Chico to remove camps at Depot Park; campers, volunteers worried

CHICO — Chico is scheduled to hand out 72-hour notices of illegal camping to people living in tents at Depot Park on Aug. 7.

Seven-day notices were issued July 30, 2023 to people at the northwest half of the Depot Park, according to two people who have received a notice.

Depot Park is one the last of the larger camps in Chico that the city has enforced anti-camping ordinances in the past year.

The park has been cited in complaints to the Chico City Council and city administration, and the city initially planned to deliver notices on July 21 but that plan was objected to by Legal Services of Northern California.

Now that notices are delivered, homeless service providers, and the people living there, are expressing concerns that the community in the park — people who rely on each other to watch their belongings and keep them safe — will be no longer.

North State Shelter Team President Charles Withuhn, whose nonprofit provides free showers to homeless people each week at the park, said this enforcement could break up a community, that people get desperate and suicides increase.

“The reason it’s so tragic this time, more so than any other sweep the city has done up to now, is that this is the last largest encampment. In the past, after a sweep, people had another camp to go to, where they could have some friendship; some community where a friend could watch their stuff when they go get some food, or go to a restaurant, or go to work,” Withuhn said.

Withuhn cited a Journal of American Medical Association study published April 10, 2023 that said camp sweeps, or “involuntary displacement,” are estimated to worsen overdose and hospitalizations.

“Continual involuntary displacement may contribute to between 15.6% and 24.4% of additional deaths among unsheltered people experiencing homelessness who inject drugs over a 10-year period,” the study said.

Maryjane Joy lives at Depot Park.

She said that her community is within a community, and she is worried, along with her friends, about the next steps to take as many do not wish to go to the Torres Community Shelter or the city’s Pallet shelter.

“These people are here to lift me up too. They really are from day to day. They make sure I’m awake; they make sure I have water; they make sure I’m fed. I make sure they have water; I make sure they are fed,” Joy said. “These guys help me through my daytime.”

Joy was recovering from an injury she said she got when she was punched in the eye while she was picking up trash by two people in their 20s.

In the middle of an interview with Joy, she heard some people fighting and shouting inside the park and stood up.

“Please! Have respect you guys, please, thank you. Come on, I love you guys,” she said.

Joy said she appreciates volunteer groups and nonprofits who distribute food to people at their camps, “otherwise most of us would be starving or have to be hunting.”

Marco Santucci is a volunteer with Hope Commons Church and was distributing food and coffee to people at Depot Park on Friday.

Santucci said he and others have been visiting major encampments in Chico over the past year, going from distributing 20 bags of food a week to 100 bags and now to 70.

“It’s a need that’s never going to end,” Santucci said. “Unless the city conquers a crisis, it’s never going to end. I mean they’re going to clear this out. They assess people, but they don’t assess all of them. Some people don’t want to go into the shelters. … So where are they supposed to go?”

Chico Councilor Addison Winslow said city enforcements have had a double sided effect. He said he thinks both housed and unhoused people should be able to use public parks, but that homelessness is a public problem and there is a need for a public solution to homelessness.

“As Depot Park is the last major encampment left in the city—well, I say that as new encampments are forming—at a point, and we will get to that point in my term in office, we’re going to have cleared out all of the places in the city that people would just show up to.

“People will continue to resort to little corners they can find. People are going to find people in their alleys in their backyards in ways they have not before, and people are going to consistently resettle areas that have already cleared out, and so the city is going to play ‘whack-a-mole.’

“The only silver lining, or glimmer of hope out of that, is that that forces us to look at those people, who are not going to the Torres Shelter when that’s what they’re offered, or something, and say, we do actually need to address these people’s needs,” he said.

Follow Us