Eric Tars is a senior attorney with the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. When we spoke this morning, Tars was at a conference focused on ending homelessness in Washington, DC, and less than an hour out from addressing a room full of attendees. His subject: "How to Offer Alternatives to Criminalization of Homelessness."
In the past week or so, the substance of that presentation has changed a bit. Tars, who last visited Portland in June, had planned on spotlighting Mayor Charlie Hales' controversial "safe-sleep policy" during the talk.
"We were really interested in this policy and wanted to see if it was what it said it was," Tars said of a visit to Portland last month. "We were all excited, because the mayor's office said, 'There were some hiccups in the rollout and we could have done some things better, but in general we’re happy with how these things are working.' The advocates were saying the same thing."
But Tars said he's had to tone down his planned praise for Portland's approach. Hales has since voiced doubts about the policy, and is coordinating a massive sweep of hundreds of homeless people living along the Springwater Corridor.
That decision, Tars says, goes against precisely what made the mayor's policy exciting in the first place: An acknowledgment that it doesn't make sense to push people around when you've got no better options for them. Hales has said the Springwater has become too unsafe—or at least too unsafe-seeming—to allow the camping there to continue.
As we point out in this week's paper, its not as though there are substantial new resources that will help the homeless along the Springwater stay off the street, once pushed elsewhere. That's got advocates plotting ways to fight back against the sweep—from a planned "refugee camp" on an as-yet unannounced plot of land, to staying put in protest, to potentially posting up in one of the city's posher neighborhoods.
The Springwater Corridor was never meant to explicitly be part of the safe-sleep policy. When the policy took effect in February, camping along the trail was already too dense for the plan to make much sense (it allows small groups of six people or less to camp overnight, as long as they take their tents down by 7 am). Tars says that doesn't matter.
"It would seem that even if the policy itself didn’t exactly apply, that the logic that the city had come to—that it really doesn’t make sense to push people around like this without a place to put them—that it should equally apply here," Tars says.
That notion, he points out, was laid out explicitly in a law that the city of Indianapolis enacted earlier this year. The ordinance required the city and county to identify a place to house or shelter homeless campers before they could be swept.
It makes sense Tars is pushing that policy. His organization closely tracks laws that criminalize and sweep homelessness, arguing they are frequently far more detrimental than helpful. Lately, they've been joined in that sentiment by the federal government. The US Department of Justice filed a much-discussed brief last year that argued against anti-camping laws in places where there are no other options. That brief didn't result in an actual ruling, but it's become a powerful rhetorical device.
So how was Tars planning to talk about Portland in his talk?
"I think I will be still sharing the best elements of it, but saying that whereas we would have given Portland a very ringing endorsement before...now we have to say that we’re watching the situation much more closely to see how it develops," he says. "If people want to try a policy like this, it does take goodwill to get it working. That goodwill can absolutely be undermined if you go back on your stated position."
