Change of scene: Atascadero cracks down on homeless encampments, partners with providers to offer services and shelter

This has been a record-setting year for the El Camino Homeless Organization (ECHO) crew.

“ECHO has helped 117 men, women, and children find stable housing in our community this year so far from January to August,” ECHO Director of Operations Austin Solheim said. “That is the most we have ever housed in a year.”

But that number comes with some context, according to Solheim. That number indicates just how many more people are finding themselves unhoused in Atascadero.

Camps of homeless individuals have become the norm for the Highway 101 and Highway 41 exits—often stretching along the on- and off-ramps and under overpasses.

“I don’t know if we have had an increase necessarily in the amount of unhoused individuals,” Atascadero City Manager Jim Lewis said during the last week of August. “[But] I would describe the recent camps as very public and very large.”

Over the previous several weeks, the city of Atascadero, the Atascadero Police Department, Caltrans, and the California Highway Patrol have worked together to clean up and remove encampments. But the issue is something they know will require far more than just the initial effort.

“This is a topic that is extremely important to our community,” Jim Lewis said. “Camps of this size are something that we cannot tolerate.”

He stressed that while the city considered it to be imperative that they remove large public encampments, Atascadero is committed to handling the removals with as much care as possible.

“We will be more assertive with breaking public camps like this, [but] it is important that regardless of who we are removing from these types of spaces we are compassionate in our approach,” he said. “We will not be assertive in our handling of these individuals.”

To combat the long-term impact and cause of these encampments, the Atascadero Police Department, ECHO, and city staff have combined resources to form two task forces.

“We are engaging in outreach for the underrepresented and making sure they know we can offer services to get them out of those encampments and into programs where they can recover and find stable housing,” Jim Lewis said.

The Community Action Team (CAT) consists of a uniformed officer and a licensed psychiatric technician—employed by San Luis Obispo County Behavioral Health—whose focus is working directly with unhoused individuals on a case-by-case basis.

The Outreach for Underrepresented Residents (OUR) team features the same makeup as the Community Action Team, this time adding a social worker.

In addition to that social worker, the OUR team is also part of the city’s continuing partnership with ECHO, which is contracted to provide outreach services, case management, and other programs in collaboration with the city.

“We operated off of grant funding for a while,” ECHO CEO and President Wendy Lewis said. “But when that funding ran out, the city reached out about our services, and this partnership has been a big part of how we have kept our program going.”

She said that in addition to keeping ECHO’s programs going, the city collaboration also highlights what her organization is trying to accomplish.

“A lot of people refer to us or think we are purely a homeless shelter, but the reality is at our core we are much more than just a place to stay at,” Wendy Lewis said. “It’s a 90-day shelter program that focuses on allowing those who are part of it to work toward getting into more permanent housing.”

Both Wendy Lewis and Solheim say the program has made an impact on recently cleared encampments along Highways 101 and 41. One individual from the encampments, Rick, said the ECHO program has been critical to getting him back on track.

“It’s a privilege to live here … a guy has a bed to sleep in every night and food made by members from the community,” Rick said. “When you ask for help, help is there, ECHO is there.”

That level of support is something that Jim Lewis is excited to have as the city looks into the future to address the long-term causes and impacts of homelessness.

“We have already had some success with this outreach,” he said. “In the last big cleanup the city did, we offered those recovery services and even had two individuals from the encampment accept our offer of resources and begin that road to recovery.”

He also acknowledged that the partnership with ECHO and the formation of the task forces are only part of addressing the issue.

“Long-term, there will be sites designed to help people transition from unhoused and get back on their feet,” Jim Lewis said. “We are working with the county to also build different and more housing to help people find homes.”

He noted that Atascadero plans on taking inspiration from the Five Cities Homeless Coalition. The nonprofit—which handles various programs to help unhoused individuals in the Five Cities area—built transitional a housing campus in Grover Beach, and areas like Morro Bay and Paso Robles are considering similar programs.

“Our main goal is to first have ways to ensure that fewer people fall into homelessness, and then from there we have transitional housing programs to help them get into homes,” Jim Lewis said.

Atascadero plans on introducing new camping ordinances into city policy at an upcoming City Council meeting in September. According to the Atascadero Police Department, the ordinance would address the when, where, and how individuals may sleep or camp on public property.

Wendy Lewis said that the steps ECHO and Atascadero are taking are just the beginning of a trend that acknowledges the issue for what it is.

“For years there have been a lot of barriers between the community and the unhoused, but in recent years we have been part of the efforts to build trust between the two,” she said. “Instead of looking at this from the perspective of, ‘Oh this is a homeless crisis,’ we need to look at it for what it really is—a humanitarian crisis.” Δ

Reach Staff Writer Adrian Vincent Rosas at arosas@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in Sep 7-17, 2023.