The sprawling homeless encampment behind a stand of big-box stores has been around so long that people in the upstate New York city of Ithaca call it by name, as if referring to a neighborhood or historic district.
Police dispatchers use the term as a geographic point of reference: “There’s a very large fire coming from the Jungle behind Carpet Warehouse …”
The Jungle.
Tucked beside railroad tracks that course through gnarly woods, the encampment harbors the disenfranchised and distrusting, the addicted and the unwell, the vulnerable and the predatory. It is an off-the-grid community, a hide-out, a drug den, a home for people with nowhere else to go. A place of freedom and fire, overdose and escape, where the police are uncertain of their role and first responders enter with caution.
But the Jungle reflects more than the often-intertwined plagues of drug addiction, mental illness and homelessness. It is also a manifestation of the policies of a proudly progressive city of 33,000 people that, like so many other communities around the country, is struggling to find a solution to its island of misery.
Recent walks into the Jungle were journeys through the detritus of desperation: discarded shopping carts, soggy plush toys, used needles, pilfered building supplies. In one corner, a mound of stolen bicycles, dozens and dozens, loomed like a metal-skeletal monument to lawlessness.
The residents live in tents, or shelters made of tarps and pallets, or makeshift compounds emanating curls of wood smoke. Scorch marks on the ground betray where campsites have burned down, or been burned down, as a result of “Jungle justice.”