A local nonprofit that helps homeless Portlanders access showers, survival supplies, and community care is trying to regroup after a series of fires left the location unable to operate.
Hygiene4All operates beneath the Morrison Bridge in Southeast Portland. But four fires since last November—three since early February—have left the organization unable to provide their full range of services to homeless Portlanders who depend on it.
Now, the organization is asking for community support to get back on its feet.
Fires have been frequent at the small Central Eastside lot, particularly in recent weeks. A fire last November damaged a pod that Hygiene4All uses as an office. It was the first fire in five years, according to Sandra Comstock, the organization’s executive director. In early February, someone took a blow torch to a 275-gallon water tank, rendering it unusable. By February 22, another fire burned out two portable toilets and another water tank.
Then on March 7, someone threw a burning piece of cardboard into a dumpster, setting it ablaze. Portland Police Bureau spokesperson Mike Benner said due to the series of fires dating back to November 2025, the Portland Fire Investigations Unit, including both fire and police personnel, was dispatched to the scene.
“Investigators determined the fire was human-caused,” Benner said. “Through the course of the investigation, a suspect was identified, later located, and taken into custody.”
Portland Fire and Rescue spokesperson Rick Graves confirmed the first crew to arrive was able to extinguish the fire, and no injuries were reported.
That fire burned the plastic windows out of a pod that holds tools, and another storage pod that holds clothing, bedding, and cleaning supplies, Comstock said.
While Hygiene4All has all the permitting it needs to legally operate under the bridge, and insurance to cover any damages to government property, the insurance won’t cover any temporary structures, including the showers, storage units, and office pods. Funding is scarce.
“There’s so much need right now,” Comstock said. “And there’s been so many cuts. I’m not getting the same grants that I usually was able to get before.”
So, she’s getting creative, trying to raise funds through the organization’s website and calling on mutual aid networks to help them get back to business. The local burger joint Burgerville is pitching in as well. For the next three Mondays—March 23, March 30, and April 6—Burgerville will donate 20 percent of proceeds from six Portland locations to Hygiene4All.
Fires compound resource scarcity
Hygiene4All’s challenges come as the city and the county are facing a harsh budget season. The two governments held a joint session on homelessness March 17 at City Hall, during which elected officials and Homeless Services Department staff presented a grim outlook for homelessness funding.
Jillian Schoene, the director of the Homelessness Response System, said the region expects hundreds of millions of dollars in shifted funding in 2028 due to deep federal cuts. She added that the federal agency Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is expected to enact new oversight measures that could have adverse effects. Those measures will likely impact Metro, which funds a substantial amount of city and county programs, including rent assistance to keep people in their homes.
Schoene highlighted that the county is facing $68 million in cuts in the upcoming fiscal year. Some $31 million of that is money the city would normally send to the county but will instead allocate toward its own shelter system this year. She said Portland’s city administrator warned of a fiscal cliff in recent years as the city decided to spend one-time funds, from Metro and the federal government, on temporary shelters instead of permanent solutions to homelessness.
Now, the county is faced with the choice between keeping or opening new shelters, and funding programs that move people into housing. Ideally, they would do both, but the new funding woes leave few alternatives.
Schoene acknowledged the “collective fiscal cliff” regional government agencies face. She advocated for local partnerships to design “a unified, balanced system that moves more people into housing.”
Regional homelessness funding has impacted small service providers and nonprofits, too. Comstock said public funding for Hygiene4All disappeared last June, and it is challenging to keep operations going on a shoestring budget.
The organization provides more than showers and survival supplies. Before Hygiene4All opened, Comstock said organizers spent a year asking homeless residents how they envisioned safety, and what they would want to make a place feel like a community, then built the location based on feedback.
Comstock said the site provides a space for people to shower, pick up supplies, but also to decompress and help regulate others who are feeling agitated.
But an increase in homeless encampment removals, or “sweeps,” has disrupted those community safety efforts, according to Comstock. She said on average, 67 percent of people who walked through the door in 2025 answered “yes” to an internal survey asking whether they had been swept in the previous two weeks. That’s up from 46 percent in 2024. Hygiene4All staff asks the survey questions each time a person enters for services.
Mayor Keith Wilson dramatically increased the number of sweeps when he took office in January 2025. The city sweeps an average of 20 encampments per day since strict enforcement of the city’s homelessness rules began on November 1, 2025. He also increased overnight shelter capacity, meaning people can be offered a bed in a congregate setting under the threat of fines and arrest.
During the March 17 joint work session, Wilson touted the sweeps as a success in his efforts to get homeless Portlanders into overnight shelters.
“We’ve helped people out of derelict RVs so they no longer pose a hazard to our roads, our watershed and our neighborhoods,” Wilson said. “And encampment counts have dropped across the city, and they decreased by 70 percent—75 percent in the downtown core. Most importantly, we’ve accomplished this by offering a helping hand, life saving resources and a path off the streets.”
Wilson said 2,100 people each month have used the overnight shelters over the past two months. The city’s overnight shelters do not have showers, so homeless residents are left to move to a day center, or seek services elsewhere, once the overnight shelter closes.
But Comstock said the sweeps have disrupted the community responses that homeless residents and services providers have built to help keep each other safe. Their anxiety is heightened.
“People’s focus is not the same,” she said. “They’re not as stable. They’re not as steady.”
She said the people who are in the area are often those with the least mobility, or cognitive ability to move somewhere else.
“We’ve lost a lot of the informal caregivers on the streets as well that help keep people regulated, keep people fed, make sure that they’re doing okay,” Comstock said.
That means people are less likely to stay around the Hygiene4All site, and less likely to disrupt someone who may be setting a dangerous fire—intentional or accidental.
“You can only squeeze people so hard before they start to fall apart and become desperate,” Comstock said. “And I see a lot of desperation on the streets.”
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly named the organization. Hygiene4All is the correct spelling.
