A family has been left terrified after a homeless encampment sprang up in the back yard of their $800,000 historic home.
Robin Bach and her husband have had to contend with death threats from vagrants living in woods they own just behind their stunning 19th Century Walker House in Concord, New Hampshire.
And those threats are far from empty, with the Bachs – who have two children aged eight and 11 – hearing gunshots erupting from the backyard encampment.
‘I can’t even use my backyard. My kids can’t go out there,’ Bach told the Concord Monitor, explaining that they play out in front on the sidewalk. ‘I would like my children to be independent and feel comfortable going outside and playing and they won’t.’
The couple bought the gorgeous home in 2018 and treated their sons to a backyard swing set in 2020. But its proximity to the nearby violent vagrant population who refuse to leave has left the children too frightened to touch it.
Bach has called the police 37 times since she’s lived in this neighborhood to report various encounters with the homeless population living mere feet away from where they all sleep.
Several years ago, Bach’s husband had an unnerving encounter with a man who they saw emerging from the woods in their backyard a few times. When he asked the man to leave, the man threatened to shoot him.
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This same vagrant returned to their property several times after this, which led Bach to file a restraining order against him.
Her children watched as police took him away for the final time.
This comes as homelessness is on the rise all throughout the country, especially in New Hampshire where the number of people on the streets in increasing faster than anywhere else, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The Supreme Court just last week issued a ruling on a case originating out of Oregon – its largest city an epicenter for the homeless – stating that camping outdoors is illegal and cities can enforce bans on it.
Thus far, the city of Concord and the police department have had their hands somewhat tied when it comes to clearing out the encampments near Bach’s and other people’s homes.
Cops need to work with shelters to make sure certain homeless individuals aren’t on waitlists for housing and services before busting up these makeshift tent cities.
They also have to strike deals with private property owners.
‘The city won’t clean up any private property,’ said Barrett Moulton, the deputy chief of patrol and police liaison on the city’s homeless steering committee.
And even if the homeless are set up on a government owned sidewalk or park, cost to the city is a major factor.
‘But if it is city land then there is a whole process and it’s often expensive,’ Moulton said.
The Supreme Court’s decision on homelessness won’t do anything about the costs associated with cleaning up trash and disposing of tents put up by homeless people, so it’s unclear how the ruling might affect policy going forward.
Bach is a progressive who has considerable sympathy for people facing homelessness. And while she’d like them off her property, she says she’s concerned that evicting them will just move the issue elsewhere and turn it into someone else’s problem.
‘It’s Whack-a-Mole. You can’t just ask them to leave, they’re going to go somewhere else,’ Bach said. ‘You have to give them someplace to go.’
And the problem has only worsened since Bach’s been living at what should be her New England paradise home, complete with five bedrooms, three-and-a-half baths and a well manicured front lawn.
She said when her family first moved in, one or two tents were usually visible in the woods behind her house.
Now, there are at least half a dozen of them, some with large tarps and structures, she said.
And when police have removed tents from Bach’s backyard, people have moved back in days later and trash just continues to accumulate in the woods along her road.
As recently as June 5, this area was filled with crushed cans, abandoned clothes, shopping carts and broken furniture.
Running out of options, Bach recently got a quote to fence in her property.
It would cost her $50,000.
‘I can’t afford to clean it up. I can’t physically do it myself,’ she said. ‘So the trash remains.’
Moulton told the Concord Monitor that the sheer amount of trash and waste that’s been piling up has been the main reason people are calling his office.
‘It’s hard to get past that image of these encampments,’ he said.
‘It’s a bad look. It’s a bad look for the city when you have as beautiful of an area as Concord is, to have it just loaded with trash, it is something that there’s a focus on to right now.
Since there are few, if any, public dumpsters in Concord, the trash issue will likely stick with the town of roughly 44,000.
‘We have a pretty significant homeless problem,’ Moulton said. ‘They’re going to be somewhere.’
For the homeless population in Concord, this means camping outside in the variant weather of New Hampshire.
Winters often bring snow and frigid temperatures as low as 12 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas this weekend will bring highs of over 90 degrees in Concord.
The Concord Coalition to End Homelessness is operating the only emergency shelter in the area, and it’s only open from December through March.
The nonprofit is harshly opposed to the recent Supreme Court ruling issuing the following statement.
‘Penalizing the most vulnerable citizens in our community because of this country’s housing shortage is unconscionable, and won’t solve homelessness,’ they wrote. ‘The solution to ending homelessness is housing.’
Even though Bach has certainly had some frightening encounters with the people trying to survive behind her home, she has talked to some of them in an effort to understand their struggle.
Most recently, she spoke with a man who said he holds a 9 to 5 job and cleans up his garbage with contractor bags.
She believes it would be better if the city created a sanctioned camping area somewhere away from where she lives, as its become clear to her that these people need a helping hand.
Sporadic enforcement from police, she said, doesn’t address the root cause of homelessness, nor does it permanently get rid of the tents or the garbage or the occasional threats of violence her family has to endure.
‘We never locked our doors. We were pretty casual,’ she said. ‘Now we have a full-on security system.’
‘This is the worst it’s ever been.’