That was quick!
One day after an unsanctioned camp for homeless women sprang up on a plot of Portland Development Commission land near Lents Town Center, organizers have agreed to take it down, according to Mayor Charlie Hales’ office.
“The organizers have now agreed to work with the Mayor’s Office to place the women who are currently at the site into shelters within the next 24 hours,” Hales spokesperson Sara Hottman says in an email. “The campsite will then be shut down.”
But it’s not the last Portland’s seen of the encampment—tentatively calling itself “Hope Forward.”
“Organizers will work on developing a managed camp at another PDC site,” Hottman writes. “The move is expected in the next two weeks.”
Advocacy 5, the nonprofit that coordinated yesterday’s takeover of a plot at SE Woodstock and 93rd, hasn’t yet confirmed Hales’ announcement. The group—a conglomeration of several organizations—has railed against what it says is slow progress by the City of Portland in protecting homeless women who frequently experience sexual assault. It’s been working with Hales’ office to establish an organized camp for women for months, but when officials recently pulled the Lents property off the table, advocates decided to act anyway.
“No one seemed to know the next step,” Gresham homeless advocate Raine Ritalto said yesterday. “So we went on and took the next step.”
The pressure would seem to have paid off. News emerged today that the PDC has a tentative deal to sell the 0.38-acre Lents plot for market-rate apartments and food carts, but Hales’ office is committing to quickly move the group to another space.
Here’s a statement Hottman forwarded from Hales:
“These organizations have done us a service in connecting us with these women, so we can move them to safety. However, our Safe Sleep Guidelines are clear: They cannot set up unsanctioned camps. It’s not courteous to the surrounding neighborhood, and it doesn’t allow us to connect these women with the services they deserve. We are moving far faster than government typically does, and we need these organizations to work with us for the benefit of our whole Portland community.”
Your clown candidate for Mayor, Sarah Iannarone, needs to explain herself. How can you run for Mayor and, at the same time, do all those end-runs around democracy. State laws prohibit rent control? As Mayor of Portland, she will just ignore state law and get us sued. Not invited to a debate? Show up with Sarah Long the disrupter. Frustrated with lack of shelter beds? Just work with activists to put an unsanctioned tent city on PDC property.
Wasn’t the Seares deal supposed to help this, or is this just more advocates yelling bullshit?
If we only stuck to what was legal, as opposed to what was right, then all sorts of injustices never would have been changed. It’s called Civil Disobedience–look it up!
I for one was glad to hear Sarah Iannarone was at this camp volunteering today.
lindacbugg
You think it was helpful for these women to be promised hope in the form of a new camp and then have it snatched away from them, and have to move twice, while under already difficult circumstances because the nonprofit “advocates” for them couldn’t bother with due diligence or securing a legal site for their camp?
Maybe Sarah Iannarone and Sara Long could have spent the same amount of time and effort finding an alternative site that would have offered more stability from the start, but no, it’s about their own egos and publicity above the needs of those they actually purport to be fighting for.
Maybe those women should get jobs. Maybe we shouldn’t be more focused on this just because it is women involved. How many other camps have been shut down in the same fashion. Mental health and treatment with a realistic transition plan is what is needed not giving them tents and acting like everything is ok.
f** tents. f**** homes, f**** people on both sides of that block… F**** all of you and your walls. None of you are solving anything, your just shifting it around- it’s an entropy/ partition function thing.