Roland Busby lifted the blue plastic and peered from the darkness. His brown eyes adjusted to the overcast morning as he climbed out of his tent and through the tarps tied to skinny trees. Coats, sweaters and mud-caked boots covered his 5-foot-7-inch frame. He wore an eye pendant necklace to dispel evil and carried a tattered paperback promising ancient wisdom.
“The truth is that the universe has been answering you all of your life,” the book reads, “but you cannot receive the answers unless you are awake.”
Capone, a brown and white pitbull mix, trotted to Busby’s side as others milled around the buckets, shopping carts and tents covering the packed earth.
By late February, Busby, 33, and about 10 others had lived for a few months in this makeshift homeless camp in these sparse woods where Decatur Street dead-ends off North 40th Street.
Before that he’d lived in other camps, an abandoned house, a friend’s place and, years ago, an apartment he rented where his daughter could visit him. That was before COVID-19, before he lost his job, car, apartment. Before he became one of the Omaha area’s rising unsheltered homeless population.
In the last decade the number of people in Douglas, Sarpy and Pottawatomie counties living outside has increased nearly eightfold — the third-highest rise in that time period among major U.S. cities, according to a national one-night count done every January.
Put into context, that eight-fold increase may not seem as dramatic. The Omaha area’s overall homeless population – both people living in shelters and in makeshift camps like on Decatur Street, has actually dipped in the past decade. And it remains one of the smallest among U.S. major cities, nearly a seventh of Denver’s.
But there are many more Omahans like Busby living under bridges and inside wooded areas, sleeping in cars and on sidewalks. Some avoid shelters for fear of having things stolen, being attacked or because, like Busby, they don’t want to leave a pet, say the case managers, outreach workers, neighbors, law enforcement officers, experts, health professionals and others interviewed for this story. Some believe the problem hasn’t gotten that much worse – the counters are just better at locating people.
Others, like Douglas County Sheriff Aaron Hanson, believe allowing the growth of camps enables dangerous behaviors that should be met with increased criminal consequences. Those could land people in the Douglas County jail which already spends about $1 million every month to house homeless people or those who might lose their housing as a result of their incarceration.
Meanwhile two employees in the mayor’s office work with up to 30 people who provide a variety of on-the-ground services. Weekly calls, which include police, parks, public works and other city employees, focus on camps and whether they’re causing problems.
Mike Fletcher, a street outreach specialist with Together Inc., withholds some information in those meetings – like the location of Busby’s camp. The longer it’s undetected, the less likely it will be cleared. That keeps paperwork for housing, jobs and health care safe from being lost, stolen or thrown away.
“It almost resets our progress,” Fletcher said. “I got you your social (security card), birth certificate and ID and now I have to start over from scratch.”
But camps also pose problems. A neighbor near the Decatur Street camp said she’d seen people wander through her backyard, fight and break into houses. She wants to be patient, she said. She just wishes this camp wasn’t next to her.
Tamara Dwyer, who leads the city’s homelessness services, is attempting to thread the needle between angry neighbors and best-practice solutions.
“What we’ve done for years is move people around that were sleeping outside,” Dwyer said. “That hasn’t helped and it usually makes someone’s homelessness last longer … So if we can try to have a more informed response, I mean, we might as well try that.”
That still leaves a lot of work for Fletcher and Busby, who’s considered chronically homeless because he’s been unhoused for more than 12 months over three years. Chronic homelessness, also on the rise in Omaha, is a tougher cycle to break. It can be fueled by addiction, mental health, disability and distrust in the housing system.
But Fletcher believed in Busby. He didn’t seem to use drugs or alcohol. His mental health appeared stable. He’s a military veteran, which would open doors once he got his paperwork and faced two old warrants.
Fletcher knew there would be curveballs and setbacks. But the life he saw for Busby – housing, a job, his daughter – felt tantalizingly within reach. Fletcher knows he won’t change the lives of all 205 unsheltered homeless. But maybe he could help get one man and his pet pitbull a home.
‘The Universe Gives You Exactly What You Need’
Things fell apart for Roland Busby when the Old Chicago closed.
He was working at the chain restaurant’s 78th Street location when COVID-19 struck. The restaurant shuttered temporarily, then for good. When Busby lost his job, he got behind on his car payment. Then his car broke down. His bills piled up. He was evicted in November 2021.
It was the latest shock for Busby, who grew up in North Omaha and attended Roncalli Catholic High School. In 2017 his mom died of cancer, he said. He tucked her ashes between the plastic sheets of a Pokémon card binder. A year later his daughter Taraji was born.
He had worked cooking jobs since leaving the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves in 2014 and dreamt of opening his own business. Then came the eviction and the failed attempt to couch surf before he became unsheltered and homeless by 2022.
There were bright moments. He found an 8-week old puppy, which he named Capone, as well as an abandoned home near Saddle Creek Road.
When Wendy Pecoraro arrived there in the summer of 2023, she was impressed by the garden of purple sage, lavender, tomatoes and corn Busby planted. But his knee – bright red and ballooned from an infection – concerned her more.
Pecoraro, a nurse practitioner and co-founder of the street medicine nonprofit HEAL Omaha, said that, left untreated, the infection would likely eat tissue, reach bone and prompt the amputation of Busby’s leg.
Busby remembered incredible pain as Nebraska Medicine doctors lanced, drained and treated his knee. He FaceTimed his daughter, though, their first talk in years.
Homeless patients are common in the emergency room, said Dr. Dalton Nelsen, an attending physician in Nebraska Medicine’s ER. They come to fill prescriptions, manage chronic ailments or rest in an empty bed or chair. On the street, Pecoraro often treats heat exhaustion, frostbite and trench foot, but there’s no typical case – one man she works with has brain cancer.
Unsheltered homelessness is bad for your health, reducing average life expectancy by 17.5 years, one study found.
It’s also expensive. Nebraska Medicine doesn’t track whether a patient is homeless, but spent nearly $70 million on uncompensated care in 2022. A national study found people facing housing instability cost the U.S. health care system $9.3 billion between 2017 and 2019.
“If our patients can’t pay, they can’t pay,” Nelsen said. “But we still see them, treat them and do all the right things for them no matter what.”
Not long after Busby returned to the abandoned house from the hospital, the police showed up. He got two tickets, one in June and another in July, for trespassing. Those turned into warrants when he didn’t show up to court in August.
Then the home burned down in September. By fall he was living in the woods near 42nd and Seward streets. When police cleared that, he and a few others migrated to the Decatur Street makeshift camp where they endured a January cold snap of sub-zero temperatures.
The job. The car. The cops. His mother. Busby tries not to think about what’s gone wrong.
“Man, the universe gives you exactly what you’re thinking about,” he said. “So make it positive.”
‘Society Needs The Safety Net’
Busby sat statue-still in the pew.
He’d just passed through the metal detectors of the Douglas County Courthouse, walked through its marble rotunda and entered this courtroom on March 8, where he would learn his fate.
The maximum penalty for each of his warrants: a $500 fine and six months in jail. His caseworker Fletcher prepped for this, calling friends, coworkers and an alpaca farm outside Omaha, before finding someone who agreed to take Capone if Busby went to jail.
The judge called Busby forward. He asked if Busby understood his rights.
“Yes,” Busby said.
“Do you understand those charges?” asked Douglas County Judge Grant Forsberg after reciting the allegations.
“Yes, sir.”
About 20% of the Douglas County jail’s population are either homeless or facing housing instability, said Mike Myers, its director. It costs about $132 a day to jail someone, he said, meaning the county is likely spending nearly $1 million a month to house homeless or nearly homeless people. Those costs are climbing, he said.
“The health issues, the mental health issues, the acuity levels, the resources we expend on our most problematic folks seems to have escalated,” Myers said.
Interactions with the criminal justice system are common for homeless people. They get charged with trespassing, panhandling, intoxication, theft or creating a disturbance. The Omaha Police Department doesn’t track if someone they meet is homeless, but many are arrested, fined or jailed, which can imperil housing and future job searches.
Hanson, the sheriff, sees incarceration, or the threat of it, as Omaha’s best tool in addressing homelessness. He recently lobbied the Nebraska Legislature to make sleeping outside in undesignated places punishable by up to three months in jail and a $500 fine.
“Society needs the safety net that is the criminal justice system for those extreme cases,” he said. “Does that mean that we want to arrest our way out of this problem? Absolutely not. But the criminal justice system does provide additional options.”
Hanson said giving people tents and other supplies only enables encampments which are dangerous to people in them as well as nearby residents.
Steve Glandt, a former captain for the Douglas County Sheriff, agrees – even though his daughter is homeless and unsheltered. Glandt has paid her rent and car bills to keep her afloat. It hasn’t helped. Recently he got a call that she was charged with possessing meth and headed to jail.
“At least we knew she was in a location that was giving her a bed and a toilet instead of the gutter,” Glandt said.
On this March day, Busby got good news: He wouldn’t have to go to jail. Prosecutors said if he pleaded guilty they would dismiss the warrants and charge a $150 fine.
The judge asked Busby if he was working full time.
“No sir, I’m homeless,” Busby said.
He could volunteer through a United Way program to work off his fees, the judge said.
Fletcher and Busby beamed as they left court. Housing seemed closer than ever.
Ticking Clocks
The signs popped up in late March, taped to nearby trees, warning people to vacate the woods of the Decatur Street camp.
Usually once notices are posted, city employees will clear the camp a week later, Fletcher said.
But a week came and went. Then another. Then another. The Omaha Municipal Land Bank, a city agency that collects and sells blighted properties, had sold the land. It seemed the new owner was in no rush to clear it.
Still, many campers packed and left. Others replaced them.
One day Fletcher showed up at the camp, excited to find Busby and discuss moving to an apartment available for him soon. But Busby and Capone had vanished. No one knew where they’d gone.
The disappearance frustrated Fletcher, because if you’re in Busby’s financial situation, finding housing is hard – and getting even harder.
Competition is fierce. Omaha has a low rental vacancy rate, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Costs are up. Renting a below-average studio apartment is $300 more per month today than it was 10 years ago, according to federal data.
Demand is building. Omaha needs to add 80,000 units by 2040 to keep up with population growth, according to an 2021 Omaha Community Foundation report.
More than 4,700 people were on the Omaha Housing Authority’s waitlist for 2,491 units in late February, according to data provided by OHA. The agency’s housing voucher program, which helps about 4,000 people pay rent, has a wait time that can stretch to four years.
In 2022, Dwyer took over Omaha’s homeless response with the goal of bridging the housing gap, and many others, in the community. It’s beginning to work, said many interviewed for this story, who say that having a point person in Mayor Jean Stothert’s office adds a level of leadership and coordination Omaha long lacked.
“I’m not going to have the same goal as the parks department, or (the Omaha Police Department) or the fire department,” Dwyer said, “but we can work together.”
Omaha has the tools to end homelessness, said Jason Feldhaus, executive director of Threshold Continuum of Care, which oversees homelessness work across the metro. Getting everyone on the same page is a powerful one.
“We’re a big city,” he said, “but we’re not so big we can’t wrap our hands around the problems we have.”
‘Come to Jesus’
The woods off Decatur Street had come to life by April 9. Buds sprouted from branches hanging above the tents and trash.
Busby ended up disappearing only a few days in mid-March. He’d tried another camping spot but also found signs there warning against camping. On April 5, Fletcher got him moved into an apartment.
Yet, four days later, Busby was here, standing by his tent at the Decatur Street camp and eating a chicken sandwich with Capone by his side.
“Roland, we have to have a come to Jesus (talk),” said Allison McElderry, another Together Inc. street outreach specialist, as she marched toward his tent. “You were here all weekend. You didn’t make curfew.”
Bubsy’s grin slumped. He dropped the half-eaten sandwich into Capone’s drooling mouth.
I lost my key, Busby told her. I couldn’t call anyone because I don’t have a phone.
I was looking for my mom’s ashes, he said, but they’re gone. Someone probably thought they were drugs and took them.
Fletcher said Busby could have been kicked out of New Visions, a housing center near Siena Francis House, the city’s main homeless shelter. Every night a resident doesn’t come home, the program loses money. It’s a room that could go to someone else.
But Fletcher, formerly homeless himself, knew how Busby felt.
Possessions can be a connection to a life outside homelessness. But they can also be stolen or lost. Fletcher found survival easier when he detached emotions from possessions, he said. Sometimes from relationships, too.
Fletcher remembers his fifth day working as a security guard at Together’s food pantry when a woman started throwing cans.
“I noticed she had a tattoo on her wrist that said ‘Wes,’” Fletcher said. “That’s the name I was born to. I was like, ‘Holy f*** this is my mom.’”
Fletcher, 30 then, met his mom for the first time as he strong-armed her out the door.
“She came back around six months later. She cried and felt bad,” he said. “And then she asked me where she could buy drugs. So that was that.”
The fact they both struggled with homelessness is not exceptional. One-third of kids who grow up in poverty will remain there as adults, according to the Brookings Institution. Homeless kids are particularly vulnerable to falling behind in school, developing substance abuse issues and being victimized. The Nebraska Department of Education counted more than 4,000 kids statewide who experienced homelessness during the 2021-22 school year.
Fletcher sees his mom around Omaha but has made peace with their non-relationship. His focus is on his wife and their child she’s set to deliver in September.
Busby’s also thinking about family. As he sifted through the keepsakes he did find, he pulled out paintings he did with his daughter. He hopes she’ll be able to visit his new apartment.
‘Back at Square One’
The May sun warms McElderry as she sits in her black Subaru. She and Fletcher have come here, where Seward Street dead ends off 42nd Street, to find Busby.
He hasn’t been at his apartment in a few days.
“You’re gonna get kicked out and we’re gonna be back at square one,” McElderry tells Busby when they find him at a camp. “And then what? … You’re literally pissing (away) this opportunity. I am so upset right now. I need to walk away.”
A rough trail leads to a small clearing covered by a few tents, piles of clothes and empty bottles. Fletcher folds his arms and stares at Busby in this place where they started working together. Capone chews on a log nearby.
“I just want Roland to understand how much I care,” Fletcher says, “almost unprofessionally so. My job teaches us not to invest emotionally, but you were one of my first clients. I didn’t have those boundaries set up.”
Busby is back outside. He also has new warrants because he never did his court-assigned community service. The life Fletcher imagined for Busby – housing, a job, his daughter – seems to be slipping away.
Busby says the move to New Visions created problems. New rules. New roommate disagreements. An argument about how much salad he could have for lunch.
Busby was also supposed to see his daughter on her birthday, May 4. He had coloring books and Beanie Babies waiting for the 6-year-old but his daughter’s mom didn’t bring her like she agreed to, Busby said.
“That’ll be the fourth birthday I missed now,” he said.
McElderry hears excuses. Fletcher is worried Busby’s depression, and his ability to handle disappointment, are bigger problems than he realized. Busby understands their frustration, but he also feels like he’s being treated like a child.
After Fletcher and McElderry leave, Busby hikes down the hill, cuts through the woods, to the Decatur Street camp where he’s lived, unhoused, for most of the past year. Busby packs the few tarps that remain of his old fort into a plastic tote while other residents wander between tents. A handful of people are still here. Another group has moved their tents just off the property.
Busby drags the plastic tote in one hand and holds Capone’s leash in the other.
He could turn right and start the hour-long walk east to 17th and Nicholas streets, to his apartment.
Instead he turns left to trudge up the hill. Busby says he may go back to his apartment later to charge his phone. But for now, he’s headed back to his new camp. Back to his tarp-covered tent. Back to the place that feels like home.