For Bozeman’s John Wallace and his girlfriend DeeDee, the coming weeks are a time of uncertainty. The couple has been living in a camper trailer on Bozeman’s streets for the past few years, and now they must decide what to do when the city’s ban on urban camping takes effect Wednesday.
Laid off from a lumber mill in Townsend during the pandemic, Wallace said he relocated to Bozeman and found work at a local gas station. Faced with a city-wide shortage of affordable rentals, Wallace said he soon fell into a life of poverty and, for the past five years, has periodically moved his camper trailer around the streets of Bozeman.
“You gotta come up with the first and last month’s rent … It’s like $3,500 up to five grand,” Wallace told Montana Free Press when asked about renting an apartment ahead of the camping ban. Maybe he could move back to Townsend, Wallace said. Maybe some family would let him stay for a while.
Daily fines of up to $500 and possible jail time are penalties for those who don’t move off the streets when the ban takes effect. Those consequences worry Wallace.
He worries about a lot of things. He worries about his neighbors, and he worries about the camp dogs he’s often asked to watch over while their owners run errands or go to work. Lately, he also worries about safety. Just a few weeks ago, he was beaten by another camper in what he describes as a blindsided attack.
Bozeman’s neighborhood services manager, Ben Bailey, was there for the 60-year-old camper after the bout of violence, rousting Wallace from his trailer and convincing him to get checked out at the hospital. The two men now greet each other like old friends, and that’s the whole point of what he does, Bailey told MTFP.
“I know every one of them personally,” Bailey said, describing his hands-on approach to managing the city’s urban campers. “So, if there’s an issue that arises, as small as something not going well at work or a conflict between neighbors, they’ll generally reach out to me.”
Bailey, a former Park County sheriff’s deputy, was hired almost two years ago and tasked with enforcing a set of rules that imposed restrictions on urban camping in Bozeman. Bailey said that, as those rules evolved into today’s current camping ban, he has had to face the tough realization that some folks living on the streets may never escape poverty and will continue to struggle with housing, despite his best efforts.
“There are some folks that I’ve worked with since I got here in December of 2023 who just don’t have any desire to be helped or want to be helped,” Bailey said. “That’s something I really struggled with because I wanted to try to help everyone, and you have to come to the realization that you can only help those that really want to help themselves because it needs to be a partnership.”
Bailey said his code compliance staff has issued over 300 warnings and 42 citations since the city commission adopted a tougher stance on urban camping last November. Those rules included a citywide permit system for urban campers and criminal fines of up to $500 for those who break them. Bailey said those changes have resulted in a massive reduction in Bozeman’s urban camping population.
The average penalty for those fines is $87, and the city has collected a little over $4,200 from the permits issued to urban campers since last year, according to city statistics. The money generated from permits and fines has gone to city sanitation services.
The new ordinance, Bailey said, has effectively reduced the city’s population of urban campers by 90% and pushed those who remain into just one camp near Bozeman’s North Seventh Avenue and Interstate 90.
Bozeman saw its largest number of urban campers in July 2023, when staff counted 244 people living in roughly seven camps. In contrast, the city counted just 16 people living in Bozeman’s remaining camp this week.
City Manager Chuck Winn told MTFP that he believes urban camping has been the most challenging conflict Bozeman has faced in recent memory. Winn has been a city employee for over 40 years.
“There’s been a focus on the campers themselves and the impacts of their circumstances, but there’s also an impact from urban camping on the rest of the community,” Winn said.
A group of business leaders sued the city in October 2023, alleging that Bozeman was ignoring its own laws by allowing camping on city streets.
That lawsuit, filed by the owners of the Rockin’ R Bar, Kenyon Noble and Donnie Olsen Realty, among others, cited a lack of police enforcement for campers who were accused of a variety of criminal acts, including drug use, domestic violence, public urination and defecation, and disturbing the peace.
The city has spent thousands on monthly cleanups, provided costly porta-john services, and staff have removed dozens of buckets of human waste over the past few years, according to Anna Saverud, Bozeman’s chief civil attorney. Contractors have towed more than 250 vehicles from the camps, and the city has impounded about 140 of them, according to Bailey.
The city has spent more than $220,000 on its response to urban camping since 2022, according to city spokesperson Takami Clark, not including the wages paid to city staff addressing the situation.
Winn told MTFP the city saw an immediate drop in the number of people camping on the streets after last year’s toughened rules were passed by the city’s commission.
Many, he said, were “lifestyle” campers who wanted a cheap place to park with views of the Bridger Mountains. He described some as subcontractors employed in the construction industry who left once the city began issuing fines. Others, he said, were those struggling with mental illness and substance abuse.
“We had this one particular camper who had a trailer that he lived in, then he had a trailer in front that he rented to somebody else and a trailer behind that he rented, and then he had a trailer that was his shop where he did welding and things in like that,” Winn said.
Winn said that the same camper wore a .45-caliber pistol on his hip while he rummaged through the trash at nearby apartment buildings, and it began to scare people who lived there. “So this ordinance allowed us to tell this particular person, ‘You can’t be here anymore,’” Winn said.
Now that the majority of Bozeman’s urban campers have left the camps, Winn said he believes some have moved their trailers onto private property, while others have moved in with family. A few, he said, have signed rental agreements and now camp at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds. Still others, he assumes, are camping on public land outside of the city limits.
More than 30 of those urban campers have moved into Bozeman’s homeless shelter since the ordinance passed last year, according to Vanessa Palmer with HRDC. That shelter, Homeward Point, is a newly built $16 million facility with a food pantry, day-use area, laundry and 130 beds. It has housed about 100 people a night since it opened about two weeks ago, according to Palmer.
City leaders also recognize that ending urban camping in Bozeman is not equivalent to ending homelessness. During a July commission meeting, Bozeman Mayor Terry Cunningham cited statistics from local homeless advocacy groups that show the problem worsening in Gallatin County, with the number of people experiencing housing-related insecurities “going up as urban camping is going down.”
“Anyone who thinks we are solving the homeless problem by addressing the urban camping problem is missing the reality of what our partners are seeing on the ground every day,” Cunningham told the commission.
As for what will happen to Bozeman’s remaining urban campers after the Oct. 1 ban, both Winn and Bailey say no matter what the city does to try and help them – or conversely, punish them – they’ll likely continue to live on the streets.
“No matter what I say, no matter what I do, no matter how I do it, no matter how many resources I have, there’s nothing I will be able to do for them,” Bailey told MTFP. “There’s no piece of paper or words on paper that will be able to affect that change.”
“People are going to have to make choices, their own kind of choices about what they do, and we have options for them,” Winn said, adding that the city will continue to help the homeless link up with social services, including HRDC, Haven and Family Promise.
Asked whether the city plans to more aggressively ticket the remaining urban campers and potentially arrest them, Bailey said his team will continue to handle each situation with “compassion,” rather than turning over the problem to the city’s police department.
“A citation itself can carry up to a $500 fine a day, and if sentenced, could lead to 10 days in jail. That would be the most serious aspect of it,” Bailey said.
Bozeman’s John Wallace does indeed worry about being ticketed, arrested or jailed if he doesn’t find a place soon. Wallace said he has been working with HRDC to try to get on an affordable housing list, and his girlfriend had recently made several appointments to tour affordable apartments in the city.
“Honestly, I just want to get a place,” Wallace said. “That’s all I want to do.
It’s my camper, but I don’t want to live like this forever. It’s getting bad.”
Editor’s note: Montana PBS will air an episode of its public affairs show, “Impact,” focusing on the city of Bozeman’s efforts to house its homeless population, scheduled for Thursday, October 16, at 7 p.m. This report has been a partnership between MTFP and Montana PBS.
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