There are many ways to know a city — its front porches, its restaurants, its tourist traps — but Angel Sivado knows Louisville, Ky., by way of its homeless camps.
Sivado knows every overpass where somebody sleeps on a worn piece of cardboard, every gas station with a tent tucked behind its dumpster. She knows the signs invisible to others: clearings in the woods behind a strip mall, abandoned shopping carts, smoke rising from campfires.
Every morning at 7:45, Sivado, 51, an outreach worker for a homeless services agency called St. John Center, drives from one homeless camp to the next. She carries jerky and Pringles, Narcan and clean socks. Many of Louisville’s homeless people use her office as their home address. They confide in Sivado, who greets everyone with her voice like syrup: “Hi, friend!”
On a sticky afternoon in July, Sivado visited one of her clients, Jessica Miller. Since the start of this year, Miller has been working on an application for a housing voucher, but right now she lives in a tattered orange tent behind the dumpster of a Thorntons convenience store. One of her legs was amputated after she got sepsis, and her prosthetic was stolen by another homeless person. During the day, she sits in a wheelchair with a rain-weathered cardboard sign: “Homeless anything helps thank you
Miller, who is 42, said she fled an abusive relationship more than six years ago and found herself homeless. She is one of nearly 600 people who were homeless and not living in shelters when Louisville last counted its homeless population in 2024, a more than 300 percent increase from before the pandemic.
Sivado grabbed a water bottle and bag of apples from the back seat of her van and took them to Miller, who was sitting in her tent. “I’m getting attacked by rats,” she said, gesturing at a heap of trash collecting near her tent.
“I can handle it,” she continued. “But it’s the way I’m treated. I’m homeless, not contagious.”
Miller said customers leaving the convenience store had been laughing at her and taking pictures. She recently heard a Thorntons employee ask the manager where Miller got the money for cigarettes, and the manager mimed oral sex. She began to cry.
Wiping her eyes with her fingers, Miller asked Sivado about something she had heard recently from a police officer. The officer had given her a verbal warning: Find somewhere new to sleep. There was a new law that prohibited sleeping outside. She could be fined, or go to jail.
Sivado knew about this law. In April, the Kentucky Legislature made unsanctioned public camping illegal, one of at least three states to ban homeless camping this year, on top of nearly 60 localities that did the same. Then in June, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling that protected bans on homeless encampments. Sivado and her colleagues had begun visiting sites in Louisville that were marked for clearing to ask the people sleeping there if they knew where they would go.
“I hope they don’t arrest you,” Sivado said.
“It seems like it should be illegal,” Miller replied. “I can’t get somewhere else like a normal person.” She gestured toward her missing leg.
“You’re getting ready to go home,” said Sivado. She brought her thumb and index finger together. “You’re this close. Let’s get you home.”
The Cicero Blueprint
For most of his life, John Hodgson had no plans to run for office. He moved to Louisville nearly 40 years ago for a job at UPS headquarters. He relished being part of Louisville’s growth, celebrating the rising number of tourists arriving each year for bourbon tours and derby parties.
Hodgson retired in 2016. During the early months of the pandemic, he grew disturbed by what he viewed as overreach by Kentucky’s Democratic governor. Hodgson, a Republican, decided to run for the State Legislature, winning a seat in 2022.
Crime was the top problem that Hodgson heard about from constituents in his district, a leafy Louisville suburb. Neighbors told him they did not feel safe downtown. Some felt uneasy about the homeless people sleeping on the streets and panhandling outside restaurants.
Hodgson set out to study what other cities were doing on crime and homelessness. He read the book “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” by Michael Shellenberger.
He visited Los Angeles, which had not at that time banned homeless encampments, as well as San Diego, which had, and concluded: “When people are allowed to live on the street untreated, they spiral.”
Hodgson plunged into the issue at a moment when homelessness, especially street homelessness, was rising sharply. A growing number of policymakers and businesspeople argue that cities have been too lenient in their approach to homeless populations. They maintain that encampments are dangerous to those in and around them.
Others argue that criminalizing street camping will not deter it, and will instead saddle homeless people with bench warrants and unpayable fines. “People are not going to disappear. They are going to have to sleep somewhere else,” said Dennis Culhane, a social scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on homelessness. A study this year found no significant correlation between ordinances criminalizing homeless activities and a long-term reduction in homelessness.
At the front of the campaign to prohibit street camping is the Cicero Institute, which was created by Joe Lonsdale, one of the founders of the data behemoth Palantir Technologies. Lonsdale, who built his career in San Francisco, decided that its leaders’ policies on homelessness were misguided. He criticized “housing first,” a bipartisan approach that has steered federal policy for more than two decades and gives people access to housing without first requiring treatment for mental illness or addiction.
Cicero, which is based in Texas, released its own platform, which proposes defunding housing first programs, reallocating those funds and banning unauthorized camping. Since 2021, the institute has assisted with legislation on homelessness introduced in Missouri, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Utah and Florida. Cicero researchers argue that housing first programs and unauthorized encampments tacitly encourage homeless people to leave addiction untreated.
“We need to be willing to push people into shelter, push people into treatment,” said Devon Kurtz, who leads research on homelessness at Cicero.
“If someone is so severely mentally ill that they’re living in an encampment full of toxic trash, they’re extremely vulnerable — jail is better than that,” he continued. “If the risk is dying, I’m willing to say jail is better than dying.”
Hodgson felt similarly. Stories from his own life seemed to bolster this case. He taught in a Sunday school and saw one of his students become addicted to alcohol and drugs. “When he would get arrested, he would stop the drug problem, go to class, go to Bible study,” Hodgson said. “I talked to his dad, who said, ‘It’s a sad thing to say, but my boy was better off in prison.’”
Last year, Hodgson and six of his colleagues began assembling a bill, the Safer Kentucky Act, which would increase penalties for many nonviolent crimes and prohibit public camping. Hodgson contacted a friend who worked at the Cicero Institute.
With assistance from Cicero, the Kentucky legislators drafted provisions that would make unauthorized camping carry potential fines and jail time.
The bill passed 75 to 23. It was vetoed by Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, but the Legislature overrode the veto, and the Safer Kentucky Act went into effect in July. Lonsdale celebrated it. “We worked hard this legislative session to help states combat the growing homelessness crisis,” he wrote on his blog. “It paid off.”
Those efforts landed on the streets of Louisville this summer.
City at a Crossroads
Sivado was getting into her car after visiting Miller that Tuesday in July when she spotted two Thorntons employees making their way toward the tent.
Sivado leaped out of the car and rushed over. “I’m from St. John Center,” she said.
The two store employees, who declined to give their names, said officials from the city had fined Thorntons $100 when they saw the tents by the dumpster. They said that under Kentucky’s new law, businesses could be held liable for the homeless people staying on their properties. The employees said Miller and her boyfriend had to leave.
“We only have until the 6th of August to get them out,” one employee said. “Or we’ll be cited again.”
Sivado explained that outreach workers had been assisting Miller for months. They had finally secured her housing voucher over the summer and now just had to find a housing unit that was wheelchair-accessible. “We’re just waiting on the inspection,” she pleaded.
The second employee shrugged, saying, “We already sent this up to corporate.”
Sivado was shaking. As the Thorntons employees turned away, she began singing under her breath: “Praise you, Jesus,” she murmured.
Seated back in the car, she slowly exhaled. She acknowledged that there was little the store employees could do. But she ached for Miller: “There is not much in the world that frustrates me,” Sivado said, “except when people abuse our clients.”
Even before the Safer Kentucky Act made camping a misdemeanor, the City of Louisville had been dismantling homeless camps. When Craig Greenberg, a businessman who founded an upscale hotel chain, became mayor in 2023, those efforts accelerated. The city cleared 19 encampments within his first seven months in office, compared with nine in the months leading up to his administration.
Scruffy tent groupings were not a good look for a city on the make. Louisville attracted a record $4.2 billion in tourist spending in 2023. Greenberg had campaigned on a commitment to public safety. For years, the city faced interlocking crises, including the police killing of Breonna Taylor and the ensuing protests. During his campaign, Greenberg was the target of an assassination attempt, when a man walked into his office and shot at him. Greenberg was unharmed, but after the attack, he doubled down on a promise to curb the city’s disorder, which was especially visible in its encampments.
“We’ve had shootings, we’ve had stabbings, we’ve had rapes within these camps just as I’ve been mayor,” Greenberg said. “The long-term solution is more shelter and more services, and that’s what we’re building toward.”
His administration has worked with a nonprofit to open a campus with a new family shelter and affordable housing project, which they’re aiming to have fully operating within three years.
The questions Greenberg faces — whether to dismantle camps and, if so, how — have dogged mayors across the country. Grants Pass, a city in Oregon, began enforcing prohibitions on sleeping outside nearly a decade ago and faced a legal challenge from a homeless woman who accrued $5,000 in penalties. The case wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in June that cities are allowed to ban homeless camping.
Had the Supreme Court ruling gone the other way, lawyers in Louisville said, they would have tried to challenge the Safer Kentucky Act.
One public defender in Louisville, Ryan Dischinger, worries about people kicked out of camps with nowhere to go; Louisville’s shelter beds can accommodate only two-thirds of the unsheltered population. On top of that, people who are arrested often lose belongings, including voucher paperwork — which could set them back in the path toward housing.
“We could see a huge wave of people who are homeless being introduced, potentially for the first time, into the criminal justice system,” Dischinger said.
Cat and Mouse
Each day, Sivado and her colleagues drive around Louisville — visiting gas stations, traipsing through the woods — trying to keep straight all the people who need them. The camp clearings complicate their work. Now, they spend days tracking down clients who have had to move.
In late July, Sivado was driving by an Outback Steakhouse. Nearby was a clearing in the woods where a camp had been marked for dismantling. She parked her car and walked gingerly onto a path littered with needles and syringes. She pushed through a tangle of vines and arrived at a large tent, which had been made by stringing a tarp to a tree.
Inside the tent were a homeless man, Ryan Spitznagel, and his wife. Sivado asked if they had seen the yellow sign on the tree nearby, which indicated that the camp was going to be cleared in mid-August.
Spitznagel nodded. “We got evicted twice. Now we’re getting evicted from here,” he said.
Two weeks earlier, Spitznagel and his wife had been told to leave a different campsite, in the woods behind a storage facility. His wife worked at the nearby auto plant, he said, and they had to find somewhere to sleep within walking distance of her work.
“If she’s not 45 minutes early to work, she’s late,” he said of his wife, who was asleep in the tent. “Her dad instilled that work ethic in her.”
Spitznagel said both he and his wife were veterans and had cycled in and out of drug addiction treatment. A colleague of Sivado’s had connected them to the local veterans affairs office and was helping them apply for a housing voucher.
Like so many homeless people in Louisville, Spitznagel felt he was playing a cat-and-mouse game. He and his wife moved, and then were told to move again. At the same time, the outreach workers trying to get them into permanent housing were having a hard time locating them.
It was a rainy morning, and everybody Sivado came across seemed extra distressed, so back in the car she turned on gospel music. “This one’s my song!” she exclaimed, beginning to belt. “The Lord is my shepherd, he goes before me, defender behind me, I won’t fear.”
‘It Was My Home’
Sivado’s work is soul-nourishing and depleting all at once. Even after her clients secure housing vouchers, getting them into an apartment can take months. This year, Kentucky’s Legislature passed another law that would, in effect, allow landlords to refuse people using vouchers for rent.
All of it makes Sivado feel that the state is putting up barriers in a job already full of them.
In early August, police officers woke Miller up in her tent outside Thorntons and told her she had 15 minutes to leave. It took time for her to get into her wheelchair, so she had to leave behind her food, belongings and tent.
“I’m left with dirty clothes on, and that’s it,” she said afterward, adding: “It doesn’t look like a house, but it was my home.”
Two months later came better news: There was an apartment whose landlord had accepted Miller’s voucher and built her a wheelchair ramp. Sivado packed up a box with pots, pans, an air mattress and blankets. The night before the move, Sivado drove by Miller’s new temporary campsite.
Miller knew she should be feeling ecstatic, but it was hard to shake her fear. She was comforted by Sivado, her voice mellifluous, who mustered a tone of confidence as she told Miller: “This is your time. Let’s get you inside.”
The post When Kentucky Bans Homeless Camps, Where Do People Go? appeared first on New York Times.
