The city has run out of room to store the items it’s collected during homeless camp sweeps.
For the past four years, these various belongings—anything from sleeping bags to ID cards—have generally been collected from city or state-owned property by cleanup staff and taken to a 1,010-square-foot, city-owned facility off SW Barbur Blvd., some seven miles southwest of the city center. These items are then held in the for at least 30 days, then thrown away. People hoping to retrieve their swiped items before then must call and make an appointment to collect their belongings at the distant facility.
But, according to the Office of Management and Finance (OMF) staff, who oversee the citywide cleanup system, roughly 90 percent of all items are never retrieved—leaving the warehouse consistently filled to the brim with recovered belongings.
That’s why Portland City Council voted this morning to allow OMF to purchase a new storage warehouse in Northeast Portland that’s more than four times bigger than the Barbur facility.
Located just north of NE Sandy on NE 24th, the new facility boast 4,300 square feet and high ceilings, an apparent improvement from the current spot. The city will pay $72,000 to lease the new facility for two years, a stark contrast from the small cost of running the current city-owned building.
At the council meting, OMF staff said the current facility’s distance from downtown and the east side (where most of these items are originally collected) is the main reason so few possessions are ever picked up. Staff also pointed to a new policy requiring cleanup crews to collect soiled items (only excluding items doused in some kind of hazardous substance) as reason they’ve lost storage space. A more central location would, ideally, shrink this growing cache—benefitting both the city and people wanting their stuff back. Which makes sense. But it doesn’t exactly explain why the new Northeast spot needs to be four times larger than its predecessor.
A quick look at the county’s 2017 survey of Portland’s homeless population shows the number of people sleeping outside has plummeted in the past few years (a reversal we can link to the $20 million boost in homeless program funding we saw in 2016).
If this move works the way OMF expects it to, staff should hopefully see a decrease in the amount of possessions the city’s throwing out.
They could probably make some more room in the facility by actually spending some time trying to reconnect all the stolen bikes they’ve recovered from the camps with their original owners.
“anything from sleeping bags to ID cards”
Uh huh. And loads and loads of literal junk.
“OMF staff said the current facility’s distance from downtown and the east side (where most of these items are originally collected) is the main reason so few possessions are ever picked up”
It does not take 30 fucking days to get across Portland to pick up stuff that is important to you. The main reason is that most of this stuff is literal junk.
“Staff also pointed to a new policy requiring cleanup crews to collect soiled items (only excluding items doused in some kind of hazardous substance) as reason they’ve lost storage space”
“Soiled items,” aka fucking junk. This is ridiculous. If I run out of room to store stuff in my garage, I don’t get to pile it in the street and then get the city to store it on the public dime, I get rid of non-necessary stuff.
And as randyzpdx says above, every single bike that comes through that facility needs to have its serial number posted to a public database so those of us who have had our kids’ bikes stolen by meth heads can come down to reclaim our property.
There’s a homeless encampment on the NW side of the North Vancouver Ave overpass (just north of Columbia Blvd) on the banks of the slough that has been there for months. I drive by every morning and more and more people show up every week. The vegetation has been trampled to bare earth, trash and stripped bike frames are piling up, and the campers appear to be mostly meth-heads.
One morning I drove by to see a man dumping a 5-gallon bucket of what appeared to be human waste right into the slough. There’s also a small boat that looks straight off the set of Mad Max that is docked every other day or so. Yes, they have a pretty nice set-up there, camping free of charge on serene waters of the slough. I reported this camp weeks ago and yet they remain.
Must be nice to know that they will not be fined when and if they do receive an “eviction” notice and they’ll be given plenty of time to pack up their crap. The garbage will be removed free of charge (on the taxpayer dime), the use of the slough as their own personal toilet will go unpunished, and the stripped bike frames will be retrieved with absolutely no repercussion.
They’ll move to another spot and trash it… get evicted, then likely move right back in to their spot on the waterfront… lather, rinse, repeat.