When Taylar Nuevelle looked out her window on Monday morning and saw the snow-shrouded ground, her first thought was of a woman whose name she didn’t know.
“If she stayed there, she’s dead,” the thought told her.
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“She” was the unhoused woman whose tent had appeared weeks earlier on a strip of greenery near New Jersey Avenue and Fourth Street, not far from where Nuevelle lives in Northwest Washington. Nuevelle often passed the tent while walking her dog and she sometimes placed food and water there. Once, she left a blanket.
She had never met the person who lived there. She only knew it was a woman because she could hear her talking, and sometimes arguing, with herself.
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Nuevelle decided to go check on the tent. She hoped to find it and the woman gone. What she discovered instead left her feeling shaken and sick. The tent was buried under a pile of snow, and in that collapsed state, it remained still — too still. Nearby, a shopping cart held enough snow to show it had gone untouched all night.
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Fearing the worst, Nuevelle retreated back to her apartment to try to figure out what to do, whom to call, how to help. She then went back outside, took a calming breath and started to look around. That’s when she noticed the woman sitting at a bus stop — wet, freezing and angry.
“She said, ‘I was trapped in that tent under that snow for an hour. I had to get out and pull all my stuff out, and the cart wouldn’t work, so I had to drag my stuff to the bus stop,’” Nuevelle recalls. “She told me, ‘The whole time I was dragging it, I thought somebody will see me and help me, but no one came.’ ”
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The woman’s coat was soaked, so Nuevelle retrieved a fluffy white one that she knew was warm. As she wrapped it around the woman, she noticed one of the woman’s fingers was badly infected, making it hard for her to move her hand.
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She also noticed the woman speaking in a way that told of struggles that went beyond her housing situation. At times, her words were inscrutable and even volatile. But occasionally they came out clearly.
“She said, ‘Your nails are pretty,’ ” Nuevelle recalls. “She looked at me and said, ‘Thank you.’ That was a moment of lucidness for her.”
When the streets are cleared and we think back on this week’s snowstorm, the largest since 2019, many of us will remember images that showed adults throwing snowballs on the National Mall, children sledding on neighborhood hills, and those stuck-in-place cars and trucks that lined Interstate 95 for more than a day.
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But there is another image that warrants our attention. Nuevelle captured it that morning. It shows that woman’s tent barely peeking out of the snow. You might not notice it at all, if it weren’t for a pole sticking out on one side and the dark color of the tent’s top.
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That photo depicts an unfortunate moment in the life of someone who has probably seen many unfortunate moments. It also shows the aftermath of the District’s approach to clearing homeless encampments.
An unhoused woman flipped off D.C.’s mayor. Then came more criticism of the city’s actions to get people off the streets.
After D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser launched a pilot program aimed at eliminating several of the District’s largest encampments by offering housing to some of those residents, community organizers and homeless outreach workers protested the confusing, rapid and inhumane way those tents and lives were being dismantled. At one encampment, city workers used a construction vehicle to lift a tent before realizing a man was still in it.
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Those activists and advocates, joined by some local lawmakers, called on the city to halt encampment closures — if not permanently, then at least through the winter.
And yet, at the beginning of December, another encampment was cleared. That one was at New Jersey Avenue and O Street NW.
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“This morning when I arrived at the New Jersey & O St encampment site, there were a number of case workers, advocates and community members helping several residents who had not been housed pack up their belongings,” D.C. Council member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1) tweeted that day. “There was confusion among encampment residents — some did not know if they were receiving a housing resource, hotel, or if they need to pack up and find a new location to sleep tonight. Some were feeling uncertain about their future, not knowing exactly how long the resources offered, if any, would last.”
She introduced an emergency bill that would have forced the city to halt encampment evictions during the coldest months. The American Civil Liberties Union of D.C. ran on its website a piece that described the vote on the bill as “a life-or-death matter for thousands of unhoused people across the District.” On Dec. 21, as my colleague Marissa J. Lang reported, the D.C. Council rejected that bill.
D.C. Council votes to continue the clearing of homeless encampments
Nuevelle says that while trying to get help and housing for the woman whose tent toppled, she learned this about her: She is 73 years old. She goes by Arlenia or Lenia. And she was displaced from the encampment at New Jersey and O.
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One of the points made repeatedly by those opposed to the swift dismantling of the encampments was that those forced evictions were tearing apart established communities and pushing the unhoused into more isolated places.
That 73-year-old woman was lucky she was able to get out of her tent after it fell on her. But she wouldn’t have had to rely so heavily on luck if she had been surrounded by others in tents. She wouldn’t have been alone when the tent collapsed.
“The person becomes an island, and that is the thing that is so terrible about the way they are going about these encampment clearings. They’re breaking up communities, they’re breaking up societies,” says Tara Vassefi, an attorney who has put her career on hold to work with mutual-aid groups. “The way the city is doing this is a war. It’s a war on the most vulnerable among us.”
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Vassefi witnessed the lifting of the occupied tent during that encampment clearing. “It was as horrific as it sounds,” she says.
Vassefi has a van she calls Billie and she has used it to move the belongings of people who’ve been displaced from the encampments. On Monday, after Nuevelle made several phone calls, Vassefi arrived with Billie to take the woman’s belongings to a hotel. On Tuesday, Vassefi moved them again — this time to an Airbnb apartment in Northeast.
Nuevelle, who founded the nonprofit Who Speaks for Me, which I’ve written about, says she called 911 that morning. An ambulance arrived, she says, but it drove away after the woman hid under a tarp at the bus stop and refused to be seen by the paramedics. Nuevelle says the woman made it clear she did not want to go to a city shelter or leave her belongings. Nuevelle says she got in contact with Reginald Black of the People for Fairness Coalition, an organization of current and formerly homeless people; Nee Nee Taylor of the activist group Harriet’s Wildest Dreams; and Maurice Cook of the nonprofit Serve Your City.
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Working together, they helped find the woman a hotel room. But because she was only allowed to stay one night, they needed to find another housing option. Nuevelle says her organization partnered with Serve Your City to pay for a month’s stay at the Airbnb.
That so many people came together to help the woman is an uplifting story. But it’s also one that could have ended very differently. Nuevelle knows that — and she has made sure that city officials do too.
On Tuesday, she sent an email to the mayor, a D.C. Department of Human Services official and several council members. In it, she describes how “Ms. Lenia” was displaced from the encampment, how she sat at that bus stop “wet and distraught,” and how she still needs a housing voucher and wraparound services.
“Will you help us house Ms. Lenia?” the email ends.
Read more from Theresa Vargas