Sexual abuse, drugs, murder: The hard truth of KC’s homeless camps and getting people out
Standing shoulder to shoulder in the numbing cold, trees creaking as if to crack, Nick Allen turns to Bill, 67 — homeless for at least 15 years and living in this Kansas City encampment in the woods.
A near fortress of tents and tarps, the camp along the railroad tracks north of Columbus Park, not only sits surrounded by a landscape of garbage and rusted appliances, but also one of drugs, overdoses, sexual coercion and murder.
“How many homicides do you think you’ve witnessed here, Bill?” asks Allen, a city homelessness worker that Bill has come to trust. Bill, who agreed to offer an inside look of his world as long as his last name was kept private, begins counting the deaths. His voice is a low grumble beneath a hoodie and graying beard.
“Two, three, four … ,“ Bill says. He wears a silver ring on his left hand “for protection”: Jesus on the cross. Within reach, he also has a machete. Within call: a fierce pit bull.
‘Boom. Christmas morning.’
“You know how many people have been killed out here?” he says. “They call this ‘killer alley.’”
Two years ago Bill’s brother died in these woods. Through the trees, at another camp, a cross made of sticks memorializes two murder victims in 2022: Marcia Boring, 52, and Eugene Shaw, 50. As prosecutors tell it, it was Shaw who killed Boring. Then, in retaliation, another homeless person murdered Shaw, but with no one willing to testify, at least reliably, charges were never brought.
“Last Christmas,” Bill says of 2023. “I had one of my friends standing right beside me. This guy comes up with a shotgun. Killed him right there. Boom. Christmas morning.” Police records confirm the killing happened on Christmas Eve.
Allen, 35, the city worker, is a burly University of Kansas graduate from Shawnee who, in his 20s, battled and beat his own addictions.
Now married, the father to an 8-month old daughter, he was hired two years ago by the city’s then-fledgling Office of Unhoused Solutions to take on a monumental task: To plunge into the camps and change Bill’s world, and the worlds of chronically homeless people like him. Get people off the streets. Get them away from harm. Find people permanent housing — along with the medical, social, addiction and psychological services many invariably need.
In two years, he has done that for upward of 100 people, said his boss, Josh Henges, the city’s houseless prevention coordinator. But a major problem in Kansas City, Henges and others complain, is that almost no one else in the area system is doing similar work.
The Office of Unhoused Solutions itself only has five workers trying to help an estimated 2,500 to 5,000 homeless people in Kansas City — maybe 10,000 when kids are counted. The number is uncertain, partly because nonprofits that are not federally funded are not required to keep or share their data. Most don’t.
While the Kansas City area is replete with churches and other nonprofits willing to offer food, blankets, clothing and other items that allow homeless people to survive outside, virtually none, Henges complains, are doing what Allen is doing — visiting the camps and working actively to “exit” people from homelessness.
Homeless advocates, in fact, debate whether the organizations that dedicate money, resources and volunteers to bring food and such may be doing more harm than good. The criticism is that the items they provide tend to make the intolerable condition of living outside more tolerable. Thus, keeping those who are unhoused in danger.
Henges is unsparing in his criticism:
“Kansas City,” he says, “has the worst homeless-serving system of any major city in the country. If you are homeless in Kansas City, you are outside. You are unsheltered. …
“The landscape of homelessness in Kansas City is terrible. It’s uncoordinated. It’s extraordinarily difficult to access. The overwhelming majority of folks who do outreach give away food and clothes. The goal should be exiting people out of homelessness. That is the only goal. It is extraordinarily frustrating knowing that there are 14 organizations that will come down here to drop off food, but none of them are going to talk about how you exit homelessness.
“Not one of them.”
Knowing that Allen and his few colleagues are not enough, Henges has asked for funds in Kansas City’s next city budget to hire 10 additional outreach workers, although he wonders if even one will be approved.
“We need 30 to 50 people like Nick,” Henges said. “No one does what Nick does and we need nonprofits to start doing it.”
Eric Burger, the executive director of Shelter KC, which is funded by churches and offers a shelter in the Crossroadsalong with psychological and other services, says that while he understands the point Henges is making, he believes criticism of the system requires greater nuance.
“I would say it’s a mixed bag,” Burger said. “To say that nothing is working is going too far. There are people coming out of homeless right now. But, yes, to say that there is not a coordinated system is right on.”
Others take umbrage.
“We go to camps weekly to work on getting folks housed,” said Jennifer McCartney, who a decade ago founded the volunteer organization Kansas City Heroes. “Our team follows up with our newly housed regularly. . . We are doing that without funding. I know we are not the only ones.”
Drugs, sexual coercion
Two year years on this job, plus three more working at a nonprofit, Allen is no longer surprised by the realities of homeless camps.
“Everything is kind of desensitized, becoming normalized for me,” he says.
He has stories, as does Bill. Like how a camp near the River Market is a well-known open drug market.
“It’s just under the bridge,” Allen says. “It’s just like people doing all these weird fentanyl movements, with cars pulling up.”
Allen recalled one guy in one camp who lit paint on fire and burned his entire body. Third-degree wounds. “He was in the river trying to wash himself,” Allen says. Then there was the guy that Allen helped get to the hospital. Knifed in the gut, he was bleeding out in the woods.
He’s been asked to identify bodies, and been asked by a homeless client to help an escaped prisoner from Lansing who’d fled to one of the camps.
The cops picked him up.
“I’ve had kids being sex trafficked out of tents, 12- and 13-year-old girls,” Allen say.
A Kansas City Police Department spokesman said the department has received no reports of sex trafficking at the camps.
Allen says it is far too common for homeless women with substance abuse struggles, or who suffer mental illness, to be sexually coerced and exploited in exchange for a fix or place to sleep. They’re another reason Henges rails against groups that do little more than drop off food or clothes.
When food’s brought to them, Henges says, the sexually exploited women never have an opportunity to leave or escape the camps. Others’ goodness traps them with their abusers.
Bill says he’s begun being visited by a 19-year-old girl who reportedly was 16 when she took to the streets.
“Came down yesterday,” Bill says. “Slumping over, nodding off from fentanyl. I know it’s fentanyl. I’ve been out here a long time.”
He says she told him she was drugging “to forget my life.”
“You’re gonna die,” Bill says he told her. “You’re going to do a little bit of it, and you’re not going to come out of it.”
Women raped at the camps?
“Oh, God,” Bill says. Of course. “It’s hard on women out here.”
“Bill deserves to be out of the chaos,” Allen says.
That’s hard, too.
‘Abandos’ and ‘Bama
Allen’s method is called “progressive engagement.”
It’s the painstaking work of becoming a fixture at the camps.
“Building trusting relationships, “ Allen says, “is the only way you’re going to get a chronically homeless person off the streets.”
Allen carries a phone app, “Show the Way,” by Simtech Solutions that maps every camp they know of: 166 in the app currently. That includes camps in the woods, camps on the street, as well as indoor “abandos” and “abandominiums,” meaning abandoned houses and condominiums that Henges says might house anywhere from three to 100 homeless residents.
“They pack them in there,” he says.
On the app, Allen stores the real names, street names and notes on the resident he’s met: 814 logged into the system so far, including five guys named Ghost, eight named Smoke.
“People love going by states,” Allen says. “I have a Florida, a ‘Bama, a New York.”
The most important work is spending time and caring enough to allow people to share the details of their stories, their needs and vulnerabilities so that Allen can help with finding housing, getting vouchers and getting people the medical and psychological help they often need.
“The point of the trust is to work through everything that has made them chronically homeless,” Allen says. “It’s very time intensive.”
Which is an understatement.
One client he is proud of helping, a woman with schizophrenia, took 150 hours. She had been living for years on a bench in south Kansas City, a matter that again triggers Henges’ frustration:
“One reason it was 150 hours,” he says, “is that there would be people, dozens every day, that would drop off donuts, bottles of water. She literally didn’t have to leave that bench. She had never showered. She would urinate and defecate into buckets there. She wouldn’t leave because people kept bringing her s--t. They were enabling her homelessness.”
Allen, having worked to build relationships with landlords, finally got her into housing.
“I, like, had landlords at my wedding two years ago. My life is invested in building relationships,” he says.
Instead of being congratulated, Allen says he was lambasted for his efforts by a church volunteer who regularly dropped food off for the woman at her bench.
“People were mad at me,” he says. “They were like, ‘God meant for her to be out here.’ They enjoyed their interaction with her. It made them feel good to help her. When I would talk to her, 10 different people would come by and give her KFC.
“But she was a hoarder. She put the food under her tarp. What people didn’t see is that mice were crawling all around her.”
The story is a success.
“The biggest thing is that the housing program I placed her in has, like, people trained in mental health that regularly visit her,” Allen says. “Taught her the basic needs and stuff. So it wasn’t just me. I handed her over to that next step, and that’s when it was freaking awesome.”
‘A lot going on’
Not all work that way. The work is nuanced. Finding housing for a couch-surfing teenager is different than finding housing for a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“What landlord is going to say, ‘Yeah, I want to rent to the guy who’s lived outside since 1997, has no work history, nine evictions, three felonies and a pitbull?’” Allen says.
But that’s the job.
Near BIll’s camp is another, a network of tents and tarps surrounded by a virtual fortress wall of hard-edged garbage: 50-gallon drums, broken bike frames, car seats, couches, electronics, clothes turned to rags strewn over tree limbs.
This has been home for Tommy, in his 50s, for four years.
“Tommy’s my dude,” Allen says, turning to him, a taciturn figure huddled in a hoodie. “Remember that time you looked out for me, man?”
“Yeah,” Tommy says.
“Pulled out that machete, “ Allen says, then explains. “There was a guy that was hurting people out here, and he was having an episode. I walked in on it. Tommy had my back.”
Ten to 15 people a week, Tommy says, bring him food. But only Allen, Tommy says, has ever talked to him about getting housing. Tommy has “barriers” to finding a good place, Allen says. For many, that means addictions or felonies.
But if all goes well, Allen hopes to have Tommy in an apartment soon.
“The system we’re trying to build,” Henges says, “has to ensure that anyone who is homeless can call one number and they have a path out, right? The system has to include psychiatric treatment, health care, job readiness skills. It has to include” — referring now to Bill — “what to do about the guy’s dog.”
He continued: “And it has to include, ‘How do you live inside?’ This guy’s been out there for 14, 15 years. You can’t just put him in an apartment. You think that’s going to go well?”
Many landlords, Henges says, want to help homeless people become housed.
“They’re not evil,” he says. “We have great relationships with landlord groups. They just want to know that someone’s going to be on the other end of the phone when this person or that person becomes symptomatic.
“Because there’s a reason they’re homeless that has nothing to do with a paycheck. It has to do with behaviors that have gone unaddressed, and now you’re bringing them inside, and that is going to impact everyone else who lives in that apartment complex.”
Allen is proud of the 100 or so people he’s housed in a job that he loves.
“Every week,” Allen says, “I have this thought in my head, where I’m driving or walking in a camp, and I think, ‘I can’t believe I get paid for this.’”
But there have been situations, he said, especially one, that speaks to how hard it all is, and how the answer isn’t just in taking someone from the outside and putting them inside. The real solution lies in what happens under that roof once a person has it — how vital it is to receive addiction, psychological and other supports. And, sadly, what can happen when they don’t.
Too often, Allen says, they don’t.
The client he thinks of was in his 40s. Addiction problems. Mental health, too. He had lived on the streets for 10 years. He and Allen grew close.
“We got to the point where he would call me brother,” Allen said. As winter came, Allen convinced him to accept housing, which he did.
“He was so proud once he got those keys,”Allen said. “He was so proud that he had quit drugs for those few months. His family was so proud he was getting better.”
Once inside the apartment, he was left alone. The homelessness housing program that had promised to surround him with social and other supports didn’t come through.
“He had never had an apartment on his own,” Allen said. “Never sat in a room alone. Suddenly he is in this box and he is by himself. … No one came and checked on him.”
He became lonely. He turned sad. Allen visited him still. But outside people who pretended to be his friends took advantage. He relapsed back to drugs. On the eve of checking into detox, he took his own life.
Allen struggles with it still.
“I was in this to help this person,” he said. “I’ll probably never quit thinking about him.”
This story was originally published January 13, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
