COEUR d'ALENE - For nine years, a makeshift encampment in the wooded area behind Target in Coeur d'Alene has been the place a number of the area's homeless have called home.

But in less than a week, the camp will no longer exist.

Jeff Conroy, executive director of St. Vincent de Paul of North Idaho, told The Press Thursday that Spokane developer Harlan Douglass plans to sell the land and wants all the homeless residents trespassed from the property by Wednesday.

Outreach workers at Heritage Health, collaborating with St. Vincent de Paul, are now scrambling to get people to leave the forested area by the deadline, he said.

Efforts to relocate the homeless people are already underway. Conroy said outreach workers told him half the camp's 50 to 60 residents have left.

"The frustration that we've got is that we've known they've been back there for nine years. We understand the property owner's position and totally understand the danger that can happen back there," Conroy said. "But after nine years, relocating them in three weeks is a struggle."

Adding to the challenge is the fact that, according to Conroy, most of the homeless people who live there do not want help.

"They don't want shelter. They don't want to be helped by any organization," Conroy said. "They want to be left alone. So they'll just disperse and land somewhere else."

For a variety of reasons, usually mental-health related, 8 percent of homeless individuals can't or won't go into housing.

Conroy added that the collaborative group is offering the displaced residents any services they will accept.

Coeur d'Alene City Councilman Dan Gookin told The Press he learned of the relocation on Thursday and that the situation with the privately owned property puts the city in a lose-lose situation.

"Once the property owner decided that they were going to sell, they contacted the city and said 'evict these guys' and the city has an obligation to do that," Gookin said. "We don't want to be the bad guys and go in there and roust everybody up. The last thing the police want is a confrontation. It's something that needs to be dealt with and in Idaho we don't really have the tool set to handle it."

Gookin added that he understands where Douglass is coming from, but would like to see the deadline extended so outreach workers have more time to relocate the homeless people at the camp.

"When you judge a culture, you always judge it by how it treats the least of its members," Gookin said. "What you have here is people displaced by society, and society should take care of them."

According to Gookin, Douglass plans to bring logging crews to the property on Nov. 3.

"We're not bleeding hearts. We understand that something needs to be done," Conroy said. "But we have to understand that they are human beings. This is not a political issue. This is not a religious issue. This is a human issue."