Heather Bernard feels the city won’t leave her alone. Nearly every month, she packs up her clothes, toiletries, bedding, and other essentials and moves around the corner or a block down from the orange storefront where she normally sleeps. Sometimes, she might lose valuable items in the moving process. But she always returns.
D.C. cleared the encampment Bernard lives at in Mount Pleasant 14 times in 2024 and once so far in 2025, largely because of its proximity to the road, the city says. This makes her encampment the one D.C. closed the most; the next most frequently cleared location was closed only eight times in 2024. Each time, after city officials are done clearing her encampment, Bernard returns, even though she’s not supposed to — she says she doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
“They’ll say, we wouldn’t like for you to be here,” she said. “And I said, look, you’re failing me because I’m waiting for my home [at] my home.”
Dressed in red Crocs and a pink jacket, Bernard, who’s in her early 50s, looks as motherly and kind as she is — when she sits down to speak to Street Sense at a nearby coffee shop, she keeps finding things to compliment. She’s exceedingly proud of her family and says her daughter “opened up [her] understanding to a new world.”
Bernard’s lilting way of speaking and slight accent betray her birthplace of Jamaica, from which she immigrated at 12 with her siblings. Her parents had immigrated several years before to set up a life for the family in D.C.
“It seemed as if something was happening, because my parents came ahead of me,” she said. “This thing about the land of opportunity, and this was supposed to be the United States of America.”
Bernard attended junior high and high school in the District. She loved school, describing it as “fun” and her grades as “good.” After high school, she dabbled in engineering at the University of the District of Columbia before committing to majoring in computer science. She graduated from UDC in 1991. After graduating, she moved home for a while before beginning a post-graduate program at American University, Bernard said, but as she became sick, bad things kept happening to her and her family.
By her own admission, her memory of this time is somewhat hazy. Bernard describes herself as having bipolar disorder and told Street Sense she also sometimes has trouble remembering details. But she said she came to Mount Pleasant in 2001 after having surgery because she didn’t know where else to go.
Bernard’s encampment isn’t an encampment in the traditional sense — she doesn’t have a tent, just a collection of belongings which include a tarp, bedding, and blankets. Still, the Office of D.C.’s Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services (DMHHS) has cleared it a total of 16 times, beginning in 2023, and most recently on April 3, according to publicly available data compiled by Street Sense.
The city originally closed the site to all camping in 2023 for “health and safety” reasons, a DMHHS spokesperson wrote, including the fact the site is close to roads and sidewalks. The agency has received complaints about the encampment since mid-2023, the spokesperson wrote.
In Bernard’s eyes, the repeated clearings are unnecessary, as she isn’t causing any trouble, and she tries “to be good.”
“If I’m at the end of the sidewalk, yeah, it shouldn’t be a problem, yeah, unless I’m blocking people, you know, from getting back and forth,” she said. The repeated closures have put her on edge, she told Street Sense.
Whenever she sees the orange Department of Public Works truck, she knows it’s time to move again. Of the 14 times DMHHS cleared Bernard’s encampment in 2024, 12 of the clearings were “immediate dispositions” — when the agency provides residents with only 24 hours of notice to pack up and move. “This morning, I saw the orange truck. I don’t know what they were looking for because every day they’re looking for something to take somewhere,” Bernard said.
For Bernard, the sense of frustration and uncertainty generated by the frequent and repeated closures has also made it harder to move into housing. It can often take people years to receive a voucher and then months to years for them to find a lease that will accept the voucher. Disruptions, like losing a case manager or not finding housing during an allotted period, can cause the process to take even longer.
“I was so frustrated. I didn’t know what to do, because I have my own damn problems, like I told you, I’m bipolar,” she said. “I had a voucher, and it had expired, and they’re waiting to fix some more. But you know, when you’re used to something, that’s what you do; It’s like, I like my home, I like my space.”
According to the DMHHS spokesperson, the city paused closures of Bernard’s encampment for several months in the summer of 2024 so city and contracted outreach workers could work towards making a housing plan for Bernard, and service providers have offered her other services, such as storage. But closures resumed after five months due to continued health and safety concerns.
“We know this is a process that takes time and trust, but we are working to build that here with the end goal of accepting shelter and working through the housing process,” the spokesperson wrote.
Edward Wycoff, a community care navigator at District Bridges, a local service provider, shares Bernard’s frustrations. He’s been in touch with her since May 2024 and has watched the repeated closures unfold while progress toward connecting her to permanent housing has stalled.
“I want this person to receive care, and that has been extremely difficult because of the many challenges that she faces, but also the many challenges that service providers face with interfacing with one another,” he told Street Sense. “I know of five direct service providers, including District Bridges, along with at least four D.C. agencies that have interfaced with her since I’ve started.”
DMHHS says they work to coordinate with all these agencies before and after all encampment closures, including Bernard’s. “DMHHS, DHS, DBH, and the area provider(s) work together to ensure residents staying in encampments have received ample outreach prior to and during encampment engagements,” the spokesperson wrote.
But Wycoff feels there are still some common holes in coordination among city agencies and outreach providers, which he thinks may have made things more difficult in Bernard’s case.
“There’s no single platform for communication, so there’s no way for me to know if [DMHHS] have contacted the provider or what has been communicated,” he said. Even HMIS, the Homeless Management Information System, has issues because providers have varying levels of information that they’re required to report and share, according to Wycoff.
Different providers have different levels of access to HMIS, where information on people experiencing homelessness and their progress towards housing is stored. This disparity can create situations like Bernard’s, where someone may be at one point matched with a housing voucher, but providers might not do the legwork to ensure a person leases up, either because they aren’t aware of the voucher or aren’t in touch with the client.
In Wycoff’s eyes, the first step to addressing cases like Bernard’s is to improve communication between service providers. This would also increase accountability in cases where one provider might not be making meaningful progress on a client’s case.
“If we are actually invested in ending chronic homelessness, then we have to find a way to have all of the people involved, all of the providers able to communicate easily,” Wycoff said.
Bernard feels these issues with communication even more acutely. She remembers once trying to talk to someone who had arrived to close her encampment.
“I said, I don’t know what you want. Why are you doing this? Please tell me the honest truth,” she said. In response, she says someone told her they had no time to explain, and she had to move once again.
