It is nearly six months since Wheeling closed its exempted homeless camp in freezing December temperatures, displacing around sixty individuals. 

Some former camp residents are now in permanent housing, but many more are staying in abandoned buildings and local shelters. For certain groups, there is still not a clear path forward. 

As dawn broke over the city of Wheeling on Thursday, January 18, on the heels of a statewide emergency declaration related to a massive winter storm, city officials mobilized dump trucks and bulldozers to a hillside in the neighborhood of East Wheeling.

Put simply, the city’s shutting down of the East Wheeling encampment and its forced evictions of dozens of residents who were not provided with any practical alternatives has been wholly unnecessary, senselessly destructive and totally unjustifiable.

For a woman, life on the streets offers no glamor or beauty. Surviving outside amongst the elements takes grit, strength, and a special kind of resilient spirit that many of the unhoused women in Wheeling possess.

In our street medicine program, Project HOPE long recognized that there were three times as many males experiencing homelessness as there were females. Or so it seemed.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs for humans is shown as a pyramid.