Tents removed, for now, from the Green. (Updated) Two dozen tents that had stood overnight on the Upper Green came down on Thursday morning — as unhoused activists planned to resume their encampment later tonight.The Unhoused Activists Community Team (U‑ACT) decided to tear down those tents as of 11 a.m. Thursday, with the intention of setting camp back up later in the day.The roughly 25 tents first went up Wednesday night behind United Church on the Green as part of a protest against government sweeps of homeless encampments, and in support of designating land for people with nowhere else to go. U‑ACT decided to take down the tents following a discussion among organizers, and after a larger standoff Thursday morning with New Haven police and other city representatives. No arrests were made, though downtown top cop Lt. Brendan Borer confirmed for the Independent that the tents had to go. City homeless outreach workers were also on the scene, including city homelessness services director Velma George, who went tent by tent offering support — including referrals to nearby homeless shelters.“As of right now, we are not leaving this site,” Amistad House’s Mark Colville said. The tents may be coming down in the morning. But they should be back come night. Organizers with U‑ACT helped the campers tear down the tents alongside Yale students and faculty. While the tents fell one by one, U‑ACT spokesperson Roosevelt Watkins held a speaker, shouting: ​“Where, then, shall we go?” See below for an earlier version of this article.Overnight Encampment Returns To The GreenOn the Green Wednesday night. Flip: “We’re all here together. We’re not spread out all over town.” Underneath a large tree on the Upper Green, Lora Weeks and her husband had gotten ready to sleep. The two have been unhoused for the past five months, staking it out on the downtown public greenspace. But before they could drift off, they spotted lights in the distance and dark ​“pods” growing from the ground.“I was told they were doing tents,” Weeks said. ​“It was like a science fiction thing.”She and her husband joined the Unhoused Activists Community Team’s (U‑ACT) latest encampment on the Green Wednesday night. The group erected 25 tents right behind the United Church on the Green in protest of encampment sweeps, as well as to advocate for an allotment of land for unhoused people to take refuge.This encampment comes four months after the last one-night encampment on the Green at the end of June, in which U‑ACT set up some 20 tents in protest of the exact same demands. This same group also initially planned back in May on pitching tents and spending the night on the Green, in view of the mayor’s office on the second floor of City Hall, but rainy weather and the prospect of arrests ultimately deterred them from setting up camp. Not so in June, and not so on Wednesday night.“We often post the question ​‘Where, then, shall we go?’” U‑ACT spokesperson Roosevelt Watkins said on Wednesday night. ​“You may come and ask us to take the tents down, but we will still be here because once again we’re trying to answer the question ​‘Where, then, shall we go?’ Until we can answer that question, we will stay here.”The 25 tents were huddled close together, with other unhoused people asking organizers if they could join. Some organizers had walked over to Union Station to pick up homeless people there to invite them to join the encampment on the Green for the night. Drinking donated tea and snacks, the campers talked amongst themselves at around 10 p.m., some catching up with each other. The air was brisk. Those in the tents had wrapped themselves in warm, fuzzy blankets, donated from community members. Informal ​“marshals” donned with keffiyehs hovered around them.Watkins explained that like the previous encampments, this one centered a sense of community for unhoused people in New Haven, something that he said is broken when the city or state sweeps encampments.“Even though you may not see it in the same light as your neighborhood, they do form a community amongst each other and to disrupt that isn’t right,” Watkins said.One of Wednesday night’s campers, who called himself ​“Flip,” recognized some of the people in the tents around him. He’d seen them around in his 17 years of being homeless. Now 57 years old, Flip described the nearly two decades of homelessness as ​“long.” After being discharged from the military, he said, he was unable to acclimate to the workforce. He stated that he had no family to take care of him, and appreciated being around his ​“community.”“We’re all here together,” he said, crouching in his tent. ​“We’re not spread out all over town.”Weeks had been a part of a previous encampment in the woods off I‑91 by Exit 6 back in 2016. That encampment was subsequently cleared by the city. Since then, she had found housing, and for eight years, she lived in an apartment. Then, five months ago, her landlord claimed that he couldn’t renew her lease due to Section 8 owing him a payment. She and her husband were back on the streets. Weeks said she still has her voucher, waiting for a housing placement. She described the time since then as a ​“nightmare.”“I miss my home,” she said. ​“I miss being able to get up at night to go to the bathroom, which is a necessity. People should be free…You have cops sitting right there. They’re about ready to arrest or harass us for no reason, just for being homeless.”Earlier in the night, before the encampment was erected, Mayor Justin Elicker attended the Hill South Community Management Team meeting at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School to discuss homelessness and open-air drug use. There, Elicker listed off the city’s recent attempts to address the homelessness issue with the opening of another shelter next month on 645 Grand Avenue. This comes after the city’s purchase and conversion of a 55-room hotel on Foxon Boulevard into a shelter, with rooms large enough to accommodate those with partners. He also highlighted the efforts of the non-cop crisis response team COMPASS and a new outreach effort of navigators with the health department who function as caseworkers that will work with those in the community and offer them resources for those struggling with substance abuse.“What my view is, is that if people are offered support and an option and they refuse to take it, and they keep disrupting the neighborhood in a way that is dangerous to people … it is just not OK, and it’s not fair to the community,” Elicker said at the meeting.For Flip, the shelter system hasn’t worked.“I’ve tried them all,” Flip said, reminiscing on his 17 years on the streets. ​“They promise you the world. Then, they say they can’t do anything for you.” Alongside U‑ACT, the current encampment is a collaboration between CT Dissenters, Jewish Voices for Peace New Haven, Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project, Yale Endowment Justice Coalition, The People’s Clinic, Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Rosette Neighborhood Village to ​“demonstrate the interconnectedness of the fight for the rights of unhoused people and the rights of all people,” according to a press release sent out Wednesday night by U‑ACT. The press release lists no particular end date for the encampment.The timing of this effort comes at the beginning of the Jewish holiday Sukkot. Next to the encampment stood a sukkah, with a banner reading ​“STUDENTSWITHNEWHAVEN + PALESTINE.” Inside, students and professors talked with one another, reflecting on the encampment.In a combined Instagram post with @themeergencyistonight and @jvpnewhaven, organizers explained that the sukkah ​“honors the temporary huts in which our Jewish ancestors made shelter during exile.” The post continues: ​“Tonight, we observe Sukkot in solidarity with U‑ACT and their fight against displacement and state violence in this city. This night reminds us that our safety is intertwined, from New Haven to Palestine.”Weeks had packed her tent, where she is going to stay overnight with her husband, with her belongings. In the morning, she will likely go stop by the Columbus House to shower before returning. She emphasized that homelessness could happen to anybody in New Haven, and that it could happen suddenly.“The world is getting worse and worse. We really got to start loving each other and helping each other,” she said.Weeks pointed to Yale University, just across the street. Then, she waved to the direction of City Hall.“You go to that place where you kids are going to learn humanity and all that…” she said.Her eyes settled on the tents before her: ​“This is humanity.”The sukkah on scene on the Green.