For people living outside, sweeps are stressful at any time of year. In the summer, they can be devastating.
Kelly Clendenon recalled how when he was homeless, there were a couple times he passed out from the heat and ended up in the hospital. His experience isn’t a rarity.
A 2025 study found that in 2021 and 2022, the rate of heat-related emergency department visits for homeless people was 30 times higher than among adults who were housed.
Clendenon, founder of Common Lens Films and co-founder of 13 Salmon Shower Project, said the city’s camping ban makes a tough situation more dangerous.
“The heat is just terrible,” Clendenon said. “So staying in a safe spot where you’re not going to get swept is a challenge for sure.”
Summer in Portland keeps getting hotter. The average temperature is nearly four degrees higher than it was in 1970. And each summer comes with almost a month of days that are hotter than average — 26 in 2025.
Since 2000, temperatures in Portland have hit the triple digits 48 times. Nearly half were recorded in just the past six years, when there were 23 days of triple-digit temperatures on record.
This year, Portland saw its first triple-digit day July 21, hitting exactly 100 degrees.
Drew Grabham is director of outreach services at Central City Concern. In his 15 years of experience, he’s witnessed the stress caused by worsening summer conditions.
“I hope that folks can really realize that compounding impact of being uncomfortable and overheated, that it just really affects all of us as humans,” Grabham said. “And I think even more so, if you have no reprieve from it.”
Disproportionate impacts
Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are well-known health concerns, but the heat can also harm the heart, brain, lungs, kidneys, liver, intestines and pancreas, according to Vijay Limaye, a climate and health scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“It’s really important for folks to appreciate that extreme heat exposure is not just an inconvenience, but can actually be life-threatening,” Limaye said. “Heat taxes the body and our organs in a number of ways.”
Heat can also worsen air pollution and the health effects that come with it. Hotter days can lead to smoggy days.
“I usually talk about it as sort of like cooking the air,” Limaye said. “And we have these primary kinds of building blocks of ozone already in the air, but when the air is warmer, we see more ozone forming.”
For homeless Portlanders, factors such as higher likelihood of chronic disease, constant exposure to the elements, and lack of resources to protect them from pollutants makes them even more vulnerable to these conditions, Limaye said.
But the real worry comes from when heat and air pollution combine.
“That’s because air pollution and extreme heat act on the same organ systems,” Limaye said. “And so we’re stressing them in a number of ways, which can do disproportionate damage to them.”
Fox is a Street Roots vendor and one of many homeless Portlanders who are worried about increasing heat and smoke.
“It’s gonna be around late August when it’ll start getting horrible,” Fox said.
The camping ban
Compounding the stress is the continued enforcement of Portland’s camping ban. Since the ban went into effect Nov. 1, the city’s Impact Reduction Program reported 5,491 sweeps as of Aug. 1. Police enforced the ban during 800 of those sweeps, according to the Portland Police Bureau’s public camping ordinance enforcement report.
The city appears to be picking up the pace. Since June, the city has conducted over 1,248 sweeps: about 20% of the total number of sweeps since the ban went into effect. Police were present at 104 sweeps in June. The Portland Police Bureau did not respond to Street Roots’ request for the number of assisted enforcement incidents in July.
During excessive heat warnings, coordinated camp removals are suspended, but Portland police can still ticket people for violating the city’s camping ban, Laura Rude, spokeswoman for Portland Solutions, told Street Roots.
“Our public camping ordinance is a compassionate tool that saves lives and restores Portland’s values as a compassionate, livable city,” Cody Bowman, spokesman for Mayor Keith Wilson, told Street Roots.
But from Fox’s perspective, the city’s policy makes life even harder than exposure to heat waves and toxic, smoky air. He moves constantly to try and stay ahead of the sweeps, but he said it’s not uncommon for him to come back to his spot and find everything gone. Rapid Response BioClean has taken his belongings multiple times when he wasn’t there, he said.
Fox and others told Street Roots city personnel told them to take only one bag of their belongings during sweeps. Rude said there is no official city policy that prevents people from taking more than one bag with them. She added that, in most cases, Rapid Response gives people a 30-minute window to pack up when a cleanup crew arrives, but that window is not provided when police are involved. The city also confirmed that workers proceed with camp removals even when the people living there aren’t present.
“The worst thing is the whole camping thing.” Fox said. “It’s bad enough that I end up kinda staying awake for days because I can’t find a spot because people are gonna steal something of mine. But it’s like when I do finally get to sleep, cops want to wake me up and tell me I can only take one backpack with me.”
Barbra Weber is co-founder and coordinator of Ground Score Association, a collective that creates low-barrier waste management jobs. She said Fox’s experience is pretty common.
“When a person is swept, all of their stuff is put into a clear bag, and it’s only marked with the location and the time it was collected. It is not a name, a person, it’s nothing.” Weber said.
While not required, people present during a sweep can provide a name or other identifying information to Rapid Response and they include that information on bag labels and inventory systems at the property warehouse, Rude said. To track belongings, removal crews also separate property by owner or by structure, as much as possible, and label unknown individuals by number, she added.
This process means it’s not uncommon for items to get misplaced, mixed up, or given to the wrong person, Weber explained.
Fox is a stone miner by trade and often carries items such as crystals, gems and minerals with him.
“They’re taking my livelihood and just throwing it on the ground.” Fox said.
And while Bowman, the mayor’s spokesperson, added that the camping ban “has helped hundreds accept shelter, many for the first time,” county data shows a different result.
The camping ban has not significantly increased the number of homeless people in the county who are living in temporary shelters or transitional housing. Those numbers rose incrementally during the first few months of the ban, with 5,081 reported sheltered in November and 5,323 by March, according to the Multnomah County Homeless Services Department. But the number dropped again to below where it was before the ban. By May, only 5,010 homeless people had found temporary shelter.
Overall, more than 1,000 additional people are experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County since the start of the camping ban, according to county numbers. In November, the total was 17,155 people. By May, that number had risen to 18,248.
Sweeps can also mean losing access to a consistent, stable community: another detriment to mental health, Grabham said.
“I think there’s these bad stereotypes about people that are houseless, but there are just some wonderfully caring communities out there that get disrupted when they have to move along or they lose touch with each other,” Grabham said. “They experience so much repeated loss that that can just get overwhelming. That would overwhelm anyone of us.”
For Jesse and his partner Izzy, the camping ban has been far from compassionate, instead adding to the daily stressors they experience.
No respite from smoky air, staying out of the sun and finding a clean place to shower are just a few of the many struggles they faced this summer.
“Dealing with police is a big issue,” Jesse said.
Izzy agreed.
“Ever since Rapid Response came around, it’s been way harder,” Izzy said. “They won’t even post you and they’ll be grabbing all your shit.”
The two have had to move consistently throughout the summer, with their longest stay so far lasting a week and a half.
Like Fox, they’ve frequently lost belongings in the city’s clean up process.
Jesse told Street Roots that in one instance, he saw his missing pair of Jordans on Facebook Marketplace with his campsite visible in the background.
Weber was equally critical of the ban and its effects.
“It would be better to leave people in place and more compassionate to provide them whatever support they need, and then to get them into housing,” Weber said. “Use the shelters for exactly what they’re meant to be: an emergency. They’re not meant to be lived in.”
Slashes to resources
This all comes at a time where both the city and Multnomah County have had to slash shelter budgets — with reductions mostly to permanent beds, rather than overnight-only. Officials expect the cuts to result in a total of over 1,100 permanent shelter beds eliminated in the next few months.
Ten shelters open at the start of the year will close by the end of 2026 due to the cuts. Two additional shelters will lose beds but remain open. One city-funded shelter is planned to double in size, absorbing sleeping pods from two of the closing shelters.
“Portland is one of the few major cities nationwide that guarantees a safe bed for everyone, every night, to anyone who will accept one,” Bowman said. “Shelter bed closures will not impact this promise.”
A house or a home
Exit data collected by Multnomah County shows shelters alone are not enough.
According to data collected as of May, 75% of people who exited shelters remained homeless. Only 6% received permanent housing and 3% moved to temporary housing.
And for many, the city’s overnight-only shelters are not a good option.
Clendenon, the filmmaker who experienced homelessness, said accepting shelter isn’t as simple as it sounds.
“They’re trying to sweep people and get them to go into what are called congregate shelters, these larger, more warehouse-type facilities, that are really scary for a lot of people,” Clendenon said. “You take a bunch of people that don’t really know each other or have any connections to each other — and a lot of people have craving addictions and/or mental illness — and you put them into a spot that is — it’s scary. It can be really intimidating for people.”
Fox is one of these people. He said social anxiety and claustrophobia make shelters a no-go for him, adding that he wouldn’t be able to sleep in such an environment.
“They don’t have anything for me like that,” Fox said. “It’s like, sure I want to be indoors, but they make it hard for people with the type of mental issues I have.”
Data from the Portland Police Bureau shows that as of June, 492 people accepted shelter out of the 1,134 people offered.
With Clendenon’s next planned film, he hopes to tackle what he sees as one of the biggest barriers to folks getting stabilized — lack of addiction treatment access. From his experience being homeless in San Francisco, struggling with long-term addiction and mental illness without adequate access to treatment beds was the biggest challenge to getting stabilized. He sees the same issues here in Oregon.
Despite their own financial restrictions, Grabham and his team at Central City Concern believe in meeting people where they’re at and working with them, one step at a time. He said mental and physical health care is a major part of this.
“We have a long way to go to really create a system of care that’s effective, well-rounded, and can have a truly lasting impact in people’s lives,” Grabham said.
This article appears in August 26, 2026.