It was something the mayor said that weighed on me.
“This is not about our strategy to end homelessness.”
Portland City Council had just voted 4-0 for a $4.5 million per year contract to Rapid Response Bio Cleaning to do camp sweeps, and Mayor Ted Wheeler was making his remarks this past Wednesday. I understood, I think, where he was going with this. There are other areas of government — the Joint Office of Homelessness, co-run by city and county, and the Portland Housing Bureau — that address issues around homelessness head-on.
The city program that administers this contract is called — it's a mouthful — the Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program, or HUCIRP, housed in the city's Office of Management and Finance.
If the program is about reducing impact, what kind of impact? Shouldn't it still be part of the larger strategy so that it doesn't increase suffering?
The impact on public health — people on the streets die on average decades before housed people — is an impact that should be addressed.
Last spring, I went out with Portland Street Medicine, volunteer crews of medical professionals, and I witnessed the medical attention and relationships they build with people living in very difficult circumstances. But their ability to provide life-sustaining follow-up was challenged when camps were swept and people were gone.
Realizing these difficutlies, I asked Drew Grabham, Portland Street Medicine board member and social worker, about the new contract, and he and executive director Dr. Dan Bissell issued this statement from Portland Street Medicine: "We are dedicated to helping people experiencing homelessness gain traction in their lives. Our observation is that sweeps do not help people move forward to build sustain pathways off the streets. Furthermore, sweeps do not provide a meaningful and long-term solution to understandable neighborhorhood concerns."
The program should foremost address the public health of unhoused people.
But specifically, as the mayor continued, “this program is about public space remediation.”
It’s easy to see poor people living in public spaces and the trash that accumulates, but this is a particular way of considering impact on public spaces, with a singular disregard for the punitive nature in taking away people’s belongings because they don’t have a home to hide them in. If it’s just about trash — we know how to get rid of trash.
So I ask the mayor: if ending homelessness is a defining problem of our city, shouldn’t we demand that everything that impacts the lives of unhoused people also support health and housing?
To do anything less is to fall short on vision.
I’ll sketch out how this program currently works, and make five suggestions. HUCIRP runs what it calls clean-ups to camps on city land and — under an inter-governmental agreement with the state of Oregon — Oregon Department of Transportation. The system is triggered when someone reports a camp through its One Point of Contact Program. Between 800 and 1,200 complaints come in each week. The city then dispatches first Clean Start, run by Central City Concern. These workers offer to bag garbage for campers and photograph and assess the camp. Should that assessment score be high enough, the city posts a sign in the vicinity, required to give notice between 48 hours and 10 days before a sweep takes place. Rapid Response Bio Clean is dispatched to dismantle the camp, bagging up belongings and hauling them away to a storage facility for 30 days.
And while, thankfully, city workers at HUCIRP do strive to reform the program so that it does less harm — requiring trainings, requiring biohazard workers to carry Narcan to reduce opiate overdoses and some winter weather supplies, increasing warehouse hours — they are hemmed in by the “the apathetic eyes of the system,” to quote a Street Roots poet, vendor Daniel Cox.
So I challenge the city to pursue how to transform how program could be constructive to its strategy to end homelessness. Those funds should go toward alleviating suffering for people living in camps. Here are five suggestions.
1) More cleanup, less upheaval. Several council members were impressed that “only” 15% of the Clean Start visits result in camp sweeps. But 15% represents nearly 3,000 camp sweeps last year. And since the ODOT contract was phased in last year, that number is expected to go up this year. Unhoused people accumulate garbage because they don’t have regular trash service. Let’s focus on an impact reduction plan that tilts more toward prevention and away from catastrophe. Could Clean Start return regularly, or other programs be engaged, such as the peer-run Trash for Peace and Ground Score. Or Metro’s Bag Program?
2) Partner with unhoused people in their own futures. Navigation teams of outreach workers engage people whose camps are scheduled to be swept, building relationships, connecting people to services. This is fantastic, but here’s the rub: Navigation teams have been sent to nine camps out of approximately 3,000 camps that have been swept.
A more constructive system would send these navigation teams or other outreach workers to build possibilities with unhoused people every single time city is about to destroy their living space. Every single time. This should be intrinsic to the program that’s about reducing impact, and not left to an outside budget through the Joint Office of Homeless Services.
3) Open up places for people to go. People need legal places to sleep. And many people actually would be well-served having nearby land to at least camp. A federal appeals court has upheld that it is inhumane to break down active camps without places for people to go.
4) Provide more storage to unhoused people. Currently Clean Start operates daytime storage facilities by the Steel Bridge and in Hazelnut Grove. That's a start. But the Rapid Response warehouse shows that a sophistocated system can be set up for storing seized property for 30 days. What if such efforts could be put into storing people's belongings when they have no home with a lock and a key? A system that exceeds day storage so they could store precious items, or belongings they just can't lug around the city.
5) Create a constructive counterpart to One Point of Contact. A policy entirely driven by complaining is destructive to our city when, in fact, many people in this city want to help. If a private entity wants to open space for camping, fast track this.
In fact, staff at HUCIRP has been thinking along these lines, putting together a program for hygiene trailers. If your organization might be able to host one, I urge you to apply. I would like this program to be widely successful, but people need to know that this is possible.
The city spends millions on a complaint-based system. It would serve us better to put that kind of effort into a system that creates ease for city residents to pitch in.
Director's Desk is written by Kaia Sand, the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.