Talk:List of homeless encampment sweeps in the United States

Requested move 18 August 2024

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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List of homeless encampment sweeps in the United States → Homeless encampment sweeps in the United States – This is to encourage more discussion on general trends and discussion than on listing a lot of examples.
Wish to withdraw move request Superb Owl (talk) 16:28, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose This is trying to turn the article into something it clearly isn't and would require a full rewrite. Create a new article if you want to talk about it in prose. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 18:47, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Suggestion

I don't see the value in listing every homeless encampment sweep you can find in the news. Likely there have been more than 10,000 such actions across the US if you go back decades. You can keep doing this if you want, it probably isn't against policy.

I think a more valuable use of the news articles you are using as sources would to make an article about "homeless encampment sweep" which would detail some of the RESULTS/EFFECTS of these sweeps (like sweeps not solving the problem, just forcing people to move somewhere else, and then be swept again later.) and how these sweeps don't result in homeless people moving into shelters or getting jobs, etc. Cheers! ---Avatar317^(talk) 22:26, 2 July 2024 (UTC)

100% agree - I think this article should be moved to "Homeless encampment sweeps in the United States" or just "Homeless encampment sweeps" and should not be a list article Superb Owl (talk) 05:27, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

These are somewhat fair criticisms, I think. There should be a page about homeless encampment sweeps that discusses the general trend and the broad impacts, and I hope to contribute to writing one in the future. I never intended this article to be a list of every single-person encampment swept off the streets. Rather, I want it to be a catalog of encampment sweeps that were notable enough to receive local or even national news coverage, which would be inappropriate for a general article. My desire to write this article came from the difficulties I had in researching homeless encampment sweeps in my area. In Philadelphia, there was what I would call an encampment movement a few years back during the Pandemic and George Floyd protests. Large encampments were set up in major public thoroughfares, partially out of necessity and partially in protest of housing insecurity and other social problems during that time. As those events recede further into the past, it is becoming harder and harder to find coverage of them on search engines. In the preliminary research I did to get this article to a publishable state, I found instances of encampments between 300 and 600 people steadily growing before eventually being cleared. I also found interesting political battles over encampments in different states. These are the stories that I wanted to collect and preserve in this article, before they are lost to the 100000th page of Google search results. As I was writing my draft, the Supreme Court issued their ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, inundating the search results for encampment sweeps with articles about the ruling. I think this underscores the need to archive and organize these stories before they are lost. I see this project as being beneficial to future researchers and historians looking for leads on the history of sweeps in their locality, especially if others contribute their local knowledge to the project (which has happened to an extent already, but I hope to see more of it). Because of the way information is organized algorithmically according to "relevance" on the rest of the internet, I think Wikipedia is uniquely able to be a valuable source of curated information, like this list. I hope there is some room in Wikipedia's policies to accommodate this initiative. I know that many dynamic lists "may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness" and that isn't considered to be a problem. What do you think? @Superb Owl @Avatar317 Unbandito (talk) 14:49, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Sounds acceptable to me. There have been some rather notable long lasting/almost permanent encampments over the decades: The Jungle (San Jose), The Jungle (Seattle) among others. It might be useful to somehow separate the political themed encampments where people are "homeless", but the camps are meant as a political statement (sometimes they camp on the lawns of state capitol buildings/Occupy movement) from the ones that are simply people without stable housing. Some of the latter become their own communities, and we have articles on a few: Opportunity Village and Quixote Village. ---Avatar317^(talk) 19:43, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Sounds good to me too - I will withdraw move request Superb Owl (talk) 19:45, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

Those are great suggestions. I'll be sure to add summaries of those articles. Right now I'm just focused on continuing to improve the article, but I think ultimately it might be better to eventually rename it to something like History of homeless encampments in the United States. That title describes the sort of project I'm engaged in here, which is distinct from writing about encampments as a more general sociological/policy issue, while being broad enough to ensure that it covers most material on the topic which is notable enough to warrant some mention. Unbandito (talk) 01:55, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

What I mean by broad enough to ensure that it covers most material on the topic which is notable enough to warrant some mention is that I'm finding that with larger sweeps, and in order to take a longer historical view, some level of background to a sweep which details the development of the camp is needed anyway. A history narrowly focused on sweeps would lead to content disputes over background info to the detriment of the article, and some might also argue it would also exclude camps cleared through negotiated settlements which are an important part of the story as well. I'm not in a rush to mess around with the title before making improvements to the substance of the article, but I wanted to put it up for discussion and provide some explanation for the change in my writing style in some of my more recent edits (which were largely a result of my research changing the way I think about the topic). If a title change is needed to justify including edits like my more recent ones, then perhaps we should make it. Unbandito (talk) 02:06, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

Quantification: "Caltrans has cleared 11,000 homeless encampments since 2021"

Here's a quote from an LA Times article: Caltrans has cleared 11,000 homeless encampments since 2021 as the agency devotes an increasing amount of its resources to taking down tarp tents and makeshift kitchens alongside and under freeways.[1] So this might be around 3,000 / year JUST FOR CALIFORNIA. ---Avatar317^(talk) 00:22, 26 July 2024 (UTC)