Clark County commissioner wants to redirect homeless away from encampments

Crews of people in brightly colored yellow shirts pace across South Mojave Road, right next to the LaVilla Mobile Home Park, carrying various items and tossing them in the back of large dump trucks.

From strollers to pink Hello Kitty blankets to black garbage bags bursting at the seams, all of it once belonged to a person living on the street in a nearby homeless encampment.

Tick Segerblom, the Clark County commissioner whose district encompasses the area of the encampments near Boulder Highway, said Monday he would introduce an ordinance during the Oct. 1 commission meeting banning encampments.

He gave a media tour of an area near East Charleston Avenue with a heavy presence of homeless residents.

“The county spent a ton of money building places where people can be housed, developing services, and so now we’re in a perfect position to kind of bring everybody together, using law enforcement (and) with that Supreme Court decision to really encourage people to come forward,” Segerblom said in an interview with the Sun. “They just cannot live in public rights of way, and they can’t live in the neighborhood, so that’s not safe. I thought, well, let’s put all the different forces together and come to a neighborhood and see what we can do. But this is an experiment, so it’s a work in progress, but it’s not going to stop.”

The move comes a week before the Las Vegas City Council is set to decide on updating its own encampment ban, which Mayor Carolyn Goodman proposed should be updated to reflect the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson.

In a 6-3 decision, the court sided with the city of Grants Pass, Ore., which passed an ordinance making it illegal for homeless residents to camp on any public property.

Since 2018, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over nine Western states, including Nevada, had held that these types of bans violated the Eighth Amendment in areas that lack enough shelter beds.

Homelessness has been an increasing issue in Southern Nevada, according to the 2024 Point-in-Time Homelessness Count. As of Jan. 25, according to the count, 7,906 people experiencing homelessness were found in Southern Nevada, a 17% increase over last year’s 6,566. It follows an upward trend in the region every year since 2021, when 5,083 homeless people were counted.

Outreach efforts have been ongoing for about a year in the neighborhood off East Charleston Avenue, said Louis Lacey, director of crisis teams at HELP of Southern Nevada.

Segerblom added that the neighborhood had been facing issues through the years due to absentee landlords not cleaning up their yards and homeless people setting up camps in certain neighborhoods, something he thinks is “unacceptable.”

Lacey said the organization — which has a partnership with Clark County to connect homeless people with resources — over the weekend informed those living in nearby encampments that there would be a county cleanup. Team members with HELP of Southern Nevada were able to connect “several” people with services, including housing in the nearby congregate shelter or Navigation Center.

One big obstacle the county and its partners have faced is getting some of the homeless residents they meet into services. Lacey said those living with substance abuse or other mental illnesses may not accept services right away, so HELP of Southern Nevada must “break through some of those barriers” to help.

Sometimes, people still turn down the resources, Jamie Sorenson, director of Clark County Social Services, noted. He could not give any numbers as to how many people are refusing care.

“There are those instances, and they have that choice,” Sorenson said in an interview. “What we try to do is be present in areas like this, build relationships over time, build trust and people, oftentimes, eventually will accept services and move into shelter and resources.”

The county begins cleanup efforts once it receives a notification from individuals or businesses through the FixIt Clark County application. Jim Andersen, chief of code enforcement at Clark County, mentioned that encampments were now the No. 1 complaint from businesses.

If the encampment is on private property, code enforcement will send a 30-day notice to the property owner and allow them the chance to clean it up. The county will go in after those 30 days and commence a cleanup if it hasn’t been resolved.

Clark County Public Works will also become involved in cleanups if they occur on a public right of way, like the one Monday morning, or in areas like washes.

The public cleanup notices are given anywhere from a day to only hours before work commences, but Andersen said homeless folks whose camps are destroyed are allowed to take whatever items they need so long as it isn’t trash.

While the county conducts the cleanup efforts, HELP of Southern Nevada provides the social services.

HELP of Southern Nevada offers wrap-around resources to the people they connect with, including housing options and help with securing important documents such as identification cards, birth certificates, Social Security cards and Medicaid applications among others. It also connects people with substance abuse and mental health treatment clinics when needed, Lacey added.

“We can’t go out here with one solution that’s going to help everybody because everyone is different, and a lot of circumstances that led to folks being homeless or them remaining in homelessness (are) at play,” Lacey said. “We’re not the enforcement arm, we are the social services arm where we are here to meet clients where they’re at and to work with them.”

The county acknowledged that an encampment ban could stretch regional resources thin but said it isn’t worried about running out of bed space.

To address homelessness, Clark County recently invested millions to open short-term and permanent supportive housing, including $23 million on six noncongregate shelters and over $170 million for affordable housing units for low- to extremely low-income residents.

It also operates 40 Rapid Rehousing programs, which the county said represented 30.77% of projects for homeless people, and a Navigation Center to connect homeless adults without children to housing, income, public benefits and physical, mental and behavioral health services, among others.

HELP of Southern Nevada and Segerblom have opposed encampment bans in the past — notably, in 2020 when Segerblom pushed the county to roll back outdated vagrancy laws following Las Vegas enacting its original camping ban.

The county commissioner said now, after “realizing that a lot of people prefer being homeless” and seeing an impact on neighborhoods, it’s one of the only ways to get people experiencing homelessness into shelters.

Police action will be taken if necessary, Segerblom added. Segerblom did not know what would happen to the displaced if shelter beds are full.

“We’ve told everybody what they have, and if they’re still unwilling to leave the neighborhoods, then it’s a choice between those people and the neighbors and, honestly, I think people in the neighborhood with kids and everything, they deserve a safe neighborhood,” Segerblom said. “It’s always a give-and-take as far as what we have available, but our commitment is, like today, anyone who will seek treatment, we have a place for you.”

 

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