Krystall Haymon-Williams has found shelter in Fort Worth’s East Lancaster corridor for about three months — long enough to see the area noticeably change.
This stretch of the roadway, which lies about 1 mile southeast of downtown, has many of the city’s resources for those experiencing homelessness, and it often sees high concentrations of people.
A month ago, illegal encampments, including Haymon-Williams’, would crowd the curbs of the corridor, she said. But in mid-January, Fort Worth police began devoting extra officers to the area to address a rise in crime and remove the camps.
“Now, there’s nobody there,” Haymon-Williams said, standing in a line she said she frequents all day, every day, outside the Presbyterian Night Shelter’s True Worth Place.
The police’s focus on the area is temporary, and the efforts are expected to run into the near future, a police department spokesperson said.
But already the area has seen a drop in crime, said Toby Owen, CEO of the Presbyterian Night Shelter.
Owen’s shelter is one of the state’s largest, providing 757 beds a night, he said. Each day, people line East Lancaster — napping, waiting and sitting on the sidewalks and streets surrounding the buildings.
The area is no stranger to tension and conflict, Owen said. But in November, his team and city officials noticed a significant rise in crime, both from homeless people — in the form of illegal camping — and from people trying to sell drugs to the homeless.
“It was kind of just a snowball that rolls downhill — it gets bigger and bigger,” Owen said. “It’s just important that we realign the neighborhood, to say, ‘We’re going to enforce the laws that are on the books,’ and to realign it so that it’s a safe and productive environment,” Owen said.
Much of the police department’s homeless outreach program, or HOPE, team has been reallocated to East Lancaster to address “narcotics activities, assaults, prostitution, and city ordinance violations,” a statement from the police department’s community alliance division read.
Officers clear the area every morning of encampments, people loitering and any open illegal activity, Owen said. The teams then clean the area of litter with city workers and UpSpire, a nonprofit that aims to put homeless individuals on a path to employment by hiring them to clean streets.
Haymon-Williams has noticed the crime — “meth and crack and things like that” — and she’s watched the officers address the illegal camping. Both she and Owen said people are told by officers to either stay in the shelters or leave the area.
When people opt to leave, Haymon-Williams said she “has no clue” where they go. When she was told to clean up her tent, she started sleeping in the nearby women’s night shelter.
A noticeable drop in reported crime followed the police’s efforts, according to crime records reviewed by the Report.
Over December and January, the area and its surrounding neighborhoods saw 18 to 40 incidents a week, with a majority being immediately around the night shelter. During the week of Jan. 26 to Feb. 1, reported incidents dropped to eight.
“There was a big shift. There was very little camping, and it was a much calmer environment,” Owen said. “We’ll always be a place for those individuals, as long as they’re willing to take our help.”
Owen said homeless people resort to illegally camping when they don’t want to abide by the shelter’s rules, which bar weapons, drugs and alcohol, and limits what belongings they can keep. These individuals still tend to stay close to the corridor to use resources.
Haymon-Williams said she would rather camp outside because the shelter is “too much hustle and bustle.” In the shelter, she has to pack up her things and leave every morning, whereas her campsite felt more permanent.
The focus on East Lancaster comes as City Hall holds broader discussions about how to address the city’s rising homeless population.
As of December, an estimated 2,702 homeless people resided in Fort Worth, Homeless Strategies manager Tara Perez said during a Feb. 3 presentation to City Council’s Public Safety Committee. Of those, 799 were labeled as “chronically homeless.”
The city devoted about $6.3 million to Perez’s unit this fiscal year. About $2.2 million of that goes to its newly launched High ImpACT program, which offers temporary, transitional housing and mental health services to those with severe mental illness.
Between May 2024 and September 2025, the program served 80 homeless individuals, and it has since been expanded to serve 110, Perez said.
Another $1.56 million went to the city’s Targeted Outreach. That program employs six street outreach workers to meet with those who are homeless to connect them with resources and shelters.
Targeted Outreach employees focus on several areas across the city where homeless people congregate, including East Lancaster and Fort Worth’s Northside neighborhood, which borders the opposite side of downtown.
Council member Carlos Flores, who represents the Northside, emphasized that the police’s focus on East Lancaster does not mean that homelessness in the rest of Fort Worth is being ignored.
He posted about the HOPE team’s East Lancaster efforts on Facebook on Feb. 3 to address concerns that other areas of the city, including his, were being ignored by law enforcement.
“The homeless population, by definition, is very transient; they’ll move,” Flores said. “It’s to everybody’s benefit that we take care of homelessness where these issues are, especially in the case of the East Lancaster corridor, because we have the concentration of our homeless resources there.”
The police presence is temporary, Owen said, but he hopes the relief it’s brought to the area isn’t.
“It’s not just a one-time enforcement; it has to be ongoing,” he said. “That’s what we’re working with now with the police department: How do we create an ongoing system that stays on top of this? I know we’re going to get there.”
Haymon-Williams, who is pregnant, said she’s trying to get out of her situation.
She’s so far struggled to get a case manager for housing assistance, she said. But she’s confident that if she’s proactive with seeking services, she can start making progress.
“It’s been very difficult trying to get my grip on this situation,” she said.
Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.orgor @shawlings601.
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