Cornelius Taylor’s promise to visit his family this past Christmas was one of many he had broken in his decades living on the streets. But Darlene Chaney could not stay mad at the troubled cousin raised as her brother. When he called soon after the holiday from the ragged encampment he called home, she made plans to take him to a movie.
They never spoke again.
A few weeks later, a clearance crew descended on the Atlanta site, a block from the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, and their heavy equipment crushed his tent as he lay undetected inside.
With homelessness at a modern peak, leaders as ideologically different as President Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California are demanding the destruction of more encampments, arguing they spread fire and crime, block traffic, impede business and commandeer whole city blocks, covering sidewalks with needles and waste.
The Supreme Court bolstered their efforts last year by ruling that authorities could ban public sleeping.
After an encampment fire closed a major Atlanta highway, Mayor Andre Dickens, a progressive Democrat, began a campaign last year to remove encampments under bridges, saying the people living in them posed threat to themselves, their companions and the city.
“It impacts schools, it impacts commerce, and it impacts people’s lives,” he said of the road closure.
But Mr. Taylor’s death, weeks after a similar fatality in California, highlights the risks of forced removals, which critics call an effort to bulldoze the homeless away. They say sweeps often have unintended consequences and inflict new trauma on vulnerable people, many with mental illness or addiction, while doing nothing to get them housed.
If anything, they say, clearances may prolong homelessness by destroying ID cards or medication, disrupting social work and sowing distrust.
“We know this is going to happen again,” said Ms. Chaney, 38, who is calling for the clearances to end. “The breath went out of my body when I heard. I don’t want the next person to feel what I do.”
After years of mental illness and addiction, Mr. Taylor, 46, achieved a prominence in death that had escaped him in life. At Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once commanded the pulpit, mourners likened him to Jesus, who they said had experienced homelessness too.
“It is not too much for me to stand here in memory of an unhoused brother because, after all, I preach each Sunday in honor of an unhoused brother,” said Senator Raphael G. Warnock, the Georgia Democrat who is also the senior pastor at Ebenezer.
In the modest home where they shared a childhood with Mr. Taylor, Ms. Chaney and her brother Derek, both truck drivers, described him as a bright, kind man wounded by a dark teenage episode they did not fully understand. He dropped out of high school and resisted their efforts to help, while complaining that many people view the homeless with disdain. His baptism in a prison chapel raised hopes for change that went unmet, but none of his struggles, they said, justified his fate.
“Whether he was high as a kite or hungry as a hippo, he didn’t deserve to be crushed,” Ms. Chaney said.
A Ubiquitous Urban Problem
About 274,000 people sleep outdoors, by the federal government’s count. Some cannot find shelter beds, and others reject them as dangerous or confining. Unsheltered homelessness has grown nearly 60 percent in less than a decade, with soaring rents often cited as a cause. While Covid-era aid and eviction bans paused the rise in the unhoused population, for past two years it has grown by an average of nearly 400 people a week.
Individuals have long slept outside, but encampments — groups of people, typically in tents — became ubiquitous only in the past decade or so. Residents say encampments provide safety, foster bonds and attract aid, while critics see squalor and threats to public safety. Mr. Trump has called the unsheltered homeless “violent and dangerously deranged,” and pledged to remove them from public spaces.
Judge Glock of the conservative Manhattan Institute served as an expert witness in a Phoenix suit that forced an encampment closure. He said the concentration of people with mental illness or drug problems increases violent crime — putting the lives of homeless people at risk — and that camp closures makes the unhoused more likely to seek services or family support.
“The most important reason to close encampments is that they are a danger to the homeless themselves,” he said.
But clearing sites can be dangerous. Three weeks before Mr. Taylor’s death, an unhoused man in Vallejo, Calif., was fatally crushed as he lay undetected beneath blankets. The clearance crew noticed only as his body dangled from the backhoe bucket.
In 2018, a woman in Modesto, Calif., was crushed to death as she slept a cardboard box. In 2021, the front loader removing tents under a Washington, D.C., overpass lofted one with a sleeping man inside, sending him to the hospital with minor injuries.
More prevalent are less obvious harms. Lost identification makes it harder to find housing and jobs. Lost medication leaves illness untreated. Involuntary displacements can leave people sleeping in more hazardous places, sever social ties, and disturb the mentally ill.
Some cities send outreach workers months in advance to help people relocate, but protocols and adherence vary widely. Bulldozers, and the accompanying chaos, can arrive with little warning.
A study of nearly 400 unhoused people in Denver found those displaced by clearances were more likely to contract infectious disease, use drugs and suffer frostbite, heat stroke or declining mental health. Research in Santa Clara County, California, found that removals “directly harmed unhoused people’s health.”
A presentation by a public health expert at the Centers for Disease Control warned that involuntary displacement is “not an effective or sustainable solution” to unsheltered homelessness.
Sweeps appear especially dangerous for people who inject drugs. They may lose clean needles or syringes; ties to watchful companions; access to known suppliers; or naloxone, a drug that reverses overdoses.
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that involuntary displacements raise deaths among injectable drug users by nearly 25 percent, because of increased overdoses and infections. Dr. Joshua Barocas of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, the lead author, said in an interview that that rate translates into the added deaths of more than 5,000 homeless people a year.
“These people are already suffering — we shouldn’t be making their lives worse,” he said.
A Cycle of Prison and Homelessness
In Atlanta, Mayor Dickens is a longtime supporter of affordable housing. Last year, the city committed $68 million toward a $212 million public-private campaign meant to house the city’s entire homeless population. He has also called clearances essential to public safety.
The Old Wheat Street encampment, where Mr. Taylor lived, sits in a gentrifying neighborhood a block from both the Ebenezer church and a National Park Service visitor’s center that offers tours of Dr. King’s childhood home. The cluster of tents had closed the small street and brought complaints of drug use and vandalism.
Outreach workers began almost a year ago to help the 30 or so residents find shelter, and the Jan. 16 clearance was scheduled about three weeks in advance, said Cathryn Vassell, chief executive officer of Partners for Home, a nonprofit group that helps the city coordinate homeless services. She said the clearance timing was partly driven by the coming King Day parade. Additional pressure to close the camp, she told the City Council, came from a man active in the community who had threatened to destroy it himself if officials failed to act.
Mr. Taylor had stayed there for years. Born in rural Georgia to a troubled mother, he was taken in as an infant by his father’s aunt, Catherine Chaney, who had stable work and a home in Atlanta. When a son and daughter followed, she raised the three as siblings.
The younger pair, Derek and Darlene, called Mr. Taylor a sensitive, affectionate child who often sprawled across their mother’s lap. “He felt things deeper than other people,” said Mr. Chaney, 43. But something changed before eighth grade, after his biological mother insisted that he spend the summer with her in a hamlet 50 miles away.
Worried about mistreatment, Catherine Chaney soon wrested him back, but he returned angry and withdrawn, refusing to discuss what had happened. Lolita Griffeth, Mr. Taylor’s girlfriend, said in an interview that he told her he had been abused in his time away. He left school in 10th grade and home soon after. When Catherine Chaney died of cancer a few years later, he attended the funeral on release from jail.
In subsequent years, he cycled between prison and homelessness, sought respite in cocaine and resisted medication for his mental illness, saying it made him numb. On good days, friends found him protective and kind. Bad days evoked his street name, Psycho. “If he didn’t get his way, all hell would break lose,” Ms. Griffeth said.
While many people on the street exhaust their families’ good will, Mr. Taylor’s relatives say they never surrendered hopes of a happy return. Darlene Chaney talked to him every week or two, scheduled medical and legal appointments, and made clear that he could return to the childhood home she and Mr. Chaney still shared if he accepted house rules, like taking his medication. He would visit, shower, smile and leave.
“Nobody gave up on Cornelius — that’s how I know love is real,” Mr. Chaney said.
When Mr. Taylor gave a niece a recent talk about staying off drugs, Ms. Chaney let herself hope he might be turning a corner. Instead he was in his tent on Jan. 16 when the heavy equipment arrived. Most residents had left. City officials said workers had checked the remaining tents but did not see Mr. Taylor inside before the machinery crushed it.
A police officer pulled him out and called an ambulance as his mouth began to foam, according to a police report. A witness told the police Mr. Taylor had been using crack cocaine, which may explain why he did not hear the warnings.
Though the police report speculated that he could have overdosed, the medical examiner’s office this week found he died of “blunt force injuries,” including a fractured pelvis and a lacerated liver and spleen.
More trouble reached the encampment: Someone slashed the few tents left. Police arrested Daniel Barnett, 42, whom outreach workers identified as the man who had threatened vigilante action if the city did not clear the area. He worked for a nonprofit developer building nearby and had complained to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the encampment had raised insurance rates.
Mr. Davis, the family lawyer, said the city had acted “hastily and recklessly” in clearing the camp and may have valued property “more than human lives.”
The death near the famed church inevitably brought a search for larger meaning. At Mr. Taylor’s funeral, the Rev. Warnock warned that the poor are often crushed by larger forces. He noted that the strike that brought Dr. King to Memphis, where he was assassinated, began after two workers were crushed to death in a garbage truck.
Ms. Chaney focused closer to home, directing her remarks to Mr. Taylor himself. “I couldn’t save you, but I pray that all those who failed you can save the next,” she said.