Allentown’s deadline to clear out the Jordan Creek homeless encampment is Monday.
According to city spokesperson Genesis Ortega, public works staff will begin clearing out the area Monday morning.
“At that time, all persons will be expected to have vacated the site,” Ortega wrote in a statement.
The Allentown YMCA warming station will open at 7 p.m. Monday to shelter residents who are displaced from the camp. The station has 80 beds — it increased its capacity from 60 this year — and is open from 7pm to 7 a.m. daily.
The warming station typically opens in mid-November to house homeless people during the colder months. Funding from Allentown, the United Way and the Lehigh Valley Community Foundation made the early opening possible.
According to Christina DiPierro, co-chair of the Allentown Commission on Homelessness, Allentown police and community intervention specialists will also be on scene Monday in case people resist orders to leave the area. She said Friday that at least some people were still camped there despite the looming deadline, but they know they must leave by Monday.
“I don’t think anybody on either side wants any issues, nobody needs to get arrested for trespassing, because as of Monday, it will be trespassing,” DiPierro said.
Two members of City Council said Thursday that they had not been briefed on how the city plans to carry out the evacuation, and were frustrated at the lack of communication.
“We are kind of kept in the dark,” said City Council President Daryl Hendricks. “All I can say is that this is the administration doing it, and it is not a legislative function, so I have not briefed, I have no idea what is happening Monday, I will try to find out.”
City Council member Ce-Ce Gerlach plans to introduce a bill next week outlining specific policies and procedures to clear out encampments in the future. She said the city should have official protocols for clearing homeless camps to avoid what she sees as “chaos” with the current plans.
“It won’t matter if it’s an encampment at Jordan or an encampment somewhere else in the city, encampments will be treated, I don’t want to say the same, but with some level of protocol, instead of just chaos and kind of just willy-nilly-ing it and just, sometimes it seems like, setting up arbitrary rules,” Gerlach said.
Allentown in early August announced that it would clear the encampment by Aug. 25, but extended the deadline by around a month after facing pushback from homeless people and service providers.
The city ordered the evacuation after officials determined the area poses “significant danger” to those living there due to it being in a flood zone. The evacuation order came after a series of deadly flash floods elsewhere in the country this summer.
The city also faces a lawsuit from developer Nat Hyman, who is seeking legal damages from the city because he claims that the camp, which is next to several of his apartment buildings, is negatively affecting his business and tenants. Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk has said Hyman’s lawsuit did not factor in to the city’s decision to clear the area.
The evacuation sparked outrage among homeless residents and their advocates, who said the city should not clear the encampment without giving people an alternative place to go.
Reporter Lindsay Weber can be reached at Liweber@mcall.com.
