Property owner removes debris from northwest Albany ‘homeless encampment’

ALBANY – How about a little good news for a change?

City of Albany officials were happy to share a positive development a little more than a week after being alerted to a heaping trash mound that had developed around a homeless encampment in woods behind the Northwest Library branch just off Stuart Avenue and a little more than a block away from Deerfield-Windsor’s Upper School to the east and the Albany Mall to the west.

Two large dump trucks, one of them filled to the top with trash, and heavy equipment were in a newly cleared path in woods off Stuart over the last few days, removing a mess that officials said was the result of homeless individuals seeking shelter out of the public eye.

“We have determined that this qualified as a homeless encampment,” City Manager Terrell Jacobs said. “These folks like to be in areas where there is lots of overgrowth, areas where they can’t be easily seen.”

City officials were initially unsure of what action might be taken to clear up the massive garbage heap that included a half-dozen or so grocery carts, several of them filled with trash. The debris eventually spilled out of the woods, leading to passersby alerting city officials.

Albany Police Department Chief Michael Persley said the problem was that the property is privately owned, leaving the onus of cleanup on the owner. Jacobs said the property owner, when alerted by Code Enforcement officials, agreed to clean up the mess.

“If it were on city property, we would have jumped right on it,” Persley said after alerting Code Enforcement of the encampment. “But after looking up that property, I saw that it was on private property.”

Jacobs said the property owner “did the right thing” and had a crew remove the debris from the property.

“At the bequest of Code Enforcement, the property owner had the trash cleaned up,” the city manager said. “In this case, the owner had the ability to do so. There are some cases in which the property owner does not do the right thing; that’s when the city must put a lien on the property and clean it up for them.

“This property owner took care of their responsibility. All is well.”

Jacobs added that with homelessness now “one of the biggest issues across the country,” the city has created a “Community Cares” department, headed by Debra Wiley, who the city manager says is “seeking grants to help with issues like this.”

“We’ve had that department up and running for about a year now,” he said. “You hardly hear about it, but they’ve had a lot of successes with issues like this.”