They say he has mental health issues, but he was able to build a 2 room house, with plumb walls, from scraps he found. He even built it to straddle over a running stream where he was able to remove the floorboard to scoop out water for boiling.
He was found after 9 years.
Thousands of people everyday in Syracuse passed near a hand-built, two-room shack where a homeless man lived for nine years, and drivers didn’t even know he was there.
The shack is within the city limits where you can hear trucks rumbling past on the interstates. It sits in a wooded area hidden in a swale where water runs through during wet weather.
The wood structure has a foundation, two doors and a window. It’s walls are plumb and the boards fit snugly together keeping out the wind and the rain. The slightly sloping roof is covered with tar paper.
It’s one of the most unusual living arrangements used by a homeless person the Syracuse Rescue Mission has seen, said Jim Hawley, an outreach case manager for the group. Homeless people tend to live in tents, under bridges or in lean-tos, he said.
“It’s sturdy, well built like a camp,” Hawley said. “It is amazing. It’s not a backyard shed he’s made. Even so, he shouldn’t live like that.”
Hawley and Amber Vander Ploeg, the mission’s director of emergency services, took a reporter from Syracuse.com to the shack last week. With the encouragement and help of the Rescue Mission, the man who is in his 50s has moved into an apartment, but he occasionally returns to his former home, Hawley said.
The mission staff declined to put a reporter in touch with the man because they say he has mental health issues and would not be able to speak competently about his experience.
“He just doesn’t trust anybody,” Hawley said.
The camp where the shack is located looks at first like a collection of roadside trash. (The Rescue Mission asked Syracuse.com to not reveal the exact location of the man’s shack to prevent others from using it.)
A set of rusting house keys is stuck on a tree limb. A woman’s leopard print scarf waves in the branch of another tree. There’s an old tire, an upside down bicycle that’s missing a tire. An old mattress, pillows and blankets are wet and exposed to the winter weather. A fishing pole is braced against a tree.
Slightly away from the camp is a foot deep hole that looks like it was used as a fire pit.
It looks as if the builder scavenged doors, window and wood used to make the shack.
The metal white front door is in such good condition it could be used on anyone’s house. Inside a windowless main room smells of damp wood smoke. There’s a bed built on a frame that lifts it off the floor, a makeshift table, a shelf along the wall and hooks for hanging clothes.
In a way, the shack also has running water. Because it’s built on a foundation that allows water to flow underneath, there is an opening cut into the room’s floor that allowed the man to scoop out water that he boiled for drinking and cooking, Vander Ploeg said.
A second room in the back has a window in one wall. There is a work bench with chain saws that the man used to cut wood for his fires, Hawley said.
The Rescue Mission became aware of the man and his shack in October when someone reported someone was living in the woods.
ht/ js
Yep, the nayawkers will fine him for
property back taxes.
He lives peacefully, not bothering anyone and no one bothering him. No one should live like that.
I didn’t expect the inside to look so filthy. Wow.
Who’s land is he on. We have had people move trailers onto our property.
We own over 600 acres so we can’t monitor all of it all the time. At least once a year we find someone living on the property. They can’t believe we could own ‘all this’.
Sorry but we do. You will have to leave.
It’s usually homeless people from the city.
Sorry your homeless but you can’t stay here.
He wasn’t homeless until the government got involved.
Apparently he recused himself from humanity.
The rest of us can only dream.
Wow, I guess that’s the America we live in today.
If you just want to be left alone, and have no tolerance for being messed with by all the busy bodies that exist today who want to control how you live and what to think – you have mental health issues.
In old times used to be – everyone with that attitude was thought of as someone who loved freedom.
Just curious – if the guy built this structure and has lived there for 9 years, how does that make him “homeless”?
Good thing they found him when they did. He might have only lasted another twenty or thirty years, living free like that.
That area looks like it’s somewhere on the city’s far south side, perhaps near Brighton Ave/Seneca Tpke which overlooks Rte 81.
Syracuse doesn’t have a rampaging homeless problem like other (read warmer) cities due to our harsh winters. Years ago we used to find one or two of these guys every spring when the snow drifts melted, usually under a pile of cardboard boxes. The Rescue Mission has kept many of them alive since then. Until booze/drugs/sickness finally has their way with them.
This guy wasn’t as nutty as most of them. He did have some skills.
A friend of mine had a auto parts store and homeless guys would come in and sit in the front of the store. He got to know quite a few of them rather well. There are quite a few organizations that cater to them supplying food and clothing. They stay in these little camps because they do not like the structured environment of charities that don;t allow them to drink and take drugs. Some of them pull in a few hundred dollars a week or more from begging or they’ll get clothing (i.e., a brand new pair of sneakers from charities or theft) and sell them. Surprising number of vets. Guys muster out of Fort Drum to the north and come to Syracuse for the VA hospital facilities.
I think we have one of the best VA hospitals in the country here. They take care of my brother. My FIL passed away there back in 2007. The staff was wonderful.
Man, this thread got me to reminiscing. I have a ton of stories about the homeless guys we had to deal with on a daily basis. I worked the city’s tenderloin area, the near West End, where many of them lived.
9 years?
He may have a case for adverse possession.
But then he’d have to comply with zoning, pay taxes, have a mailbox, etc.
Just wait until the Planning Department finds out he didn’t obtain a building permit. He’s screwed.
Pretty loose covenants I’m thinking.
wirecutter?
Jimmy Carter’s “Habitat for Homeless Humanity”
When I was a kid there was a nutty little guy in town whom everybody called Crazy Frank. He dressed in shabby street clothes and wore an old WW2 Army wool overcoat, winter or summer. I never heard him speak, and for all I know he may have been mute. It was rumored that he was a victim of shell-shock from the war, but I suspect that was just people’s way of trying to explain away his condition. Nobody I knew seemed to know what his real name was or where he lived, but he was totally harmless, so no one was upset by him, and would actually help him with handouts. When he needed money he would make little Sheriff-type badges (stars, I think) out of tinfoil and take them to local businesses, where he would silently present them to the manager, who would then take a couple of bucks out of the till for him. Everybody knew the drill, and he would never hit any one place often enough to become a real nuisance.
In his spare time Frank would stand beside the busiest intersection in town, smiling and holding up a crudely- lettered cardboard sign that read “U.S. GOVERNMENT POLICE” to the passing cars, who mostly ignored him. He wasn’t panhandling, just (I think) trying to show that he was some kind of important guy. Everyone needs to feel important in some way, I suppose.
Anyway, it’s amazing how much people’s attitudes toward the mentally ill have changed since then. Today Frank would be picked up by the cops, labeled a potentially dangerous veteran with possible PTSD, and hauled off to an institution for the public good. And his, of course.
I will say this, though – I never saw the guy when he wasn’t happy and smiling.
Maybe Crazy Frank wasn’t so crazy after all.
😉
Vietvet – For years we had a
nutterguy dress up like a fancy drugstore cowboy; hat, chaps, boots, toy six guns and all, marching all over downtown, happy as a clam. Never bothered a soul. Of course we also had Crazy Mary.@Sig94: Crazy Frank was just one of a few “mentally-challenged” individuals we had around town who never harmed anyone, and so were generally tolerated by the public at large. Too bad people have to be so weird about such things nowadays.
BTW, we didn’t have a “Crazy Mary”, but we did have a female wino called “One-Eyed Mary”, whom I have mentioned here in the past. Mary had a glass eye, and her unique method of panhandling was to take it out and ambush office workers on their way downtown. She would get up real close, point to the empty eye socket, and say, “Excuse me, mister, but could you give me couple of bucks to take a cab to the hospital? I think there’s something wrong with my EYE.”
😉
Peter Case’s song – Underneath the Stars, fits this situation,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy5sk2PvTz0 .
He found his Paradise, lived in peace and happiness, no troubles, no neighbors.
And then the Government stepped in.
impressive…most impressive…