D.C. is expanding the reasons the city closes homeless encampments, making every encampment in the city vulnerable to closure. This could impact the nearly 200 people who live at encampments across D.C., according to city data.
D.C. officials first announced the change in how the city enforces its no camping policy after President Donald Trump’s initial remarks about encampments in D.C. in early February, and a few weeks before the city closed an encampment, seemingly at the president’s request.
Wayne Turnage, D.C.’s deputy mayor for Health and Human Services (DMHHS), testified in a Feb. 20 oversight hearing for his agency that DMHHS would no longer close encampments solely for health and safety reasons, as had been the city’s practice for the last several years.
“Up until this year, there were no site closures that did not involve health and safety,” Turnage said. “We are now entering territory where we may close encampments for reasons that don’t include health and safety, and they are more consistent with the mayor’s goal that people don’t sleep outside.”
The city did not provide specific responses when asked if the decision was connected to Trump’s comments on encampments. In a statement to Street Sense, Turnage wrote “our primary focus is always working to move people experiencing homelessness into safer shelters or housing.”
While this is technically not a shift in policy — Mayor Muriel Bowser has the authority to ban camping on all city land in D.C. — it represents a dramatic shift in how DMHHS makes decisions about when to close encampments. Since 2022, when DMHHS began labeling some encampment engagements as closures, the city has always cited health and safety as the motivation behind its decisions, according to a Street
Sense analysis of five years of public data.
In the past, DMHHS officials have told Street Sense they do not make the decision to close an encampment “lightly.” High fire risks, biohazards such as human waste, and intrusion on highways are among the factors the agency uses to justify closures. The encampments website commonly says closures are an “enforcement that this public space must remain clear at all times due to safety concerns,” though it does not provide specific information on what those concerns are.
The number of encampment closures has ticked up over the last year even as the total number of encampments in the city has decreased. In November 2023, D.C. reported 105 encampments, compared to 81 as of December 2024. In 2024, DMHHS closed 32 encampments, compared with 12 in 2023. So far in 2025, DMHHS has already conducted three encampment closures and scheduled 11 others.
A few weeks after Turnage’s testimony, Trump called on Boswer to “clean up all of the unsightly homeless encampments in the City, specifically including the ones outside the State Department, and near the White House” via a Truth Social post on March 5. The next day, DMHHS added an encampment closure for March 7 at the E St. Expressway NW in Foggy Bottom, which corresponds to the area Trump described.
By scheduling the closure so quickly, DMHHS disregarded its typical policy of providing residents with two weeks of notice before closing an encampment except in case of emergencies — a practice Turnage boasted about in the oversight hearing.
Advocates and outreach providers argue camping bans do more harm than good. Andy Wassenich, the policy director at Miriam’s Kitchen, said camping bans are typically ineffective at ending homelessness and mostly serve to shuffle people around the city, causing trauma in the process.
“There’s more and more evidence that involuntary removal from encampments, or however you want to put it, or evictions has negative health outcomes for people experiencing homelessness,” Wassenich said.
