Albany city officials set aside two vacant lots at Ninth Avenue and Jackson Street a year ago where people living on the street could pitch up to 15 tents.
Now those people have until Thursday, Aug. 29, to go somewhere else.
“Where am I going to go? Probably to hell,” Sean Cassidy, one of the people living at what is euphemistically called Marvin’s Garden, said. “No, really, I’m not sure.”
One thing is sure, as per a sign city officials posted at the site last week: people still at Marvin’s Garden Aug. 29 will be arrested for trespassing and risk going directly to jail. Their belongings, if police decide they’re not useful, will be thrown out.
Something else is certain, said Alica (who declined to give her last name). None of this will alleviate the problem of unsheltered homelessness in the 57,000-person Linn County community 70 miles southwest of Portland.
“Where else are we going to go?” Alica said. “Once we leave here, everyone is going to be complaining that we’re everywhere else. We move to different spots, and everyone automatically calls the cops. ‘Oh, there’s these people here.’
“Well, you kicked us out of this spot where we were contained just so you can complain more.”
‘Concerns about protecting our unhoused population’
Albany city officials created Marvin’s Garden in July last year in response to ORS 195.530 (passed by the Legislature as Oregon House Bill 3115 in 2021), which requires local laws governing homeless Oregonians’ survival activities, like sleeping in public, to be “objectively reasonable.” Providing adequate shelter or sanctioned sleeping space expands a city’s ability to enforce laws regulating those survival activities.
Albany City Manager Peter Troedsson’s decision to close Marvin’s Garden less than a year later came 33 days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled cities could ban homeless people from — and leverage civil and criminal penalties for — sleeping in public.
The case, Grants Pass v. Johnson, emerged from an Oregon city roughly the same size as Albany.
Troedsson told the Albany Democrat-Herald last week that local code gives him the authority to close the site without getting approval from the City Council. He did not return calls from Street Roots at the time of publication.
“Police officers are often there,” Troedsson said of Marvin’s Garden at a July 22 City Council work session. “It is ending up soaking up a lot of our time. Police officers just don’t go there to go there. They get called there for a wide variety of reasons.”
During the regular July 24 City Council meeting, city councilors took the path opened for them by the Supreme Court ruling and passed the first reading of new laws restricting sleeping on public property.
The proposed changes prohibit sleeping on public property unless people have no reasonable alternative. They must also obey posted rules and be actively working with local service providers on securing alternative housing.
Violators face sanctions including compulsory community service and — eventually — jail time.
“I have serious concerns about protecting our unhoused population by people who decide they know what is more ‘reasonable’ than others,” City Councilor Jackie Montague said during the council meeting.
A second reading of revised public sleeping statutes was scheduled for the council’s 6 p.m. Aug. 7 meeting.
‘We’re building relationships with them, garnering trust’
Carol Davies, nonprofit Creating Housing Coalition outreach director, said alternative housing should include Marvin’s Garden — named after Marvin Leonard Studer, a man who died in 2011 at the age of 63 while experiencing homelessness in Albany.
“I realize that Marvin’s Garden is not pretty to look at,” Davies told councilors. “There are a lot of problems. A lot of those problems could be rectified if there was an organization that was in charge rather than just having the police show up continually.”
The eviction notice at Marvin’s Garden lists the names, addresses and telephone numbers of 11 agencies that offer shelter or other resources for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness.
“Our local service providers, accompanied by city staff, will ensure that those at the site over the next few weeks receive service referrals as they prepare to leave the site,” reads an official announcement of the closure on the city’s website. “Albany has sufficient shelter beds available for those currently at Marvin’s Garden.”
However, Davies told councilors that Marvin’s Garden is many people’s only refuge.
“A lot of the people — I would say most of the people — who are at Marvin’s Garden right now are there because they’re ineligible to go anywhere else,” she said. “They’ve got a lot of mental health problems. They’ve got substance use problems.”
City Councilor Ray Kopozynski said there are people who just can’t be helped.
“Some people will, in fact, yes, fall through the cracks,” he said at the July 24 council meeting. “That is a guarantee. It’s always been the case. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about some of these people because they’ve made bad choices. They don’t have the ability to go through the mental processes to get out of that hole.”
City Councilor Ramyola McGhee objected.
“Sometimes people don’t make a bad choice,” McGhee said. “Sometimes things just happen, and then end up consequently in some situations. We need to be very careful in our language in reference to our most vulnerable population.”
Rather than throwing people out, Davies said, organizations like hers should be allowed to work with them.
“We’re going out there, and we’re talking to people,” she said. “We’re building relationships with them, garnering trust, and we’re getting these people the help that they need.”
Capt. Jerry Drum of the Albany Police Department’s operations division told councilors during a July 22 work session that there have been 22 police calls for criminal activities at Marvin’s Garden in as many days.
“Our community service officers go there every day with the idea in mind of, ‘Let’s talk to these folks about cleaning up their things,’” Drum told councilors. “They’re met with resistance. They’re met with anger.”
He said he doesn’t know how the situation would be affected if people were scattered throughout the community.
“Some of the conflicts are because they’re in such close quarters,” he told councilors.
Street Roots was unable to verify Drum’s accounting of recent issues at the encampment at the time of publication.
‘That’s the new thing, beat the homeless’
Living at Marvin’s Garden is definitely dangerous, Cassidy told Street Roots, but the danger doesn’t come from the people living there.
“Every night, we have people — even emergency services — come by and lay on their horns and peel out,” Cassidy said. “It happens several times a night. Off duty, they come by and do the same thing. I’ve seen families — families — come by here and take shopping carts loaded up with shit out of their vehicles, dump them off and drive off laughing.”
Marvin’s Garden is in a mostly industrial area far from Albany’s main neighborhoods. Cassidy said that’s to keep him and his fellow residents out of sight and out of mind. However, he added, some of Albany’s housed residents go out of their way to bully the homeless.
“I’ve seen them drop off more than 350 pounds of dog food and spray it down with a hose and laugh,” Cassidy said. “People will say, ‘Hey, you guys hungry?’ and throw rotten food at us. I’ve had things thrown at me. I’ve been maced. I’ve been robbed. I’ve been beaten. That’s the new thing, beat the homeless. I’ve not done anything to people.”
‘They knew exactly what they were doing’
Alica said problems among residents of Marvin’s Garden are greatly exaggerated. Most people police themselves, she told Street Roots.
“This one woman was screaming, drinking and throwing up for half of the night,” she said. “She got kicked out because of it. It’s not our fault people like that do that sort of thing. We don’t do that, but we give them a chance.”
Marvin’s Garden was only open for a year, she added.
“We really didn’t have a chance to see if this spot was going to work,” Alica said. “We were perfectly fine here, and obviously there’s no neighbors. That’s the funny thing. No one’s actually come out and complained to us. If there are so many complaints, then why aren’t the people complaining to us?”
Alica said it’s dangerous for her as a 19-year-old woman to be living on the streets. At Marvin’s Garden, she said, at least she has a community to protect her.
“This place makes it so much easier to be safe,” she said. “Everyone cares. Everyone here tries to be nice. Some people moved out, and we’re cleaning up the junk, but it takes time. Before, I was not OK. Not happy. And I came here, and I was, wow, I can be here and have my stuff.”
City officials were just waiting for the legal opportunity to shut Marvin’s Garden, Cassidy said.
“The city did a hell of a thing here,” he said. “They knew exactly what was going to happen. They’re the real inmates running the asylum.”
With the deepening housing crisis, Cassidy said a lot more people are going to find themselves losing their homes and living in tents.
“We’re not going to treat them the way they’ve treated us,” he said. “There’s no way in hell. Just because people have been assholes to me doesn’t give me the right to be an asshole back.”
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This article appears in August 7, 2024.