NORTHAMPTON — On Wednesday morning, a familiar scene played out at the end of Cooke Avenue, near the Fitzgerald Lake trailhead. Portable tables overflowed with baked goods, bagged teas and hot water, people sat and stood around talking with friends or meeting for the first time, all against a backdrop of uncertainty.
The group was anxiously anticipating when someone from the city of Northampton — the police, the Division of Community Care, a representative of the mayor’s office, they couldn’t be certain — would show up to begin evicting those living at the site, who call themselves Moose Camp.
For some among the group of campers and supportive community members, this was the second time in under six months they had gathered in anticipation of a showdown over a campsite the city planned to clear. In May, Northampton had enforced an eviction against campers living on land owned by Eversource behind the abandoned Speedway gas station on King Street with a major show of police force. But this time, the campers were on public land they thought would be safe from such “sweeps” and sheltered from many of the other perils of outdoor living.
The eviction comes after the Supreme Court ruled in late June that people have no Eighth Amendment protection from being punished for sleeping outside, which had previously been considered “cruel and unusual.” And at the state level, Gov. Maura Healey passed a budget earlier this year that repealed the previously guaranteed right to an emergency shelter, citing unprecedented demand. The state now limits individuals and families to a nine-month maximum stay.
In Northampton, city officials say they try to take a more humane approach. But that doesn’t mean conflicts don’t arise amid a housing crisis driving more and more people onto the streets — or into the woods.
“I’m tired of hiding alone like a rat,” Ty Nichols, who had been living by Speedway and helped organize Moose Camp, told The Shoestring. They explained that it’s much easier to avoid sweeps by living alone or with one other person. “I want to live in community, where providers can find us and where there are bathrooms nearby.”
After leaving the Speedway camp, Nichols spent the summer living in the Meadows section of Northampton with their partner, Jay, but said the place was not a viable campsite for the winter. The roads nearby don’t get plowed and would be inaccessible to service providers who offer hotel rooms on nights of extreme cold.
Moose Camp, named after the Moose Lodge that used to exist at the site, came together in early September as Nichols and nine others sought a place they could stay for the winter that would be at low risk of eviction. The camp, members said, represents a contrast to others in Northampton where “anything goes.”
“It’s a safer space for someone in my position,” Didi, another camp member who declined to give her last name, told The Shoestring. Didi said she has post traumatic stress disorder, a brain injury, and other health problems, and is recovering from opioid abuse. She said she appreciates that the camp is a “recovery camp” where no hard drugs are allowed.
“I like being in a calm environment, a peaceful environment, a chosen environment,” she said. “An unfamiliar space is disruptive to me.”
But while the site appeared to be a stable, low-risk area for the camp — Moose residents said a nearby camper has reportedly kept his site for ten years — that has not been Moose Camp’s experience. Though the city and the campers disagree about when the campers were properly notified they needed to leave, the city moved to evict the camp within a month of its establishment.
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According to Alan Wolf, Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra’s chief of staff, there are four reasons that Moose Camp cannot stay at its current site: the fire risk, complaints from neighbors, the proximity to conservation land, and the development of affordable housing at the site.
With regards to city-owned land, Wolf told The Shoestring that “it is not our policy to move campsites or require them to relocate unless or until there are a bunch of competing resident or city needs that make it not a good campsite.”
Habitat for Humanity, which has had an agreement with the city to develop four permanently affordable homeowner units on the land, just learned about Moose Camp last week, according to executive director Megan McDonough.
“Habitat is still eager to move forward with the project,” McDonough wrote in an email to the mayor on Thursday morning, less than a day after The Shoestring reached out for comment from Habitat. “But we would advocate for adjusting our timeline if more time is needed to assist the people living in the encampment.”
“I will defer to the city about when/whether or not, you need to evict the people in the encampment from your land,” the email continues, “but please do not use our partnership as the impetus for removal. We can be flexible. We stand ready to build permanent affordable housing when the time is right.”
In conversations with city staff and officials that The Shoestring observed, Moose Camp members asserted that the fire department had approved of their cooking and fire setup.
In a phone interview with The Shoestring, Northampton Assistant Fire Chief Matthew Lemberg explained that the fire situation is complex. Cooking fires don’t fall under open-burning regulations, which stipulate the time of year and materials that can be burned, he said. His officers who visited the camp found a cooking fire with “safety precautions in place.”
“We allow cooking fires, but we don’t necessarily agree with being able to burn anywhere you want because that could make our job more difficult,” Lemberg said. “Allowing it doesn’t mean we agree with it.”
Wolf also cited complaints from neighbors and users of the Fitzgerald Lake trail. He agreed to share any written complaints, along with the city’s responses, with The Shoestring, but was not able to redact personal information and provide them before publication.
“I personally have tried to talk people out of complaining about campsites,” Wolf told The Shoestring. “I have tried to say, ‘Is this really an issue for you?’ We try and speak with the neighbors.”
Moose Camp residents have told Wolf that the complaints are likely about other people who camp nearby. Some of the complaints predate the establishment of Moose Camp, and, as some members of Moose Camp are employed, Nichols said they go to bed early.
“This is the intractable issue of my municipal career that I have hammered my head against for five or six years,” Wolf told The Shoestring.
The city has no shelter system of its own, Wolf explained, and relies on independent partners who receive funding from the state and federal governments to supply shelter beds.
“There is not enough housing,” he said. “The shelters in Northampton are full. We are having meetings about what we’re going to do when it’s cold, because we care about people. There is nothing more that I wish than that I had a place to point to where people could live.”
But for members of Moose Camp, the care the city offers often isn’t enough, they said.
Nichols explained that the camp has tried to work with the Division of Community Care — the city agency created based on recommendations from Northampton’s Policing Review Commission to host a non-police emergency response agency — as much as possible to keep their campsite low impact. But during Wednesday’s confrontation with city officials at Moose Camp, Wolf provided a packet of documents to Nichols and other campers he said showed that the Division of Community Care had notified the camp of its impending eviction weeks ago and had offered various forms of assistance to move. That concerned Nichols.
“Regardless of any of the heart, or intentions of any single individual working, the fact that all of their reports go to the same people who activate the police means that until they are reformed, or placed under a third party (independent of the city), the people must understand that talking to them can have the same ramifications as talking to police, only at a slower pace,” Nichols wrote in a response to The Shoestring.
Wolf said that a Division of Community Care staffer told him the agency delivered an Oct. 1 eviction date to campers weeks prior on Sept. 10 — four days after the campers say they moved in.
“And I believe him,” Wolf said.
Additionally, the campers have had difficulty figuring out who exactly in city government made the decision to evict them.
On Tuesday, The Shoestring followed Nichols and Jay as they went around to visit different city offices to deliver the message that they would not be able to clear the camp by the following morning. The two were accompanied at various times by other members of the camp, the pair’s chosen advocate, Nan Sibley, and Cara Jackson of the Pedal People cooperative, which partners with the campsite to do trash and recycling pickups.
At the group’s first stop at the Division of Community Care office, a staffer, Donovan Gibbs, told those gathered “we’re not the ones” who could allow the camp more time to move. Gibbs directed them to Wolf, who, after a lengthy discussion, said the decision to extend the deadline was in the hands of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Division of Community Care. The group headed to the office of Health and Human Services Commissioner Merridith O’Leary, who said she wanted “to have everyone in the room” to make a decision. At that point, Wolf and Gibbs arrived, and the campers departed and did not receive any further communication from the city that day.
“This is a really good example of what systemic trauma looks like,” Sibley told The Shoestring.
Sibley, who has herself had to live outdoors more than once in her life, was employed until recently by Community Action Pioneer Valley as the community engagement coordinator for the Northampton Resilience Hub, a project that is intended to house multiple services in one building for the city’s most vulnerable residents. The city is now transitioning oversight of that project to the nonprofit behavioral and mental health organization Clinical & Support Options, according to an August 30 announcement by the city..
Sibley said that the lack of clarity on who is making decisions that impact the life of a person living outside is traumatic. “A person on the receiving end of that harm cannot address this because it’s a system, it’s the city, it’s not the responders.”
“When a municipality identifies public safety as a reasoning for displacing people, they have said, maybe unintentionally, that you’re not the public that I’m concerned with,” she said.
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Moose Camp is surrounded by color as the leaves turn shades of red and gold, the still-warm October sun shining through them. Tents — some for individuals, some big enough for a group — are spread out over the wooded area with narrow, uneven footpaths connecting them. Nearby, houses are visible through gaps between the trees, but the camp is hard to notice from the trailhead. A tarp covers an outdoor kitchen with a space for cook fires in a rocky alcove. An area that Nichols cleared of invasive bittersweet vines houses an array of portable solar panels to charge phones and electric heating pads. Though there are some trash and recyclables on the ground, most of it is contained in blue Pedal People bins.
Nichols moved to the area following his mother several years ago. While they lived with her for some time, Nichols says they moved out so that she could better care for their brother, a veteran. They’ve been living outdoors since, working freelance gardening jobs, trying to remove invasives when they find them, and foraging for wild foods.
While Nichols tidied up from a dinner they cooked the night before, they told me about their interest in starting the camp. “If I’m out here anyway, I want to share my skills with my community.”
When asked why they and other campers wouldn’t just move to a shelter, Nichols explained that, besides the fact that local shelters are full, they “are meant for people who have burned every bridge.”
“It’s not a safe place,” they said.
Kyle, another camper who only gave his first name, works nights and said he wouldn’t be able to maintain access to a shelter bed because most shelters require residents come in for the night at certain times. In contrast to shelter life, where residents have to guard their possessions and accept a life of little to no privacy, he enjoyed life at Moose Camp.
“There’s more community,” he said. “You’re having a meal, talking about your day. It’s up to me when I do stuff.”
Kyle is originally from South Hadley and began couch-surfing in March after losing housing in Dorchester. He went to college, but never finished, and works nights as a clerk and additional landscaping jobs during the day.
“You save a lot of money having your own place,” he said, referencing how expensive it is to constantly eat out or have to buy food for only one meal. But finding an apartment through the federal Rental Assistance for Families in Transition program has been difficult.
If evicted, Kyle said, he plans to return to his old camp spot, which he called “lonelier.”
“I don’t like this constant threat of, ‘Is it OK that I’m here?’” Didi said, joining the conversation. “I’m watching my partner struggle, too.”
Didi has lived outside for years. She has a grown son, who is in the military now, and said she won’t go back to the shelter system now that she doesn’t have a child to care for. She said she feels safe at the camp as a woman, as someone with multiple disabilities and a criminal record, and as someone in recovery from drug abuse.
“Every time I take a step in my life, it feels like something comes along and ruins it,” she said. “It’s really hard to make something from nothing.”
On Wednesday morning, Wolf arrived with O’Leary, as well as Northampton police Capt. Victor Caputo and several Division of Community Care staffers. While some camp members set out on their daily trips to the opioid recovery clinic, Nichols and Jay represented the camp in lively discussions with the city officials, with Sibley and other members of the gathered crowd occasionally jumping in.
“We have to pick a day,” Wolf said, after Sibley suggested that nothing was going to happen at the site for some time after the city cleared it.
After conferring privately and touring the campsite, the city offered the camp until Monday at 10 a.m. to vacate.
“It feels personal towards people who are making an intentional community,” Jay told The Shoestring afterwards. “We can’t just move into an established camp.”
With the day’s action over, the crowd slowly dispersed, helping clean up along the way. Nichols spoke to those left about the hope that the camp could move the campers from a place of survival to one of collective love for each other.
“You guys make me feel like I don’t have to hide,” they said.
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