- Dirk VanderHart
- Wesley Courveler, foreground, says the new camp has a right to exist.
The city sprouted another organized homeless encampment on City of Portland property on Sunday. No one bothered to tell the city it was coming.
“The mayor’s office didn’t know where we were planning on moving ahead of time,” says Steve Kimes, a Portland homeless advocate. “I sent notice last night.”
Kimes has been working with people living at Forgotten Realms, the nickname given to the tent community that’s sprung up next to the city-sanctioned Hazelnut Grove encampment on North Greeley. As part of an upcoming permit for Hazelnut Grove, the city’s planning to force campers at Forgotten Realms to move along by January 19. So some of them are hoping to start a camp of their own.
Roughly 10 homeless residents moved to a city-owned lot at North Kerby and Graham on Sunday. The site sits close to I-5, across the street from Legacy Emanuel Medical Center, and directly next to at least one home.
The spot’s strategic, according to Kimes. He says the corner lot will allow easy service for garbage and portable toilets—amenities that were made tricky by Hazelnut Grove’s relative inaccessibility. He expects a portable toilet in the next day or two he says.
“We’re hoping that the mayor or his assistant will come over—take a look at what we’re doing, give us the same kind of opportunities that Hazelnut Grove had,” Kimes says.
At the camp Monday afternoon, campers were busy erecting tents and making other preparations. An old trailer, set up in the middle of the lot, is equipped with a generator and battery power. Its resident, Wesley Courverler, had a role in setting up Forgotten Realms, and says the new camp is a far more suitable living situation.
“I have just as much a right as they do to live,” Courverler said of Hazelnut Grove. “If they move me, they’ve gotta move them.”
Courverler says he’d like to begin building small structures on the property in coming days. Campers on site said Portland police had visited briefly Sunday, citing a complaint. While I was visiting this afternoon, Courverler knocked on the home next to the land—a large duplex—to introduce himself, but no one answered.
This new camp effort—and those that might follow—could present an interesting challenge for Mayor Charlie Hales. In recent months, Hales has shown a willingness to be relatively lenient with homeless campers, an acknowledgment that Portland has a shortage of both affordable housing and shelter space. Last month, Hales’ chief of staff, Josh Alpert, directed all city bureaus to alert the mayor’s office when a camp sweep is being considered, arguing that should only happen when absolutely necessary.
But the permissiveness has rubbed some residents the wrong way. The Overlook Neighborhood Association has railed against the campers at and around Hazelnut Grove, and even demanded a public list of campers so residents could conduct their own background checks.
Kimes says he and others scouted around a dozen different locations when looking for a new camp site, and that they “wanted to make sure it was not a place in the Overlook Neighborhood.” The spot they landed on carries plenty historical significance. It sits between an interstate and hospital that each contributed massively to displacement from the neighborhood—at one time the heart of Portland’s African American community.
Kimes and Courverler say that anyone who’d like to move into the space will have to agree to abide by a code of conduct, and that camp leaders will limit the number of people living at the site. Courverler said he’s thinking 30 people could live on the plot.
“After having lived near Hazelnut Grove, everyone is in agreement that that is just plain too many people,” Kimes says. Here’s the code of conduct the camp plans to enforce:
As for the city, it was still trying to get its head around the situation this morning.
“Reports are just coming in,” said Jen Clodius, a spokeswoman for the city’s Office of Management and Finance. “The city has not authorized camping there.”
Update, 3:50 pm: There’s no indication Hales is going to allow the nascent North Portland camp to remain.
“The City is open to facilitating organized camping once it identifies land on which camping could take place,” mayoral spokeswoman Sara Hottman tells the Mercury. “Folks occupying land does not mean the City will sanction a camp; indeed, nobody should be occupying City land without having first discussed it with the City.”
Hottman said in an email that Alpert, the mayor’s chief of staff, spoke with an advocate who’d mentioned that campers from Forgotten Realms had organized and drawn up a code of conduct.
“He told them that was great, but that the City didn’t yet have land to offer to them,” Hottman said. “Josh continues to search diligently and daily for such land.”
How come if a person tries to live in a tiny home on wheels on their property they get fined by the city but if these crazies camp out on City of Portland property no one gets fined?
Fine the homeless. Great idea. Schmuck.
@econoline “these crazies”? please, enlighten us: what is it about the state of lacking secure housing that makes someone inherently crazy?
Nicolas Caleb:
econoline brought up an interesting quandary. The city wants private citizens to follow their City Code & Charter. It’s not like this is the only encampment placed in the city, so it’s a ubiquitous issue. In fact, R2D2 was entirely created by flaunting multiple code and zoning regulations in order to be built. If a developer built a building without a permit, they’d be in some serious trouble.
How can a city be run when some people follow the law and others don’t? Does the city even have any legal grounds to go after private citizens if they do not fairly apply their rules throughout? Should we have separate rules for the housed and non-housed?
Not that I agree with fining the homeless into staying homeless, but broadly speaking, my casual observation leads me to wonder that we have very separate rules for the homeless in the city. Homelessness is a point of understanding, it’s not a reason to pretend they are entirely immune from oversight and enforcement and compliance. It’s not necessarily a reason to not enforce rules or codes of any kind of the homeless and enforce them stringently on other people.
A city cannot be run on such ambiguous law and enforcement. We all need to know what the rules are.
Who could have seen this coming?!
Honestly, our city is just stupid. Flat out. I’ve always figured that people reaching that station in life running a city must be smarter than me. But I’m coming to the conclusion that these people are actually stupid. No sense of cause and effect or human nature. Purely reactive to every situation, surprised by everything. Incompetent and totally ineffectual.
Blabby:
I’ve actually concluded that government politics, at least local issues, could be entirely run by a simple computer program. At the very least, the city needs a simple flow chart to help them figure some stuff out.
4000 homeless people are forced to live without land laws daily in the county. The residents of Forgotten Realms want the opportunity to find better housing, but it is impossible to find work or a better way to live being forced to move all the time. This camp is a possibility of living at peace long enough to get off the street.
Steve, turning the entire city into a constellation of shanty towns is not the solution. Regardless of the “rules” they try to establish, they breed crime and drug use and trash the land they are on.
The solution is to give people space, to treat them like human beings. FR isn’t a “shantytown” unless we are forced to stay that way. It’s a group of people looking for solutions in a city that isn’t giving them any.
Crime and trash is an assumption. FR has trash cans, a bath room and people to keep the peace. They aim to be good neighbors. Sorry that you assume otherwise, but it isn’t true.
People without walls don’t act any better or worse than people with walls. Homeless campers just have the disadvantage of living out in the open where there are litte/no services available (or that are maintained year-round, e.g. ‘Closed for the Season’ bathrooms, like there’s a season where people need to go and a season when everyone can just hold it). Caregivers of small children, elderly people, anyone who recreates outdoors year-round, and people without homes can all agree that public restrooms are a welcome resource. At. least.
Donald Trump threatening to use his power and influence to deport millions of people is much worse behavior than leaving trash on the ground when there’s nowhere else to put it.
If you want a civil society, provide civil resources. A country that can spend six squillion dollars a year on military funding can sure as hell provide *at least* year-round public toilets, we’re just choosing not to spend our money that way, because ‘bootstraps’. Which is a damn shame, and a total failure of imagination.