As the left-behind possessions of homeless people were loaded into the back of a dump truck at a Middlebury encampment on Thursday, an advocate for the unhoused community decried the “cruel” decision by the City of Akron to sweep through the area.
“This stuff gets to me, it eats at me,” Sage Lewis said as he sat cross-legged at the unzipped entrance of a cheap green tent. Akron police officers and city employees stood nearby, watching a “junk removal” company clear the lot.
“This has got to be the lowest denominator of a solution I can possibly imagine. I can’t imagine anything less effective. Literally anything is better than just throwing their stuff away.”
Earlier, the city posted a big yellow sign on the lot, declaring that the “personal property” at the encampment “constitutes a nuisance” and that everything would be picked up and thrown out on Oct. 31.
According to Mayor Shammas Malik’s spokesperson, the encampment violated a city ordinance on littering and the city deemed the site to be “dangerous to the public health, safety or welfare.” That designation allowed for the city’s Department of Neighborhood Assistance to clear the site.
Lewis vowed to stay put at the encampment until he’s either arrested or the mayor’s office talks with him about a plan for the winter.
Friday afternoon, Eufrancia Lash, the deputy director of public service for the city, emailed Lewis and invited him to set up a meeting with him and the mayor “within the next few weeks” to discuss “the issues surrounding our houseless citizens as we move through the Fall and Winter seasons.”
Middlebury site subject of legal action
The sweep is the latest in the city’s multi-year crackdown on encampments Lewis facilitates on or near his properties. In 2022, the City of Akron took Lewis and the vacant lot’s owner, Larue Corn, to court for violating city ordinances connected to the encampment.
The lot’s owner has been dead for years, Lewis said, a fact that city lawyers and police officers don’t appear to know or acknowledge. In the lawsuit, the city filed a motion for default judgment, which means the court would decide in the city’s favor if it agreed, based on Corn not responding.
Akron police officers told Lewis and the others on the property Thursday that Corn might ask them to leave and they’d be trespassing if they didn’t: “If Larue Corn shows up and says, ‘Sage, get the hell out of my property,’ I am leaving, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
When Signal Akron arrived at the lot around 11 a.m. Thursday, one of the last remaining residents of the encampment was wheeling away his belongings on a small two-wheeled cart, donning a hand-written cardboard sign reading, “OLD HOMELESS HANDYMAN. GOT WORK? PLEASE HELP.”
Akron has only one homeless shelter for single men, Haven of Rest. It has “Christ-centered” guidelines, including a condition that people attend church services before each meal. Some men at the encampment had been permanently banned from the Haven of Rest, Lewis said.
‘Literally nothing has changed’
Lewis had hoped the city’s response to homelessness would be different under Mayor Shammas Malik — because he’s younger and has a law degree from “liberal bastion” Harvard University, Lewis said — compared to the Dan Horrigan administration.
“Literally nothing has changed,” the businessman and former Akron City Council candidate said. “Not anything. Not a statement, not a policy. It’s just been smooth as ice. We’re doing the exact same thing the other guy did. I’m just sick of it. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how to get this fixed. So here I am.”
Lewis compared his decade of advocacy for homeless Akronites to Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay about the Greek legend of a man condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a mountain only to have that boulder roll back down every time.
“I read it, man,” he said. ”I’m tired of pushing this rock up a hill.”
After city employees, officers and the waste removal crew left on Thursday afternoon, a married couple arrived back to find everything there gone. The man, bleeding from his nose and weakened from a recent surgery, dropped to his knees, grasped his wife and cried. The couple didn’t know what they were going to do next.
As dark clouds rolled in and the wind blew the leaves and dust, they put an old blanket on the dirt and laid down where their tent once stood. With rain appearing imminent, Lewis covered the couple with the blue tarp that he had affixed to the top of his tent moments earlier.