Some States Have Stopped Pretending Sweeps Were A Solution.
Encampments don't form by accident. A 2025 study of Seattle's unsheltered population found tent sites sit closer to food and basic services than emergency shelters do — people aren't choosing the sidewalk over help, they're choosing proximity to what keeps them alive. Move the tent, and the person doesn't leave the neighborhood. They come back, because the neighborhood is where the services are.
Sweep the camp today. It reforms three days later, two blocks over. Cities have run that playbook for years, and it never actually ends anything — it just moves the same problem around a map.
Now several states have opened a second option: ban camping everywhere, but let cities certify as many compliant, designated areas as needed instead — real sanitation, real security, a real address — as the only lawful alternative to a useless sweep.
Sweeping encampments does nothing more than cost a great deal of money and move people three blocks away. A designated area holds them somewhere real.
That's the choice states have put in front of every city facing this decision. The NODE — Network of Officially Designated Encampments — is what a city builds when it's ready to stop the Homeless Shuffle™.
Source: encampment-amenity proximity study, Seattle/King County unsheltered population, 2016–2022 outreach data (published 2025).
Want to see the certified alternative to a sweep? Reserve a demo through a Letter of Interest — no cost, no commitment.
Download LOI → Email Your LOI → Questions? Reach Tom directly → [email protected]Encampments don't form at random. Research consistently shows they cluster around the same handful of things: food access, public transportation, employment opportunities, healthcare and social services, shelter access, and weak enforcement zones like parks and greenspace. That's not incidental — it's why a designated area has to sit near the same cluster of services, or it won't hold anyone.
But that requirement runs straight into the other thing every one of these statutes demands: distance from residential property and no reduction in commercial property value. Behavioral health services and transit are concentrated in city centers, next to the exact residential and commercial property the statute says to stay away from. North Carolina's HB 781 ran headfirst into this — an advocate testified on the record that the bill's own rules make it "nearly impossible" to find a legal site at all, because the two requirements fight each other.
That's a real problem — for a single, fixed, permanent site. A city that builds one shelter, one facility, in one location has to solve that contradiction once and live with the answer forever. If the site's wrong, there's no fixing it short of tearing it down and starting over.
Because a Node deploys on any paved surface a city already controls — a transit corridor, an underused lot, a city-owned parcel — instead of requiring land acquisition or construction, a city isn't searching for the one perfect address. It's searching a much wider field of candidate locations for the spot that actually threads the needle: close enough to transit and services to hold the people it's meant for, far enough from the residential and commercial line the statute draws. And if the answer turns out to be wrong, the Node moves. The building doesn't.