Picture a familiar scene in homeless services. A case manager with a clipboard, standing at the edge of an encampment, offering one bed to one person.

A person accepts. The rest of the camp stays. A few weeks later the person who left is indoors in a placement far from everyone they know, and the team is wondering why it is not holding.

I coordinated interim housing in Los Angeles for years. Youth portfolio first, then the adults. More than a thousand beds, dozens of programs. And the question I ask first about any placement is not about the client's diagnosis, income, or paperwork.

It is whether the people they rely on will still be within reach.

What we keep getting wrong

We treat encampments as collections of individuals who happen to be near each other. They are not. Ask anyone who has lived in one. Ask anyone who has done outreach in one for more than a week.

The research is blunt about this. Residents describe their camps as "a family" and a source of solidarity, and they share food, blankets, and tents as a matter of course (Social Connection Guidelines evidence brief). A qualitative study of 30 former encampment residents found that people displaced without a placement described stolen belongings and assaults they believed their camp would have prevented, while those placed in harm reduction housing reported real gains in health and safety. The authors' conclusion is the one worth building on: policies that avoid abruptly disrupting encampment social networks are likely to work better. Even HUD's own guidance lists a sense of safety and community as one of the main reasons people choose camps over shelters.

Then we clear the camp and place people one at a time, by acuity score, into units scattered across a county the size of a small state.

Moving someone indoors matters. But when the plan dissolves the relationships that person depends on, we should not be surprised when the placement struggles.

San Jose already ran this experiment

In December 2014, San Jose cleared the Jungle, a creek-side camp of roughly 300 people and one of the largest encampments in the country. The city meant well and spent real money, more than $4 million on the relocation effort. More than 200 residents were rehoused permanently, according to the city, and officials called the operation a model (San Jose Inside, Peninsula Press).

The other side of the ledger is just as documented. The city itself says about a third of the people moved back to the area (ABC7). Implementation partners told HUD that closing the Jungle led to rapid growth of smaller encampments throughout the city. A year later, San Jose counted at least 200 of them (Peninsula Press).

So the housing was real, and the dispersal was real too. The lesson is not that the city failed. It is that the city treated the camp as a waiting list of individuals, and the pieces of the community it dismantled showed up again in smaller camps across the city.

A decade later, the city swept the same ground with a different method: a by-name list of all 109 people at the site, a bed offered to every person on it, most of them expected to move to a single tiny-home site (KTVU). The results are not in yet. But the method is the one I am arguing for: plan for the whole site at once instead of one referral at a time.

I am not romanticizing tents

Encampments are dangerous, unsanitary, and unstable. I have spent enough time in them to know they are not safe places to live. People die in them.

The argument is not that camps are good homes. It is that the people in them already have the thing our housing programs struggle most to build after move-in: relationships. When we house people alone, we hand them a choice between indoors and everyone they know. That is a choice most of us would fail too.

And one honest caveat: not every bond in an encampment is a healthy one. Some people need distance from the very people around them, and a good placement plan asks that question too. But the answer is never to dissolve everyone's connections as the default.

What whole-community placement looks like

This is not a new program model. It is a sequence, and it takes coordinated placements, suitable housing options, and flexibility in how programs run.

  1. Plan housing options for the entire site while individual placements continue. Build the by-name list, including the people who decline services at first. Especially the people who decline at first.
  2. Ask residents, privately, whom they want to stay near. And whom they need distance from. Both answers belong in the plan.
  3. Place cohorts where you can: couples, tent neighbors, families of choice, the person who watches everyone's belongings. (The pets matter more than you think.) Where the units do not allow it, cluster. Same building, same block, same bus line.
  4. Never hold an available placement hostage to a group move. If someone is ready and a unit exists, they go. Community preservation is an option people can choose, not another condition they must meet to get indoors.
  5. Treat the camp's informal leaders as partners in the plan, not as problems in it.
  6. Staff the first 90 days for community, not just case management. Shared meals, shared space, transportation help, the small things that let a community re-form indoors.

This sounds daunting. A practical starting point is simple: ask residents which relationships they want to preserve, and start counting who actually belongs to whom.

The bonds outlast us

Here is the part that matters most, and the part we plan around least. Case management closes. Some supports run on their own clocks. Programs sunset and funding cycles turn over. What is around a client after we close the case is a big part of what determines whether the placement holds.

If we placed them near their people, they have a ride to the appointment, someone who notices when they are spiraling, someone who remembers the job interview. Formal services can change or end. Trusted relationships can remain part of someone's daily life for years.

We spend enormous effort assessing individual vulnerability and so little asking about connection. We should be doing both, and tracking whether our placements preserve the support people actually value.

Bring the community indoors together wherever you can. And never make someone choose between a home and the people who help them keep it.

I learned this the slow way over years of interim housing coordination, and I have been packaging what works into course materials for teams doing this work. If an encampment resolution is on your desk this year, start with the question of who moves with whom.

Take care of your teams out there.