Last week, after some gentle prodding, the City of Portland announced that it’d be opening one of two day storage sites for homeless people this week, months later than planned. We reported that’d be happening.
It hasn’t.
The west end of the Steel Bridge has neither the 53-foot modified shipping container officials said was on the way, nor the restrooms and dumpsters they say will create a needed new resource for homeless Portlanders in and around downtown.
“The delivery driver got the flu,” says Jen Clodius, a spokesperson for the city’s Office of Management and Finance. The new plan? The storage containers are slated to arrive on parks land beneath the Steel Bridge next Tuesday, with the second container delivered to a spot near the Hazelnut Grove homeless camp on North Greeley on Wednesday.
“Mind you those are just deliveries,” says Clodius. “There’s still set-up work to be done.”
As we’ve noted, the day storage sites will help fill a gap in service for the city’s growing homeless population—offering them a place to store their belongings without fear of theft. Those places exist in Portland—for instance, at the Bud Clark Commons in Old Town—but can’t possibly keep up with demand. That will almost certainly remain the case even with the planned city operated sites. Cities like San Diego and Vancouver have similar systems.
Portland officials say the storage sites will run for at least six months. People will be able to drop off belongings from 6 to 7:30 am, and pick them up from 4:30 to 6 pm. Belongings that aren’t claimed will be kept onsite for three days, before being transferred to another facility.
As usual, the City overpaid in the first place. It would make too, much sense, to provide vouchers to the indigent, good for payment at several different privately owned, storage facilities, conveniently located around town. That would be a lot cheaper, and instantly implementable.
I’ll bet they could have bought ten 48 footers, used, for the same money. There is no reason the containers have to be new. Waste of money.
It’s all about the kickbacks. If they get rid of the homeless, then all the bottom feeders are out of a paycheck and out on the street.
The ridiculous amount of Stuff in many of these camps really is the primary problem when it comes to both the health of the campers and, frankly put, the reason the camps look like shit and are so upsetting to many. Something that would help is for all those the do-gooders who pass out various items to the homeless be it needles or socks or that nappy couch you didn’t want to pay to take to the dump please bring along some extra strength garbage bags and offer to exchange them for a few bags of garbage you can take off the hands of the campers.