Wilson Avenue homeless linger as sweep day arrives

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, June 17, 2005 | 11:02 a.m.

Jay Lilly, a 56-year-old woman who has been camped on a sidewalk at Wilson Avenue downtown for 14 months, said Thursday she was just waiting for a property deed to be located, and that would enable her to get off the street.

She has said this before.

After she said it Thursday, she went back to playing her calculator-sized game of electronic poker, with no apparent regard at all for the cleanup of the homeless camp she lives in scheduled for today.

As many spoke of uncertain plans, several tents unexpectedly caught fire Thursday morning. Volunteers from the nearby Rescue Mission helped put the fire out and noted at how the incident underscored the fragility of living conditions in the camp.

This morning, according to Linda Lera-Randle El, director of Straight from the Streets, a nonprofit organization, Lilly and about 30 others were the only ones left in a camp that had swelled to 300 people or more in the last year or so.

Dozens of tents, lean-tos and bedrolls remained, Lera-Randle El said. "The street looks like a hurricane went through -- like a ghost town," she said.

The cleanup -- manned by Las Vegas Neighborhood Services and Metro Police -- marked the end of a 60-day effort put together by private and public agencies to get people off the downtown street. The camp is just north of where Bonanza Road crosses under Interstate 15.

On Thursday, the last day of the effort, elected officials from the valley's municipalities, advocates and other government agencies met in Henderson to consider a regional plan for reducing homelessness and to review the first-ever attempt to bring agencies to the street.

But hours before that meeting, the camp still had about 117 tents, lean-tos and bedrolls belonging to between 250 and 300 people -- more or less the same numbers seen on April 20, the day a Clark County trailer became an impromptu aid office on the street.

Lera-Randle El said those still on the street told her this morning that Metro Police officers began urging everyone to pull out at about 2 a.m.

Today, the trailer was to be removed, as were the remaining homeless people, and their possessions. Unlike previous sweeps, fliers handed out earlier this week advised the homeless people that they will have 30 days to recover any possessions the city removes from the street.

As for the effort itself, 82 people were given Clark County temporary vouchers of $369 to get into rental housing since April, according to preliminary figures supplied by Paula Haynes-Green, regional homeless services coordinator. Nonprofit organizations working out of the trailer or on the street helped an additional 47 people into housing.

The difference between the two: county rental assistance doesn't come accompanied by ongoing, one-on-one outreach, as some of the housing offered by the nonprofit organizations does, meaning some of the homeless people may soon be back on the streets if they fall prey to addictions or mental illness.

It is unclear how many of the people who obtained some kind of housing during the two months they were in the camp at the onset of the effort, how many arrived to Wilson because the trailer was there offering help, and how many were never at Wilson at all, Haynes-Green said.

It is also unclear how many people total came through the trailer during those 60 days, she said. The county also denied services to 149 people during that period because they weren't eligible.

On Wilson Avenue Thursday, Phil Johnson, a 43-year-old who finished an 8-year prison sentence for armed robbery in February said he finally found some help at the trailer after months on the streets.

During those months he had been to offices around the valley of some of the agencies that were at the trailer, but none had been able to help him. He said part of the problem with getting on his feet is being mentally ill -- he takes Paxil and Wellbutrin -- and part of the problem is having a criminal record.

By chance, at the trailer, a voucher wound up being the ticket, and he got into an apartment nearby only days ago. Now he has to see about a pending Social Security disability application -- his fourth time applying -- or find some other strategy to keep afloat, a difficult proposition.

Meanwhile, Clark County Manager Thom Reilly, at the meeting Thursday afternoon, said that the Wilson Avenue effort, while "not the answer," was something that had never been tried, and that it helped many people.

And on the corner of Wilson, a man who said he is 58 and who everyone calls "Pops" or "Scotty" said he was also waiting from some kind of deed which would demonstrate that he was the owner of the street, or some other document that would show how much money he had in the bank, or the results of an appointment he had at "immigration" Wednesday.

Like Lilly, he said he had no plans to go anywhere.

Sgt. Tom Stoll, whose Metro Police Bolden Area Command squad has been spending about 60 percent of their time on the street in the last two months, said Thursday that other sweeps in recent years had shown the same pattern.

"They don't leave until they have to."