It’s time for the city and county to support scaling up the tent city model in our region. Being able to find a permanent location for Right 2 Dream Too on the east side was a great first step, but it’s not enough.
Neighborhoods and businesses might not like the idea of allowing more tent cities, but it’s a lot more effective than not doing anything.
For years, the Portland police have been letting people sleep and camp in what the police and advocates call low-impact areas — in certain parks, under bridges, in industrial neighborhoods, etc. Many camps’ numbers ebb and flow depending on a range of circumstances — enforcement in a particular neighborhood or area, complaints, safety, weather, etc. In the winter, camps tend to grow. In the summer, historically, with the arrival of tourists, the police ramp up enforcement and people tend to thin out throughout the city.
Those realities are changing.
I’ve made the argument on more than one occasion that because of development in inner Southeast Portland, in the Pearl and around the city, there are fewer places for people to sleep in smaller numbers. Because of that, homeless camps around the region have grown. No longer is it either safe or manageable to allow for a simple policy of low-impact camping. I believe this is one of the key factors in why the volume of people sleeping in higher visibility areas has increased so dramatically.
A visitor looks at the Right 2 Dream Too design in downtown Portland. The tent city was established in 2011.File photo by Israel Bayer
Debunking the myth that tent cities aren’t a solution is a challenge. There are a lot of reasons people in both the public and private sectors say tent cities won’t work. Some of them are related to their own organizational agendas or business interests, while others simply won’t move from their stubborn viewpoints.
Like it or not, tent cities save lives. They provide safety, order and calm in a world filled with chaos. They provide restroom facilities, a place to store belongings, a place to get a good night’s sleep, and they are clean. They also provide a sense of community that helps people build self-confidence and find the support to access services.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Right 2 Dream Too as a model
Some have argued that tent cities are not ideal due to environmental conditions. I’m not sure what world these people are living in. When you’re sleeping outdoors, you are already being exposed to a higher volume of car emissions, disease, bad weather, crime and an overall lack of safety. Would you rather sleep with a group of people in tents or on the curb of a busy street? Caring for people experiencing homelessness through an environmental lens is something that has been forgotten about, or never even considered, so saying a tent city isn’t safe or not suited to the elements is a more than ridiculous notion.
In March, Seattle’s city council unanimously adopted a policy to support three additional legal encampments or tent cities — each serving up to 100 people. They also provided resources to local social-service providers to then work with the tent cities to help house individuals and families on the streets. Currently, there are two tent cities in Seattle on church property. In total, the city will now have five operating tent cities.
FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Photos: A 21st-century tent city in Seattle
The city of Seattle came to the hard conclusion that its current system simply wasn’t getting the job done. Regardless of how many shelter beds or housing units they provided, people en masse continued to be homeless.
“People have realized that it’s not whether people are going to be camping; it’s under what conditions people are going to be camping,” says Timothy Harris with Real Change street newspaper in Seattle. “The business community is becoming more pragmatic in Seattle and open to solutions they have not been in the past.”
“Encampments are not a permanent solution to homelessness, but they give people sleeping outside a community with rules and standards of conduct and safety, as well as access to services,” says Lisa Herbold, a legislative aide with Seattle City Councilman Nick Licata’s office. “We can’t wait until we have permanent housing for everyone to address the very real public safety needs of people who live outside today. If there was a natural emergency that put 4,000 on the street, we wouldn’t wait to help them until we could fix their homes.”
FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Vendor Leo Rhodes: Tent city always a work in progress
Of course, tent cities are not the solution to ending homelessness. But neither are shelter beds or living in a hotel. The region finds itself 40,000 units short of affordable housing, and that’s not counting a growing number of middle-class Portlanders who are being displaced from core neighborhoods.
Regardless of your own political ideology around the issue of tent cities, human beings are suffering. It’s not practical, pretty or humane. The sooner our elected leaders come to this conclusion, the better. No amount of local or federal plans to end homelessness or public relations campaigns are going to change this. The writing is on the wall. We need more tent cities in Portland. It’s as simple as that.
Israel Bayer is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach him at israel@streetroots.org or follow him on Twitter @israelbayer.