A Community Hidden in Plain Sight

As Bellingham struggles to address homelessness, a team of Public Works employees pick up the pieces of lives uprooted

Story and Photos by ANDREW WISE

It’s a crisp, bright fall morning. A troupe of men in neon vests and work boots lug trash bags along the crushed gravel trail that follows Whatcom Creek through downtown Bellingham. One pushes a red shopping cart packed with clothes and soggy cardboard.

This is Tim Morse’s crew for the day. Morse, Bellingham Public Works Department supervisor for homeless camp cleanups, wore muck boots and a high-visibility jacket. He’s wiry, in his mid-50s, short white hair trimmed close around a weathered face, watery bright blue eyes. He has been working for the city for more than a decade, cleaning many of the same campsites over and over again, tracking the ebb and flow of the homeless population in Bellingham by the tattered vestiges of existence packed into trash bags and driven to the dump.

The public works employees’ relationship with the homeless community is intimate, visceral and complex. Morse and Officer Dante Alexander, Bellingham Police Department’s neighborhood police officer for the north side of the city, have the difficult task of asking people to abandon the spot they call their temporary home.

According to the Whatcom County’s annual homeless census for 2017, there has been a 51 percent increase in the number of unsheltered people living in Bellingham since 2008. That increase has the city scrambling to increase the number of beds available.

Earlier this year, the city had identified a property on Roeder Avenue, near the camp under the bridge, as a location to build a new shelter that would add about 200 beds, but the Port of Bellingham purchased the property in May, killing the plan.

As the city and its nonprofit partners continue to work on long term solutions, Morse and his crew focus on the next camp to be cleared and the strangeness of holding in their hands pieces of shattered lives.

The trash bags are stacked in the back of a city-owned flatbed truck. The red shopping cart was laid on its side on top of the pile. They had cleared the first of the 14 to 16 camps throughout the city that are typically covered in a sweep like this. These improvised living spaces are tucked under bridges and in slivers of public space wedged between commercial developments and busy streets.

Alexander’s squad car is parked behind the city truck. His job involves showing up with Morse’s crew when they’re scheduled to clean up camps to ask anyone remaining in the area to leave. Camps are usually tagged a week before they’re cleared with a notice to vacate.

Alexander leaves, and the crew heads to the location: a plot of grass next to the entrance to the Parberry recycling center on D Street. The crew piled material haphazardly onto a tarp next to the sidewalk. A flowery black and pink bra is lying against a box containing an old Trivial Pursuit board game, the box dumped open and spilling its cards onto the tarp. Four crew members lift a shopping cart loaded with clothes, pillows and bags, walk it to larger flatbed truck and tip it, nose first, on top of the pile. Morse stands next to the truck, poking through the material with a long metal grabber.

Then, “Sharps! I need a sharps container,” one of the workers yells from the back corner of the camp. Another heads his direction, carrying a water bottle-sized dark orange rubber vessel with a special lid and a medical waste symbol on the outside. Trapped in the jaws of a metal grabber is a small white and orange syringe. It has dropped down the gullet of the orange bottle and the lid is shut.

The presence of needles seems to shift the way workers operate, stepping more gingerly and using the end of the metal grabber more delicately to poke through the remaining boxes.

About five blocks away, inside one of four buildings owned and operated by the Lighthouse Mission Ministries, is Director of Programs Bridget Reeves’ office. The Lighthouse is a faith-based nonprofit that has a total of 230 beds per night for people experiencing homeless.

Private entities like Lighthouse and Catholic Community Services have been able to develop new city-sanctioned resources for the growing population. A $10 million Catholic Community Services project to provide 40 studio apartments to homeless youth broke ground in October.

Reeves’ goal is to get as many people as possible through the doors, using Lighthouse’s resources to offer help with everything from employment to health care to substance abuse. She sees camps near the Mission as representing a significant step for a lot of people. Lighthouse staff members reach out directly to people living in camps adjacent to the Mission, and that they have discussed eventually travelling to camps located further away in other parts of the city.

“Some of those folks are people have been on the fringe of services for a long time here in our community. They may have been sleeping outside for 10 to 20 years, and moving this close to the Mission is success for them right now,” she says.

She adds that for a lot of people, entering the Mission means not spending the night with their social circle or significant other.

On this particular day, in late October, the Mission has been at capacity for a week and a half.

“Even if more people wanted to come in, they wouldn’t be able to,” Reeves says. Despite efforts to increase the number of beds available, including converting the drop-in center into a 24-hour emergency shelter last year, the Mission is still forced to turn people away each night, back to the network of camps.

With a cold winter looming, Reeves and her colleagues have reached out to local churches about opening their doors as emergency shelters for women and children through the heart of the winter, housing people continuously for three months. It’s an unprecedented move. Churches have served as intermittent shelters during cold weather in the past, but never continuously through an entire season.

“[Church leaders] felt we really need to make this happen,” Reeves says. “People can freeze to death.”

It’s early and the air stays cold despite the sunshine when Morse and his crew arrive at an empty camp located along a small creek running through a thicket of alder trees. The Home Depot parking lot is only a hundred yards away, but the dense vegetation creates the illusion of deep woods. Tarps are strung between trees and a sleeping bag is twisted among lawn chairs. On the ground are a porcelain vase, two gutted desktop computers and a mass of other seemingly unrelated items. A pair of metal grabbers swings a toy horse, then a pillow with the stuffed animal face and arms of a tiger, as well as a package of diapers, into the open maw of a black trash bag. One of the workers drags a sled loaded with full bags along the trail leading back to the road.

Several weeks later, some of the camps Morse and his team cleared have sprung back up — some in the same locations, others in new crevices of the city that haven’t yet been discovered. The nights get colder, and the risks associated with sleeping outside increase. As Morse and Alexander prepare for the next round of tagging and clearing, they can only hope that the people they come across will make their way to a place like Lighthouse, and that when they get there, they won’t be turned away.