KAIA SAND | 20 years in, we keep moving forward while staying true to our roots
Street Roots, said co-founder Bryan Pollard, “was born in advocacy. It never was not a part of the organization.”
After all, Pollard pointed out, the Street Roots staff came together in Burnside Cadillac editor Sharon Pearson’s apartment to work on the Right 2 Sleep campaign.
Although my own stint writing for the Burnside Cadillac was brief – spring and summer of 1998 before Street Roots emerged that winter — I was fortunate to work on the Right 2 Sleep campaign. This was my introduction to creative tactics, handing out faux tickets to people camping along the Rose Festival Parade route for a good seat. We aimed to raise awareness that anti-camping ordinances were selectively enforced against unhoused people. (After Pollard reminded me about that campaign, I flipped through a file I’d labeled “Burnside Cadillac” in pink marker, locating a hand-drawn campaign sticker.)
“The issue at the time was the sit-lie ordinance,” Pollard said, referring to bans on people sitting or lying on public sidewalks. The sit-lie ordinance, as well as camping bans, have been enduring issues for Street Roots over the past two decades. Much about the legal system makes poverty more difficult, and this awareness animated the earliest days of Street Roots and continues today as we pursue our current advocacy project, Portland Street Response.
Out of the doorways and into Dignity Village
“Have you heard the good news, homeless people?” wrote Jack Tafari in the November 2000 edition of Street Roots. “We are coming out of the doorways, coming out from under the bridges. We are setting ourselves up a tent city. We are coming in from the cold.”
Tafari, the Street Roots submissions editor, was himself sleeping in the doorway of Street Roots, which was then on Southwest Morrison Street.
A number of Street Roots vendors and other activists began to set up camps, and when the city swept their camp, they would pack up and launch a “shopping cart parade” – a creative, eye-catching tactic.
On Dec. 16, 2000, they launched Camp Dignity, pitching six tents on public land.
“Since then, it has broken ground on four different sites, grown in size to about 35 tents, and formed a system of governance that sees to the safety of its participants,” Pollard wrote in the February 2001 issue of the paper. “With a food preparation area, portable toilets, a storage tent, and heated ‘watch’ tent, it has become a hospitable place where weary people can rest.”
Dignity Village organizers faced off with city officials and neighbors. They often endured scathing media attention and struggled to find land. But by 2001, Dignity Village found a permanent location at Sutherland Yard near the airport and prison.
Street Roots provided organizational backing in those early years – a place to meet, a newspaper to tell their stories, a mailing address for people who moved from camp to camp in shopping cart parades.
Dignity Village organizer Ibrahim Mubarak told me, “It is highly impossible to talk about houselessness in this town and not talk about Street Roots.” Mubarak has gone on to organize countless other camps, villages and rest areas such as Right 2 Dream Too. As it has with many others, Dignity Village proved a formative experience for Mubarak, and a place of acceptance, he said, after 9/11 when he struggled with hateful backlash against his Muslim faith.
In a Feb. 23, 2001, letter to the Portland Tribune , Jack Tafari responded to criticism that Dignity Village organizers couldn’t get jobs without a stable address: “I would like to point out that many of us already have jobs and that our address is c/o Street Roots, 1231 S.W. Morrison St., Portland, OR 97205. Our situation improves daily, and we are all working for dignity.”
While the Street Roots address has changed, moving to 211 NW Davis St., its steadfastness for many unhoused people has endured. Mounds of mail arrive daily for scores of unhoused people. Street Roots itself continues to be an organization where our advocacy positions are strengthened by both the vendor program and the newspaper. People on the streets coalesce around the importance of telling the stories and delivering the news.
Vendors, reporters, editors, staff, volunteers — we all share the same coffee pot. That’s where many stories get swapped. It’s where I heard the story of the woman who was arrested for trespass and then released without her blankets at midnight. Or the man who told me he’s not going to show up for a court hearing because it’s simply all too much of a mess. Or the man who crumples a TriMet fare citation in frustration: He didn’t have money for a ticket, and he certainly doesn’t have money for fees.
There is no possibility of spending time around Street Roots vendors and not recognizing that the legal system makes poverty harder.
It is from that informed position that our newspaper has always covered issues of over-policing and the legal barriers experiences by the poor – policing, private security, ordinances, exclusions, fees and fines.
Enter Portland Street Response
Portland Street Response did not emerge out of a vacuum. It was borne out of 20 years of challenging the criminalization of homelessness. A through-line moves from that first Right 2 Sleep campaign to our current fight for the Portland Street Response.
But a tipping point for public readiness was The Oregonian’s 2018 report that 52% of the people arrested in 2017 were unhoused people. Helen Hill followed up by interviewing vendors about their experiences with the police. I devoted columns to exploring solutions.
Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green investigated how court fines and fees drive people further into poverty . Serving as respondent to Mayor Ted Wheeler’s address on homelessness at the Oregon Health Forum in November, I suggested we send out first responders other than the police for street crises, including City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty’s campaign suggestion that we consider Portland Fire and Rescue for the work. Editorial staff discussed policing in preparation for an interview with Police Chief Danielle Outlaw. In early December, we published an editorial calling for a new system.
Then I traveled to Eugene to do a ride-along with the street outreach program CAHOOTS , following the trail of Mayor Ted Wheeler, Outlaw and Hardesty’s staff, who had visited in January. Bob Cozzie, director of Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communication, which oversees 911, did the same. In February, Willamette Week reported that the 911 system receives calls reporting an “unwanted person” every 15 minutes.
Momentum was building. There was a groundswell of public awareness and an opportunity to offer a plan for systemic change.
In our editorial department, Green dug in, creating a blueprint for a new response system , naming it Portland Street Response. We released a special issue with that plan on March 15. Commissioners Hardesty and Chloe Eudaly endorsed the plan soon after.
We needed to shift gears into a campaign. Street Roots vendors attended the April 1 budget forum, holding colorful signs. Mark Rodriguez stepped to the microphone and implored Council to adopt the Portland Street Response. Au Nguyen built a website so we could gather endorsements and organize supporters to write letters. I spoke to countless neighborhood groups and organizations around the city.
The mayor announced May 1 that $500,000 would be budgeted for a launch of a Portland Street Response pilot . We entered quickly into yet another phase, in which we pushed for the voices of unhoused people to inform the pilot development. I began to co-lead a community outreach workgroup with Matt McNally, community engagement coordinator for Commissioner Hardesty, while working with Vendor Program Manager DeVon Pouncey to keep vendors updated. We organized listening sessions at Sisters Of The Road, JOIN and Yellow Brick Road, and then we launched a survey in which Street Roots vendors led survey teams in gathering input from 184 unhoused people on what they wanted in the Portland Street Response. We did this by partnering with Sisters Of The Road, Right 2 Survive, Street Books, the Mapping Action Collective, Yellow Brick Road and Portland State Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative. On Sept. 16, we released the findings as a report “Believe Our Stories & Listen,” holding a press conference at Central Library, where Street Roots vendors spoke alongside elected officials.
City Council is due to discuss a pilot plan in November. Portland Street Response needs to be designed large enough to make an impact and nimble enough to adapt to the needs of actual people on the streets.
A lot happened quickly from the time we published the Portland Street Response plan, but then, a lot has been happening for the past 20 years. While we are bigger— more vendors, more staff, more frequent newspapers – we are, intrinsically, the same organization that has been grappling with the criminalization of poverty all along.
A lasting impact
Born in precarity as a protest camp, Dignity Village was organized by people who were tactically nimble. The earliest days of Dignity Village were marked with creativity and resolve, and the fact that the village still exists is a testament to the importance of both characteristics. With survival itself on the line, organizers refused to give up. They kept finding a way.
Street Roots has a history of taking on fights true to our values, pursuing them with tenacity.
Our 20th year is marked by a flagship advocacy campaign, Portland Street Response. Across our newspaper, our vendor program, everyone is engaged, and we are a determined bunch.
We need to be. We have a responsibility to build on the courage and the struggles of those who came before. They didn’t wait for perfect conditions: A group of people sleeping in doorways piled belongings into shopping carts, and called it a parade.
“We travel in our famous shopping cart parades from place to place until victory comes,” wrote Jack Tafari. With that as the exemplar, a whole world is possible.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org . Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand .
Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
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