Homeless driven from desert site

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, March 8, 2002 | 10:52 a.m.

After living outdoors for more than a decade, Gordon Harvey Easton, 74, knows weather.

That's why he spent the month of February digging a cellar 7 feet deep to cool off his A-frame house -- before summer rolls around.

"It's natural air conditioning," he said, seated in front of the one-room house he built next to the Las Vegas Wash.

But Easton may not see this summer in the house he has built over the last five years with hand tools, lumber and scraps in a field east of Boulder Highway and Russell Road. Though not technically "homeless," he's squatting and living near an encampment of about 30 homeless men and women.

That was expected to end today. Metro Police ordered Easton and everyone else to vacate the field by this morning after residents of a neighboring mobile home park complained to police and Clark County's Public Response Team about some of the homeless people trespassing on their property.

And though James Foreman, the county agency's manager, said the case was a "normal example of code violations," homeless advocates say Easton is caught in the middle of a growing trend, where private property owners are complaining to the police and other agencies about the homeless, who are then moved along from place to place.

"The same thing happened in what is known as Tent City -- on Owens Avenue and A Street -- where several dozen homeless people were evacuated just last week," said Linda Lera-Randle El, homeless advocate and director of the outreach program Straight from the Streets.

Lera-Randle El said she had no qualms with the police for responding to citizen complaints. "But my issue is where we have older men and women like Mr. Gordon being displaced and made to suffer for the acts of a few lawless people," she said. "The point is, there is no plan to deal with the majority of the homeless -- these people should not be told to leave in 72 hours, but given extensive, one-to-one outreach in order to find them alternatives to camping out in the desert."

The men and women in the field, though disappointed, are resigned to moving.

"We're prepared to leave the area," said David Roberts, 49, who has lived for nearly eight years in various spots near the wash. Several men with him nodded their heads.

When asked where they would go, the men pointed to the mountains east of Boulder Highway.

"We just think it's unfair to Mr. Gordon to move him along after all the work he's put into the house," Roberts said, using the name by which the men referred to the former carpenter.

The house, complete with a door bought at Home Depot, a basement and an attic, has earned the respect of all who live in the field, said several who were packing their few possessions Wednesday and Thursday.

Some of the men interviewed have lived in the field for up to four years, in what one of them described as a "family."

"If we get mad at each other out here, we still help each other out," Roberts said.

Roberts, a roofer by trade, said he gets by recycling scrap metal and searching for food in trash containers.

"But when one of us doesn't have enough to eat, someone else always helps out."

Their situation took a turn for the worst several weeks ago when four men -- who one of the men called "bad apples" -- climbed the fence of a nearby mobile home park, causing several of the park's residents to alert authorities.

Mobile home park resident Barbara Auble, who has called the police about the homeless people in the field several times over the past two months, said she's worried about them setting fires and about health threats caused by their unsanitary living conditions.

"I know they're not all bad and that they need a place to live," she said. "I just don't want them in my backyard."

On Monday, a county investigator and about two dozen police officers arrived at the camp and issued warnings for charges ranging from littering to trespassing on private property -- and told the people in the field they had until midnight Thursday to leave.

Easton said he began living outdoors in 1990 after a landlord complained about his five cats in a North Las Vegas apartment. He lived in a park on Bonanza Road for six years, until it was turned into a golf course.

Then he came out to the site beside the wash, where he began building his house.

He said most of the people chased off the land Thursday arrived during the past three years.

Easton, originally from Michigan, spends most of his days working on the house. On Thursday afternoon, he had just arrived from having his handsaw sharpened.

He also said he keeps to himself, and doesn't make many friends -- or enemies.

"I don't have time to be drinking or carousing," he said, noting he spends free time trying to track down a son and daughter he hasn't seen in about two decades.

Easton, who lives off a small retirement fund, is confused about the order to vacate the land, and would like to talk to county officials about being allowed to stay in his house.

"The funny thing is, police have always passed through here and given me the thumbs up," he said. "Now that I've finished the house, they want to come and give me a hard time. It just doesn't seem fair.

"Where am I going to go? And what about my cats?"