What Comes After the Pines?

Following the no-camping enforcement at The Pines, local leaders talk homelessness Up North

By Kierstin Gunsberg | June 21, 2025

As the morning commute rushed by on May 7, streams of yellow caution tape outlined the woods off West Eleventh Street and Division in Traverse City. After years of debate over how to respond to the growing number of unhoused people living in those woods in an encampment nicknamed “The Pines,” officials were enforcing a no-camping ordinance.

Residents of The Pines, which less than two years ago sheltered a quarter of the county’s unhoused population, were told they had to leave.

The enforcement didn’t come as a surprise to the roughly one dozen people still living there, says Ashley Halladay-Schmandt, director of the Northwest Michigan Coalition to End Homelessness. “Folks knew it was coming.”

That’s why over the last year, coalition field workers and members of Traverse City Police Department’s Quick Response Team (QRT) had been visiting The Pines to inform its residents of the upcoming change and to help them make relocation plans. For the first summer ever, Safe Harbor, the only emergency shelter within city limits, was an option.

Before this year, Safe Harbor always closed its doors from mid-May through mid-October, opening just for the coldest months. But as the enforcement loomed, city leaders pushed for a pilot program to keep the shelter—and the extra summertime beds it would bring to the unhoused community—open year-round, pitching it as a safer alternative to outdoor encampments. As soon as the pilot was approved, the enforcement went into effect.

Where Did Everyone Go?

While some of the public discourse surrounding the change at The Pines questioned why it needed to be emptied at all, others pointed to the health and safety risks of living in the elements. “We had people in The Pines using wheelchairs during the summer,” says Jennifer Holm, TCPD’s Police Social Worker Coordinator and the developer of its QRT.

Leaders like Holm, whose work revolves around increasing the resources available to northern Michigan’s vulnerable populations, agree that creating a year-round emergency shelter was a step in the right direction, but as Halladay-Schmandt says, they’re far from resolving homelessness Up North.

And, as it turns out, most residents displaced from The Pines haven’t been utilizing Safe Harbor, according to Brad Gerlach, Safe Harbor’s volunteer manager. He says that five Pines residents sought shelter at Safe Harbor following the enforcement. Now, just one remains.

“We’re not generally seeing people from the Pines,” he says. Instead, most of the shelter’s summer guests are familiar faces, people who have historically always stayed there (though he notes that some of Safe Harbor’s wintertime-regulars did default to The Pines during past summer months when the shelter closed.)

That’s because some in the unhoused community prefer outdoor encampments over the challenges of communal living at indoor shelters like Safe Harbor, he says. “You’re always together. And you’ve got a schedule [for] all the things that at home you just do when you want to do them.”

So where are former Pines residents living? That’s tough to answer because, as Gerlach explains, most are hesitant to disclose where they’re staying if it’s not an approved shelter.

Not Enough Shelters, Not Enough Housing

Even if every person experiencing homelessness in northern Michigan wanted a shelter bed in a communal living space, there wouldn’t be enough. Safe Harbor has 74 beds—56 for men and 18 for women—and is almost always at capacity.

“When we turn someone away, which happens at 8:30 right when our check-in ends, there really isn’t anywhere we can direct them to,” says Gerlach.

Traverse City’s only other emergency shelter, the Goodwill Inn, offers 120 additional beds. That brings the city’s emergency bed total to 194, still short of the 250 people experiencing homelessness across the five-county region, most of whom are concentrated in Grand Traverse County, according to Halladay-Schmandt.

“So what we have to do is really double down,” she says. “Making sure that of the 250, we are housing the people who are most likely to die in the streets if we do not intervene.”

Having to triage who gets shelter first reinforces how much more work still lies ahead. Ideally, says Halladay-Schmandt, “We could have gone in [to The Pines] and said okay, everyone in here gets housing. But that’s not a reality in our community right now.”

The shortage of emergency shelter options and permanent affordable housing is a concern shared by the QRT, says Holm, and part of why the push to establish Safe Harbor as a year-round option was so important. “We don’t want people to be in that situation, where they don’t even have a shelter to go to,” she says.

It’s a problem without a quick fix, admit Holm and Halladay-Schmandt. In the meantime, as they work toward the ultimate goal of permanent affordable housing for all while pushing for policies that better support the current unhoused population, here’s what they’re sharing about their progress—and what still needs to happen.

Up North, Homelessness Numbers Are Holding Steady

And that’s surprising, says Halladay-Schmandt, considering that nationally, it’s only getting worse, with PBS reporting an 18 percent rise in homelessness across the U.S. at the end of 2023.

Across Antrim, Benzie, Grand Traverse, Kalkaska and Leelanau counties, coalition data shows the number of people experiencing homelessness has held steady over the past two years. “Folks come and go, so it’s not a static number,” Halladay-Schmandt says, “but it hovers right around 250 people experiencing homelessness any night.”

We Need More Cohesive Systems

More than 60 agencies—including Addiction Treatment Services, Traverse Health Clinic, and Safe Harbor—make up Traverse City’s QRT, a network connecting people at risk of law enforcement contact with agencies that can help improve their lives.

“[QRT] was built because we figured that if we can get to the root causes of some of those contacts,” which includes the challenges of homelessness, “then we can, in theory, reduce them,” says Holm.

Now, Holm wants to educate other communities on how they can build their own version of the QRT, not just so they can improve their own systems, but so they can network with her team to create better communication and resource coverage over the region.

“If other communities have this… we would be able to transcend geographical boundaries and actually provide coordinated services.” Agencies can’t help people in crisis if they don’t know what their needs are, she explains.

Systemic Change Needed

Ultimately, says Halladay-Schmandt, more permanent affordable housing is needed. The vacancy rate for affordable housing—that is, housing that costs no more than 30 percent of a household’s income and is often subsidized by federal funds—is zero in northern Michigan.

“Whereas, in a healthy community, it would be around 5 to 8 percent,” she says. “[The number] of places in our community that are available to rent for people who are experiencing homelessness is extremely limited.”

As for how many units it would take to meet demand?

“We’re working on that,” she says. “We thought we had the number, but what we kind of failed to recognize was the economy… There’s so many factors we have no control over, like how many people will fall into homelessness this year. We cannot estimate that.”

Limited Healthcare Access Could Drive a Spike in Homelessness

One of the biggest upcoming unknowns is healthcare access. In May, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which would require nondisabled adults on Medicaid to work at least 80 hours per month beginning in July 2026.

While there’ll be some exemptions, millions could still end up losing coverage, including people in Grand Traverse and Benzie counties, where 20 percent of each county’s population is enrolled in a Medicaid program according to Georgetown University data.

For some of those enrollees, that loss could be a tipping point towards housing instability.

“If folks aren’t able to pay their medical bills, are we going to see a huge increase [in homelessness]?” Halladay-Schmandt asks. “We can’t predict what’s going to happen in the next couple of years here in terms of the general population or with folks who are kind of right on the edge of the margin of becoming homeless.”

Planning Ahead

In May, the coalition partnered with the City of Traverse City and Grand Traverse County Rotary to launch a housing and homelessness task force.

“We’re meeting for the rest of the summer and into the early fall to determine what a Community Action plan would look like to address and eventually end homelessness in our region,” explains Halladay-Schmandt.

Besides pinning down the number of affordable housing units that are needed, those meetings will dig into where the next emergency shelter should be located and how it’ll be funded.

“We’re working on that with local stakeholders, state partners, and then we’ll present the community with a plan hopefully in December of this year,” she says.