When Kentucky Bans Homeless Camps, Where Do People Go?

Angel Sivado tries to move people from the streets to permanent housing. A new law makes helping her clients more of a challenge.

There are many ways to know a city — its front porches, its restaurants, its tourist traps — but Angel Sivado knows Louisville, Ky., by way of its homeless camps.

Sivado knows every overpass where somebody sleeps on a worn piece of cardboard, every gas station with a tent tucked behind its dumpster. She knows the signs invisible to others: clearings in the woods behind a strip mall, abandoned shopping carts, smoke rising from campfires.

Every morning at 7:45, Sivado, 51, an outreach worker for a homeless services agency called St. John Center, drives from one homeless camp to the next. She carries jerky and Pringles, Narcan and clean socks. Many of Louisville’s homeless people use her office as their home address. They confide in Sivado, who greets everyone with her voice like syrup: “Hi, friend!”

On a sticky afternoon in July, Sivado visited one of her clients, Jessica Miller. Since the start of this year, Miller has been working on an application for a housing voucher, but right now she lives in a tattered orange tent behind the dumpster of a Thorntons convenience store. One of her legs was amputated after she got sepsis, and her prosthetic was stolen by another homeless person. During the day, she sits in a wheelchair with a rain-weathered cardboard sign: “Homeless anything helps thank you

Miller, who is 42, said she fled an abusive relationship more than six years ago and found herself homeless. She is one of nearly 600 people who were homeless and not living in shelters when Louisville last counted its homeless population in 2024, a more than 300 percent increase from before the pandemic.