless in Norristown wait to be cast out of encampments

About 20 homeless encampments in Norristown will be cleared in the coming weeks, with no plans to store people’s confiscated property, according to advocates for individuals living homeless in the borough.

Officially, borough officials have neither confirmed nor denied what advocates call a potential “sweep” of an estimated 160 people living mostly in tents in various parts of the municipality, many in public parks.

A spokesperson for Peco, however, said that individuals living in tents on 3,000 feet of land owned by the utility along the Schuylkill River Trail in Norristown “will need to relocate” at an unspecified time so “hazardous waste and trash” can be removed from the site. Advocates say about 12 people live there.

“They’re moving us around like we’re dirt,” said Adam Edgington, 41, a former salesman. He and his wife have lived in a tent on the Peco site since the fall. Edgington said police officers have come by to warn people of the impending clear-out. “It makes you feel unstable,” Edgington added. “Things are falling apart fast.”

Homelessness is a fraught issue in Norristown, where residents, advocates, and those experiencing homelessness exist in a tense environment. It plays out in a county of great wealth but few beds for those who sleep outside. These days, when a person who loses a home calls Montgomery County for help, there’s little more advocates can do than issue tents.

Norristown officials have said they’ll time a full-borough sweep to coincide with Peco’s clear-out, according to Stephanie Sena, a homelessness expert and anti-poverty professor at Villanova University’s Charles Widger School of Law. She also runs a homeless shelter in Upper Darby.

Thomas Lepera, Norristown’s president/councilman at-large, was asked multiple times in an interview whether the municipality will be clearing out people living homeless within its borders. He declined to answer, repeating the phrase, “We’ll be cleaning sites of hazardous materials where people are living” in encampments. He acknowledged that the eradication of what he described as “feces, needles, and God-knows-what-else in barrels” will coincide with Peco’s efforts. No date is set.

Sena said that she spoke with Norristown Municipal Administrator Crandall Jones, and that he told her the borough would “use police to sweep people off borough land when Peco does it.”

She added that Jones said the borough has no plans to store the belongings of people who are cleared out.

People living in encampments say police officers told them they’d soon be compelled to leave.

Neither Jones nor Acting Police Chief Michael Bishop returned phone calls.

A spokesperson for Montgomery County said that although he’s aware of the Peco clear-out, he had not heard of a plan to dismantle other encampments. Sources close to the issue have said county officials are against any potential sweeps, but feel powerless to stop them.

Both Lepera and the Peco spokesperson said county officials should be contacted to clarify the situation, and to explain what will happen to the belongings of people who are moved — always a point of contention in clear-outs. In many cases, people lose identification documents, medications, and other possessions critical to survival.

Phone calls to the chairman of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners; the county COO; the director of the Department of Health and Human Services; and the administrator of the Office of Housing and Community Development, were not returned.

On Thursday afternoon, the Community Justice Project (CJP), a Harrisburg-based nonprofit legal aid program that represents low-income Pennsylvanians, sent a letter to borough officials calling for an immediate cessation of “all current plans to sweep or to clear homeless encampments in Norristown.”

The CJP has partnered with the National Homelessness Law Center and Legal Aid of Southeastern PA on the matter, and was writing on behalf of their client, Maurice Jefferson, an un-housed Norristown resident. The letter addressed “Norristown’s legal exposure for its law enforcement practices” against unsheltered Norristown residents.

The document quoted people living in Norristown encampments as saying that, in past sweeps, police officers ordered them to vacate without adequate notice, then removed and discarded their belongings.

It also referenced the Norristown Municipal Council adopting an ordinance last year that prohibits a person from being in a park or recreation area “except between sunrise and sunset.” This could lead to residents being charged “for being homeless,” the letter said.

The letter questioned how Peco, Norristown, and the Norristown Police Department will determine what constitutes “hazardous waste.” By trying to cart it off, authorities may instead “destroy or dispose of all property remaining at the encampments, without storing such property for residents to retrieve later.”

Such acts violate the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which protects property rights, the letter went on to say.

It cited other potential constitutional violations of the rights of people experiencing homelessness, laying out a case for a possible lawsuit against Norristown.

Sena said she plans to place Apple AirTags, which allow an item to be digitally tracked, in the belongings of encampment residents to see whether any confiscated property is discarded rather than saved.

At the Peco encampment the other day, Adam Edgington’s wife, Brittany, 37, who once worked for Instacart, said she’s “irritated that cops came out of nowhere to tell us we have to leave. I’m not going anywhere.”

Cheryl Spaulding, 63, from a neighboring tent, said simply, “Being moved out is scary. I have nowhere to go.”

In a nearby encampment, CJP plaintiff Maurice Jefferson, 34, who’s lived there on and off for two years, contemplated a potential sweep.

“It’s intimidation,” said Jefferson, who last worked as a contractor.

He added, “A tent is a form of housing. If there are a whole bunch of tents in one spot, that becomes a residential area. And in a residential area, we have rights.

“I just hope when they come for us, they act civilized.”

Some key factors have exacerbated homelessness in Norristown, 21% of whose population of about 35,000 live in poverty.

In 2021, flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Ida damaged a low-income Norristown apartment complex with about 100 units, forcing tenants to evacuate. The borough chose not to re-build the site as affordable housing.

Last year, a 50-bed homeless shelter in Norristown was closed after the state conferred the land on which the facility sat to the borough. County social services agencies petitioned to extend the lease of what had been the only local shelter, but Norristown officials declined.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Norristown to re-position itself in the marketplace,” and build something that generates tax revenue, Lepera said.

Some complain that because Norristown is home to numerous substance abuse and mental health programs, outsiders are drawn to the borough, then live off the grid.

“They just stay,” said Don Ketcham, 44, owner of Cycle Stop, a motorcycle shop on Main Street. “And I want them out.

“They get high and do dope sales across the street, and I get to watch this lifestyle right out my doorway. They’re drug addicts who burned all their bridges with friends and family,” he said, adding that one of the people living un-housed is his relative.

He added, “These are people nobody wants to have anything to do with anymore. And I’ve lost business because of them, because people are afraid to come here.”

Mark Boorse, director of program development at Access Services, a nonprofit that runs a homeless outreach program in Norristown, disputes that everyone who’s homeless suffers from substance use disorder, or is experiencing mental illness. He said issues such as job loss and overwhelming medical bills have disrupted the lives of many of the 80 men and 80 women identified as living homeless in the borough. There are no children in the encampments.

Boorse, who knows many of the individuals living homeless, also disagrees with Lepera’s contention that 80% of the un-housed in town are outsiders; it’s less than 50%, he said.

He added that the municipality has swept people experiencing homelessness three times in the last eight months, several from areas scheduled to be developed.

“They moved to other places in the borough,” he said. “But the number of spaces is diminishing. Is this part of a larger, intentional process designed to move everyone out?”

Although the county may have the money to create homeless shelters and underwrite low-cost housing, it has no power to force such accommodations on a community, Boorse said.

“The biggest impediments to sheltering and housing the homeless are local zoning laws,” he said, a kind of codified NIMBY-ism.

Lepera said the only fair solution is for each of the more than five dozen towns and cities in Montgomery County to house its share of the estimated 450 people living homeless in the county.

At its core, Sena said, homelessness is an issue of a lack of affordable housing.

“The country is economically unequal, and a house is becoming more of a luxury commodity,” she said. “The borough has had affordable housing, as well as a shelter, but it purposely closed them.

“Now a sweep is coming. And people have nowhere to go.”