A family is terrified after a homeless camp sprang up in the backyard of their historic $800,000 home.
Robin Bach and her husband faced death threats from vagrants living in the woods they own, just behind their beautiful 19th-century Walker House in Concord, New Hampshire.
And those threats are not empty: the Bachs, who have two children aged eight and eleven, hear gunshots from the camp in the backyard.
“I can’t even use my backyard. My kids can’t go out there,” Bach told the Concord Monitorand explains that they play outside on the sidewalk. ‘I want my kids to be independent and feel comfortable playing outside, but they don’t want to.’
The couple bought the beautiful home in 2018 and treated their sons to a swing set in the backyard in 2020. But the proximity of the violent vagrants who refuse to leave has left the children too afraid to touch it.
Bach has called police 37 times since moving to the neighborhood to report multiple encounters with homeless people living just a few feet away from where they all sleep.
A few years ago, Bach’s husband had a nerve-wracking encounter with a man they saw several times coming out of the woods in their backyard. When he asked the man to leave, the man threatened to shoot him.
Robin Bach, pictured, said her children can’t even use the backyard for fear of the homeless who live in the nearby woods.
Pictured: Bach’s nearly $800,000 home being overrun by a growing homeless population
This vagrant returned to their estate several more times, prompting Bach to file a restraining order against him.
Her children watched as the police took him away for the last time.
That comes as homelessness increases across the country, especially in New Hampshire, where the number of people on the streets is growing faster than anywhere else, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The Supreme Court last week ruled in a case out of Oregon, the state’s largest city and homeless epicenter, that outdoor camping is illegal and that cities can ban it.
So far, the city of Concord and police have been barely able to clear the camps near the homes of Bach and other people.
Officers must work with shelters to ensure that certain homeless individuals do not end up on waiting lists for housing and services before breaking up these makeshift tent encampments.
They must also enter into agreements with private landowners.
Bach with her two children, who take refuge in playing on the sidewalk in front of the parental home
Aerial photos of the New Hampshire State House in Concord at sunrise on a foggy morning
“The city will not clean up private property,” said Barrett Moulton, deputy police chief and police liaison to the city’s homeless committee.
And even when homeless people are placed on a government-managed sidewalk or park, the cost to the city plays a significant role.
“But when it comes to urban land, there’s a whole process that goes into it and it’s often expensive,” Moulton said.
The Supreme Court ruling on homelessness does not affect the costs associated with cleaning up trash and removing tents set up by homeless people. It is therefore unclear what implications the ruling will have for future policy.
Bach is a progressive who has a lot of sympathy for people experiencing homelessness. And while she would like to see them off her property, she says she worries that evicting them will just shift the problem and make it someone else’s.
“It’s whack-a-mole. You can’t just ask them to leave, they’re going somewhere else,” Bach said. “You’ve got to give them a place to go.”
And the problem has only gotten worse since Bach moved into what was supposed to be her New England paradise home, complete with five bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms and a manicured lawn.
She said that when her family first moved there, there was usually one or two tents visible in the woods behind her house.
Now there are at least half a dozen, some with large sails and structures, she said.
And after police removed the tents from Bach’s backyard, days later people had moved back in and trash continued to pile up in the woods along her road.
As late as June 5, this area was littered with crushed cans, abandoned clothing, shopping carts and broken furniture.
Garbage and poor housing conditions are scattered in the woods behind the street where Bach lives on in Concord
There is a ‘no camping’ sign in front of the waste
In some places there is so much waste that the grass and soil underneath are completely invisible
To insulate herself from the growing waste, Bach tried to fence off her property until she found out it would cost her as much as $50,000
Left with no other choice, Bach recently received a quote to install a fence on 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 mess just sits there.”
Moulton told the Concord Monitor that the sheer amount of trash piling up is the main reason people call his office.
“It’s hard to get past the image of these camps,” he said.
“It’s a bad look. It’s a bad look for the city when you have such a beautiful area like Concord, to just have it filled up with trash, that’s something that’s the focus right now.
Because there are few public dumpsters in Concord, the waste problem is likely to affect only this city of about 44,000 residents.
“We have a pretty big homeless problem,” Moulton said. “They’re going to be somewhere.”
For the homeless in Concord, this means camping outside in New Hampshire’s changeable weather.
In the winter, snow often falls and temperatures can be as low as -12 degrees Fahrenheit. This weekend, however, Concord will be over 32 degrees.
Bach, who has been forced to deal with the homeless problem literally in her own backyard, still has empathy for those without a roof over their heads. She is urging the city to establish an approved camping area so people can get back on their feet.
The Concord Coalition to End Homelessness operates the only emergency shelter in the region and is only open from December through March.
The nonprofit organization strongly opposes the Supreme Court’s recent ruling and issued the following statement.
“Punishing the most vulnerable citizens in our community because of the housing shortage in this country is unconscionable and will not solve homelessness,” they wrote. “The solution to ending homelessness is housing.”
While Bach has undoubtedly had some terrifying encounters with the people trying to survive behind her home, she has spoken to some of them in an attempt to understand their struggles.
She recently spoke to a man who said he works a 9 to 5 job and picks up his trash with garbage bags.
She believes it would be better if the city created an approved camping site somewhere other than where she lives, because it has become clear to her that these people need help.
She said sporadic police intervention does not address the root cause of homelessness, nor does it permanently rid her family of tents, trash or occasional threats of violence.
“We never locked our doors. We were pretty casual,” she said. “Now we have a full security system.”
“This is the worst thing that ever happened.”