SUNDAY, JUNE 8, marked a peculiar and largely overlooked milestone for Portland’s Old Town.
Precisely three months after a homeless man was stabbed on a sidewalk beneath the Burnside Bridge, that crime scene—a problematic springtime campsite but also the only public walkway directly linking SW Naito with the Skidmore Fountain MAX station—was still walled off by wooden barricades and sagging police tape.
And that bureaucratic limbo shows no sign of lifting anytime soon, thanks to some mild political wrangling.
Though no one’s keen to see overnight violence and drug use return to the belly of the Burnside, the one proposal that would permanently bar camping from the sidewalk—closing it at night, calling it a “high-traffic” area during the day—remains in a holding pattern. It appears to have been overtaken by a much larger discussion on homelessness in Portland City Hall, led in part by Commissioner Amanda Fritz.
If sidewalks are out, and if shelters are full, then where exactly should campers go?
“My suggestion was we have more conversations about that space and where people can be instead,” says Fritz.
Fritz tells the Mercury she’s begun talking with officials in the one major landowning city bureau under her control, Portland Parks and Recreation, about letting people stay for the night—provided they aren’t causing trouble. And while cautioning that the talks are “very preliminary,” she’s also hoping to have the same chat with other big property-holding bureaus, like water and transportation.
“Are there situations where, if people were on city property, other than sidewalks, and if they weren’t causing a problem,” Fritz says, “that we would not be moving them on until morning?”
Camping enforcement in Portland has always been spotty. Officials insist the city, for years, has unofficially tolerated low-impact camping.
But after some newly muscular rhetoric from city hall about enforcement last summer, cops and park rangers and others have been very visibly sweeping larger campsites—often drawing public complaints from homelessness advocates about property confiscations.
The sidewalk beneath the Burnside Bridge was an example of both.
After those sweeps, campers began gathering in the winter, drawn by the promise of shelter from the elements. And with so few people actually using the sidewalk to cut to the MAX station overnight, cops and private security guards decided to tolerate what sprang into a makeshift campsite.
Slowly though, that began to change. Guards working for nearby Mercy Corps tell the Mercury that drug dealers and others showed up, too, crowding out some of the original campers.
Meanwhile, in late February, Right 2 Dream Too co-founder Ibrahim Mubarak was arrested on suspicion of disobeying an officer after advocates confronted police who’d showed up at the camp. Then came the stabbing on March 8—in which a bleeding 39-year-old man went stumbling into traffic on SW Naito.
It wasn’t the first stabbing for the site, city officials say. But with all the notoriety, it was the last straw for cops, who shut it down.
“Most of the people who stayed the night are still around,” says a private security guard working for Mercy Corps.
The guard—who asked to remain anonymous because he’s not authorized to speak with reporters—says his own son was briefly among the group camping beneath the bridge. Some of those who left, he says, wound up a few blocks away, beneath the Steel Bridge.
“I got to know some of the people,” the guard says. “Some people wanted to sleep, but it just got out of hand.”
The police bureau, through a spokesman, says it realizes the crime tape “isn’t a permanent solution, obviously.” That’s why they want to put up signs limiting who can use the sidewalk and when.
But since the tape went up, says Sergeant Pete Simpson, complaints have dried up. And so have arrests.
Simpson also says he’s heard no beefs from pedestrians or people concerned about civil liberties.
Because of the tape, there’s technically no legal way to get from Naito to the MAX station; to do that, you have to cut through private parking lots controlled by Mercy Corps and the University of Oregon. Guards theoretically could discriminate against people who “look homeless.”
“As long as people are only walking through,” the Mercy Corps guard insists, “that’s all we care about.”
Diane Dulken, a bureau of transportation spokeswoman, says police and transportation officials have briefed city hall on their sidewalk-closing proposal—even though they technically don’t need council permission.
But “there is no firm timetable right now,” Dulken says.
That’s partly because of Fritz—who’s been a champion for Right 2 Dream Too and emerged as one of the council’s loudest advocates for people on the streets.
“There needs to be somewhere where people can go,” she says, “when they’re hungry, tired, and poor.”
I’ll tell you where they can go when they are hungry, tired and poor. The unemployment office and get free training on how to get a job. Enabling the homeless to continue living on the streets does nothing but hurt them in the long run. People giving them money on the streets leads them straight to their meth dealers, getting high, then harass our local business’s and people who work their assess of for a roof over their head. It’s a vicious cycle that needs to be put to a dramatic stop. Quit funding the homeless and reward our citizens who set an alarm for themselves, get up, and get to work contributing to our community.
I sleep outside and “Low Impact” is my motto. There is absolutely no need for shopping carts full of crap from the dumpsters. I have one small fabric shopping bag with one change of cloths and toiletries; that’s it. It gets stashed in the brush and rarely is discovered. When it does get found and swiped, it’s easy to replace. I sleep on plastic garbage bags and always appear clean. Universities have lots of restrooms. Most outdoorsmen aren’t as austere and adventurous as I, and need to stay close in to town. If you want low impact, it would help tremendously to offer free lockers, high school sized, to hold a small bag and pup tent. Open the public parks and restrooms at night. City owned high rise parking structures would be ideal.
As to the job issue, I have become persona non grata, due to the abusive Government and the Internet; 666 Now.
Most of these people came to the streets with serious problems, ranging from errant neurobiology to childhood trauma. (I know a lot of people believe all people have to do is “suck it up” and “toughen up” and everyone will grow up to be healthy and productive citizens, regardless of the damage wrought by nature or nurture, but anyone with any capacity for rational thought and a bit of honesty and perceptivity will quickly realize that’s a bunch of malarkey.) And, well, it doesn’t take too long for a troubled soul in a dismal set of circumstances to take to self-medicating, and then the problems are compounded by addictions and the often-resulting acclimation to criminal necessity. These guys aren’t lazy; a $120 a day dope habit precludes that possibility. But, you know, they aren’t exactly encouraged to join mainstream society and work when every year all the good work goes overseas and our cost of living keeps outpacing the incomes of service and blue collar workers, jobs that require credit checks and UAs and two interviews to hurdle through in order to hope to be able to land; you may as well try to make a living by appearing on The Price Is Right!
I’m not hearing any solution to problems, just politicians playing their games, conservative jerks full of willful ignorance and self-righteous animosity, and liberal fools eagerly erecting turnstiles for their bedraggled poster children to spin through.
Portland’s patchwork approach to homelessness satisfies no one, is slowing our economic recovery (it doesn’t make a good impression on businesses considering moving here), and is fueling an ongoing shameful situation. People shouldn’t have to live on the streets.
Could we please fund a comprehensive strategy? I’m a taxpayer, and I want this city to provide the services its citizens need, while giving law enforcement clear rules and the tools it needs to deal with criminals. We need to get our house in order.
I work in that area and I meet many different people that are camping outside for a variety of reasons. Some struggling to get out of the bad situation they are in, some with severe mental health issues, some with drug issues and at the bottom of the list are the career homeless that wouldn’t have it any other way.
The problem is that Portland has made it so easy to be homeless that people practically flock here to be so. I see these ridiculous self-righteous do-gooders driving around handing out bagged lunches once a week so that they feel good in the grace of god at church on Sunday. Well you know what people? No one is starving on the streets of Portland! There are so many places to eat that I’m pretty sure they eat better than I do.
And the police have their hands tied due to a system that doesn’t give them any options other than trying to scare them away like a flock of pigeons only to return. The sheriffs department drives through with inmate workers once a week on a crated junk truck and if any campers dare leave anything behind it’s grab and trash time! Sweep it up all tidy like it never happened.