• A man in Indiana is facing fines for allowing a homeless man to sleep behind his pizza shop.
• The city said the fines would increase every day and could reach more than $7,000 per day.
• Eric Weber said he let the man stay to avoid creating a pattern of displacement.

A pizza-restaurant owner says city officials are threatening him with thousands of dollars in fines for allowing a homeless man to sleep in a tent next to the dumpster behind his restaurant.

Eric Weber, the owner of The Slice in Evansville, Indiana, said town officials wanted to evict the man who is living behind his property, according to a local CBS and Fox News affiliate.

Weber recently received a $500 fine from the Evansville Area Planning Commission which said the tent was a structure that violated a city ordinance for land use. The fine would increase rapidly every day and could eventually swell to more than $7,000 per day, the station reported.

Weber told the outlet that he let the man keep his tent there because he thought it was the right thing to do.

"If you're looking at the greater good in this situation, the aesthetics of the alley and taking care of a homeless person, which one makes more sense?" Weber asked.

Weber told the outlet that he had tried to help the man for years and he thought forcing him to leave would create a pattern of displacement that would make his situation worse.

"Either you kick him down the road until somebody complains — and then he gets kicked down the road again — or you deal with it," Weber said. "If you give him food and water and a basic-shelter situation, it seems to me it could be done in an economical fashion that makes sense, and I definitely think the city could do it."

The planning commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

The number of unhoused and homeless people in the US has increased in recent years, Insider previously reported. More than 500,000 people experienced homelessness in the United States in 2022, according to the 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report.

The rise in homelessness is largely because of a lack of housing and the rising cost of the little housing that exists. The resulting rise in homelessness is playing out in myriad ways across the United States. 

Protests about the treatment of the homeless in New York City broke out last week after the killing of Jordan Neely, a Black man killed by a passenger on the subway. Neely was on the city's "Top 50" list for homeless people in need of urgent help when he died.

Homelessness is particularly stark in cities like San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, where homeless people have built large encampments on public property, sparking debate about whether to dismantle the encampments and relocate the people who live in them.

Lawmakers in Oregon last month introduced a bill that would allow unhoused people to sue if someone forces them to leave their encampments on public property.

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