City of San Antonio pauses daily encampment sweeps for weekend’s expected freeze

San Antonio’s Department of Human Services (DHS) will pause its daily sweeps of homeless encampments for the hard freeze expected here this Saturday, according to an emailed statement provided to the Current.

As part of an ongoing abatement effort, the city conducts five to six encampment sweeps daily, DHS Assistant Director Patrick Steck told the Current in a recent phone conversation. The city plans a total of 1,300 camp sweeps for Fiscal Year 2025, KSAT reports.

It’s not just the city guiding the decision to crack down on the street homeless population, however. According to a survey of San Antonio residents, cleaning up the encampments is the second highest priority for the current year’s budget allocation. As a telling figure, encampment sweeps even surpassed “services to assist the homeless” as a priority for survey respondents.

For Fiscal Year 2024, homeless encampment cleanups were the top priority for San Antonio residents according to prior results of the same survey.

But with shelters overflowing and a waitlist of thousands of households, the city continues to displace the street population without providing some of them with anywhere else to go.

In addition to a break in sweeps for the freeze, DHS officials also said that encampment cleanups would pause again for the Jan. 28 Point-In-Time (PIT) count, the annual census of the homeless population in San Antonio. Last year’s PIT Count reported a total of 3,372 homeless people in San Antonio with 888 living unsheltered.

The 2024 PIT count also showed that the problem is getting exponentially worse, with a 6.8% increase in San Antonio’s homeless population over the previous year, and a 17% increase from 2019’s pre-pandemic levels.

San Antonio also surpasses the much-larger city of Houston, ranking second in the state in number of homeless people.

For this weekend’s freeze, DHS has opened temporary emergency shelters to provide additional beds for the night, though officials didn’t provide the Current with the number of beds by press time. For last week’s freeze, the city provided an additional 230 emergency beds for an unsheltered population of more than 800.

DHS officials said outreach workers began contacting unhoused people on Tuesday to encourage them to take shelter before the freeze.

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This article appears in Jan 8-21, 2025.