The goal was to get ahead of the chilly weather.
When the city launched a first-of-its-kind, three-week cleanup of hundreds of camps this fall, officials framed it as a compassionate intervention — a chance to bring people out of tents in the woods and into warm beds indoors. They touted last month how 181 people from these cleared encampments had accepted shelter.
The sad reality of the sweeps, however, is that far more people were simply scattered to new campsites while losing crucial gear for the colder months…