Homeless, homeowners collide at The Tracks

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Ada Hensely walks around her campground Thursday along the Central California Traction and Stockton Terminal & Eastern railroad tracks at the east end of Roosevelt Street in Stockton.CLIFFORD OTO/The Record

STOCKTON - There's a place in east Stockton, a no-man's land of sorts, where two short-line rails intersect. To the denizens who have called it home for years, the area is known simply as The Tracks. To the longtime homeowners, railroad operators and businesspeople nearby, the trash, noise, vandalism, human waste, trespassing and general destruction created by the homeless who camp there has reached the breaking point.

"I'm done with it," said Cheryl Cutlip, 60, whose grandfather built the brick house on East Roosevelt Street in 1922 that she lives in today. Her house, sitting on two acres that abuts the southwest corner of the railroad junction, is the closest to the homeless camp.

Cutlip has made literally hundreds of calls to the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office (her home is in the county); the Stockton Police Department (their jurisdiction begins about 20 yards north of her front door); and the two railroad companies whose properties the homeless are squatting on.

"Growing up, the old hobos never bothered us. I never was afraid of them. These people, hoo!" Cutlip said, referring to her recent not-so-cordial relations with her unwanted neighbors.

"I have sympathy for people, but these people are choosing to live there because they are on their drugs. You can find needles every day - and feces. They throw their feces over the fence," she said.

The fence Cutlip referred to was erected by her family about a year ago around most of her two acres. It's made of corrugated sheet metal and cost the family several thousand dollars. Before the fence, trash was a constant problem and trespassers walked through and loitered on the property at all hours of the day and night, Cutlip said.

Now though, Cutlip's daughter, Michelle Beach, 32, who lives with her family just a few doors down, wonders if the fence wasn't a mistake. The sheet metal has proved to be an attractive canvas for taggers. And while it keeps people out for the most part, it's provided a solid wall offering some protection from the elements on cold nights.

"Two weeks ago they started building tepees, tying them to the fence. They threw human feces over our fence. They are making their village there," Cutlip said.

Beach said of her mother, "If you don't bother her, she won't bother you. But the other night they were pulling 9-foot pieces of metal down the tracks at 4 a.m., making all sorts of noise. The trash out here gets cleaned up and within a week it will look like this again," she said, pointing to a large stream of garbage piled along the fence line on railroad property.

Managers with both short-line railroads said that during the past year they have experienced an increase in problems caused by the presence of the homeless on their rights-of-way.

"It's private property. It's an operating railroad with trains every day, plus a lot of them use drugs and drop their needles on the ground," said Dave Buccolo, general manager of the Central California Traction Company, whose tracks run north/south through the junction. He believes it's worse now because the city has pushed the homeless out of other areas.

"We run them out, but they come back. We will go back next week to clean that area out again. They will leave and within two weeks they are back - it's right there in that no-man's land. The only resolution is to ask them to move again," Buccolo said.

Private property signs warning trespassers to stay out are constantly torn down. "We call the authorities, but unless they have a warrant they don't do anything. (Cutlip) knows we are trying," Buccolo said.

His counterpart with the east/west-running Stockton Terminal & Eastern Railroad, superintendent of operations Winston Deason, said much the same thing.

Both are concerned about someone getting hurt, especially if they are drunk or high on drugs and hanging around the tracks.

And they worry about their own employees getting sick or injured from the human waste and needles they encounter on a daily basis while out working on the lines.

"After I stepped on a needle, it set me back for awhile," Deason said. And even though he's the boss, the lifelong railroader said part of his job now is to pick up plastic bags of human waste left along the tracks because he won't make his employees do it.

"That's the only thing that really bothers me," he said.

Deason sends an ST&E crew out once a month to clean up the mounds of trash on their property around the junction. He tells the homeless he encounters living there to leave. He calls the authorities.

"I don't know what else to do. If they arrest them, you'll see the same people back in three or four days. Our society can't take care of these people," he said.

In a recent year, the ST&E spent $19,000 picking up trash along its tracks in Stockton. The CCT spent $35,000 last year. "That doesn't help us on the bottom line at all," Buccolo said. But federal laws, enforced by Homeland Security, require railroads to keep their lines free of both garbage and people walking along the tracks. Neither line has its own police force, unlike the mainline railroads.

Emerging one day this week from her makeshift tent on CCT property at The Tracks, Ada Hensley, 48, one of about 20 people who have recently been camping near the junction, spoke openly about why she has called the area home for the past seven years.

"There's nowhere to go. They want us to go to the shelter, but it's overcrowded. This is where we live," said Hensley, adding that before she became homeless she grew up and lived in the nearby neighborhood. As for Cutlip, who's at the end of her rope with her homeless neighbors, Hensley said, "She's a nice lady and I can understand her concerns."

She also doesn't feel too harassed by the railroads. "Sometimes they bother us when it gets really trashy. The police bother us only when people call on us. Either they don't have nothing better to do or they have a problem with people out here, but usually they don't bother us," Hensley said.

Hensley, in fact, said she does her best to keep the area tidy and free of trash, but others don't cooperate, especially those she calls the Dumpster divers.

Heide Henderson, 44, who used to live at The Tracks but now resides in a motorhome, said, "If the world would help the homeless instead of keeping us on the streets, maybe they wouldn't be in this situation. Maybe they need to live in this situation. It's hard out here."

Stockton police spokesman Officer Joe Silva said the lieutenant who oversees homeless issues for the department is aware of the camp at The Tracks.

Most of the people there are walking around during the day and only come back to their encampments at night, he said.

"When people call in to report the problem, even if they don't get an immediate response, it gets documented and sent to our strategic commanders," Silva said. "We keep a running log of complaints. They will see there is an issue happening so they can go out to assess and evaluate the situation. They are not only looking for what type of enforcement actions will be needed, but what type of service we can provide the homeless. We hand out fliers with details on where they can go.

"Part of this comes down to the individual themselves," he said. "There are places out there willing to accept them, but they have to adapt to the rules and regulations. That's where we run into the problems with the ones who don't want to go along with the rules like no animals and they have to be clean and sober."

Silva said the Police Department, despite the financial constraints the city is facing, has not given up on dealing with the homeless. He stressed the importance of residents and business operators to continue to report problems.


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