Clipboards in hand, the teams dispatched to survey people on the streets about their experiences with first responders. They were gathering feedback for how to design the Portland Street Response pilot.
This surveying effort tackles a hard truth. If 911 dispatchers are inundated with so-called unwanted-person calls – every 15 minutes, according to a Willamette Week investigation – who are the “unwanted” persons?
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Although I flinch as I write “unwanted person,” it gets at the brutal truth of how a whole segment of our population is treated. Because many of the people coded this way are homeless, Street Roots convened the survey, conducted on July 16 and 18, in collaboration with Right 2 Survive, Yellow Brick Road, Sisters of the Road, Street Books, Portland State Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative (HRAC), the Mapping Action Collective and City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty’s office.
After a training each day, participants formed survey teams led by at least one Street Roots vendor who had experienced homelessness. Portland State University students joined many teams. They filled bags with incentives to hand out to people in appreciation for their time – sewing kits, granola bars, super glue, bungee cords, flashlights, batteries.
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As they left Street Roots, teams selected locations on a map where they would survey, most based on areas the city scheduled for sweeps in the coming week. But in other cases, vendors drew on their expertise to guide teams to camps, shelters, sidewalks and parks where they knew people.
“I went to St. Francis and CityTeam, and people were open because I know people there,” Street Roots vendor David Northcut said. “People were glad that something like that’s going to happen.”
Vendor Chris Wagoner described approaching people who were reticent at first but willing “when I told them it was about making their experience better, safer and comfortable for them so they can function.”
Vendor George McCarthy told me how perspective shifts depending on the conditions of a person’s homelessness.
“You can live in the woods, and when you get back indoors, you will be amazed how your opinions can change,” he said. “You can get different opinions from people depending on where they are, what station they are at, how sick they are.”
McCarthy took his team partner, a PSU student named Holly, to the Do Good Multnomah shelter, and she marveled at the access he provided to a smoking room full of veterans – conversations she never would have had without McCarthy and his relationships.
When Northcut and Wagoner returned their surveys, they described how people told them stories. Wagoner recounted how “one guy was talking about how he lost his ashes for his mother. They were packing the camp up, and he wasn’t there at the time. They threw away the ashes.”
Greg Townley, the co-director of HRAC, came upon one person on Peninsula Trail who had a head wound.
“While we are trying to work on an approach to help people in crisis, we came upon someone who was clearly in crisis,” he said. “I felt very impotent. When you are doing research, that’s a common experience. If it’s going to help, it’s going to be way down the road. There’s not much you can do in the moment to help. That was perhaps the most visceral experience of that.”
The hope is, though, that this research can, in fact, inform this process quickly. Townley and his co-director, Marisa Zapata, will convene researchers to analyze the results in the next couple of weeks to report back to the city.
Unhoused people should count in a democracy – and not just as objects of concern, but as participants, people whose rights are not superseded by housed people.
It seems ludicrous to have to write that, but I’m struck by what a high toll it takes for an elected official to treat unhoused people as constituents. This was clear on July 19 when Commissioner Hardesty published the screenshots of racist comments targeting her because she spoke out against the displacement of unhoused people by Oregon Department of Transportation boulders. One post declared that she should “go back to where she came from” – and then described an abortion clinic – parroting Trumpian language.
All of this hatred was in response to Hardesty standing up for some of her constituents – unhoused people.
State Rep. Alissa Keny-Guyer (D-Portland) listened to her unhoused constituents that same week. She called our office and asked if she could join a surveying team, going out with Street Roots vendor Mode to survey people on Powell Boulevard, talking to people in the district she represents.
For many people on the streets, participation in democratic processes is challenging because survival is a full-time job. People wait hours in line for a shower, suffer sickness, squirrel away money to afford bus fare, on and on.
Life is much harder when other people determine your fate again and again, and when, truly, you are treated with disdain. It’s hard to enter the civic spaces.
In its effort to widen the circle of civic engagement, the Office of Community and Civic Life supported our efforts, making it possible for Street Roots to pay vendors stipends for their labor doing the surveys.
The energy among Street Roots vendors who surveyed was beautiful. While too often powerlessness courses through the particularities of homelessness, collectively, we were pursuing knowledge. There is power in that.
And, because for some people this policy is a matter of life or death, they deserve for their voices to be heard.
“I’m ready for it,” Northcut said of the Portland Street Response after his afternoon of surveying. “That way people won’t get hurt so much.
“You might save a life. You might save two or three.”
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.