They want to make their own decisions.......
I decide I want free land, I decide I want free food,
I decide I want free shelter, I decide I want free drugs,
I decide to beg or steal for free stuff, I decide to be addicted
and homeless for years while using the bleeding hearts
hopes I can be returned to productive society as a sop for
freedom. I guess if the Village Idiot can run a con, then
so can these people.

Moved in on Sunday...."a portable toilet was scheduled for delivery Tuesday afternoon."

Where have they been going to the restroom for those three days?

"Cleaned up a dumpster's worth of garbage." Left by people who have been camping in that area for the last 2 years (at least).

Oops... I forgot that if you raise these issues or question any homeless advocates position, you're just a big, bad taxpaying homeowner who wants special treatment!

I support camps and settlements for people to live in. Houseless people are just as important as people who work hard to afford their rent or mortgage. When people are seen as unwanted that effects their desire to participate in a society that hates them. Thus it may translate into a big middle finger and not caring if they trash your neighborhood. When one person lives in a mansion and another can't find a place to set up a tent. This is a big red flag that something is WROnG!!! We are all in this together. An injury to one is an injury to all. No one chooses to be born in this cold world. Don't hate the player, hate the game!

@mite115: I personally hate the used needles strewn on the ground (27,787 used needles were picked up downtown in 2017) the piles and piles of garbage/debris left behind, the stripped bike frames, the buckets of human waste, the environmental devastation, and the attitude of some on the left that these things don't even exist.

"Houseless people are just as important as people who work hard to afford their rent or mortgage." Except it is solely the responsibility of those who pay taxes to foot the bill to clean up the things I listed above. When the city or county says it's spent tens of millions on the homeless issue, that's tens of millions in tax money provided by the people who work.

Sadly, the problem doesn't seem to be getting any better and tens of millions more in tax money will be spent likely without much change.

People in Portland (myself included) were upset when the Bundy clan took over the Malhuer Wildlife Refuge (public land), but apparently if you're homeless, those same people (myself excluded) will protest at city hall in support of you taking over public lands.

"Big Four Corners is one of Portland’s core habitat areas. It provides important
habitat for deer, coyotes, river otter, and a variety of birds and amphibians.
More than 175 species of birds use the Columbia Slough Watershed. Water
quality benefits include protecting cold water sources to the Slough and providing
the opportunity for restoration work to shade the Slough."

(from the PDF linked in the article)

But fuck those stupid otters and their water quality and shit, right? Especially to support one who is, again quoting the article, "houseless by choice".

We haven't even begun recovering from the Eagle Creek fire. Haven't we had enough destruction of our natural spaces for one year?

This is great! So who are they paying rent to? Or did they buy the land?

Fuck these people. It's a natural area, already challenged by proposed depredation by the Port of Portland. People need to be housed. Natural areas around the city are priceless and need to be preserved and enhanced as well. These assholes want to make those two ideas mutually exclusive. They need to move on, or be removed, now.

Welcome to the future. A lot of the self-righteous folk commenting on these stories, who engage in the freedom to cast aspersions as far as their small minds and big mouths can broadcast them, will be in the same boat. Every decade more and more people are unable to meet their cost of living without making concessions to chinese-slum living conditions. I look forward to meeting them in the future; I wonder how many of them will turn into the parasitic drunks/addicts they seem to think every person is who lives on the streets or in subsidized housing. (How better to cope with one's past mistakes and present struggles, than to blame the victims of a callous society that values land and money over decency and autonomy?)

But, all cultural partisan disdain aside, this is not the place to be setting up a camp. As our city grows, so does our need for green spaces; not only do the tame the ugliness of human architecture, but they also tame the ugliness that arises in the heart of a corporate sell-out consumer urban professional class that struggles to maintain a quality of life that is more expensive to maintain with every passing year. Locations like the current one R2D2 occupies are ideal: not only don't they take up green space, but they aren't close enough to residential neighborhoods to incite the locals into pitchfork-and-torches hostility (though of course it won't stop some impotent narcissists from pissing in the well of the Internet, like bosses lol).