COMMENTARY | The Portland woman died in July, a victim of the 'cleanup' policy the city is doubling down on
In the midst of the Christmas, Hanukkah crush, even for Wiccans and Pagans, it’s easy to overlook a relatively recent national ritual that coincides with the solstice: Since 1990, the National Coalition for the Homeless designated Dec. 21, the longest night of the year, National Homeless Persons Memorial Day.
Personally, around this time, I can’t help but think about my housemate and friend Debby Hill, a longtime vendor for Street Roots, who died on New Year’s Eve 2014. A founding member of Dignity Village, Portland’s first city-sanctioned tent city, Debby died inside, thankfully, in a nursing home.
I’m sometimes amazed that she survived so long on the streets, given the host of health issues she had struggled with since birth, which I had ample occasion to bear witness to during visits to the emergency room, ICU and various and sundry wards at Legacy Emanuel Hospital. Debby’s experience of struggling through houselessness with multiple disabilities — both physical and psychological — is far more common than most of us would care to imagine over our figgy pudding.
So National Homeless Persons Memorial Day is here to remind us that in the era of late-stage capitalism, medically fragile, chronically ill people, and people with multiple disabilities, are routinely dying in our midst on the streets of some of the most “livable” cities in the United States.
VIGIL: Portland event for people who died homeless brings together housed and unhoused
For Scott Rupp, along with so many others who seem to have fallen out of windows of apartments all over the city and into street encampments, the city is anything but livable.
In July, Scott lost his wife of 37 years, Debby Ann Beaver, who would have been 58 on Jan. 9. Debby was among the 82 people whose lives and deaths were being recognized at Portland’s Homeless Persons Memorial Day vigil. And Debby Ann Beaver’s death ought to be seen as a measure of just how unlivable this city has become for minimum-wage workers and elderly people and people with disabilities living on fixed incomes, many of them depending on Social Security benefits to survive.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, fair-market rent for a studio apartment in Multnomah County was $1,131 in 2019, which would alone eat up 75% of the monthly income of the full-time minimum-wage worker and is well out of reach for someone on Social Security payments.
A young able-bodied worker might reasonably make do by cobbling together multiple jobs, but Debby Ann Beaver was neither young nor able-bodied. And so, like so many others, she died houseless, the victim of a “sweeps” system that Mayor Ted Wheeler and others on the City Council seem hell-bent on continuing — and funneling millions more dollars into.
DIRECTOR’S DESK: City efforts should lead to health and housing, not sweeps and more suffering
Eighty-two is unlikely to be the definitive death count of Portland’s homeless, given that the official report for 2019 won’t be issued until October. In 2011, the year that Street Roots and Multnomah County partnered on the county’s first homeless death count, the tally was 47 people who died under the city’s bridges and on its streets and sidewalks.
In 2018, the homeless death count soared to almost twice that number: 92.
Portland is one of the few cities nationwide that track the deaths of homeless people. The city took its lead from Seattle, where homeless and formerly homeless activists with the Women’s Housing Equality and Enhancement League and Mary’s Place/Women in Black worked with the King County Medical Examiner’s Office to launch King County’s homeless death count. In 2018, the King County Medical Examiner’s office logged 194 deaths; in Los Angeles County, 1,047 people died on the streets in 2018.
I arrived late to the memorial vigil, having just come from another memorial vigil for a 17-year-old young trans woman. She was a high school student named Nikki Kuhnhausen, who was murdered, allegedly by a transphobic 25-year-old man. When I arrived at the service, John Mayer was midway into the story of Debby’s death, which he reprised for me later. Until September, Mayer was the executive director of the Sunnyside Community House, operating out of the Sunnyside United Methodist Church building in Southeast Portland.
As Mayer tells it, earlier in 2019, Debby had hip surgery and “was released to the street.” In July, Debby, together with her husband Scott, and a number of other houseless people, were camped along a fence line in Southeast Portland, in close proximity to the Sunnyside Community House, where she found community, a couch to crash on, and coffee and warm meals.
“She was just a feisty, wonderful, strong woman,” Mayer said, “but she couldn’t walk very well for the last few months.”
In mid-July, the campsite was swept by the city-contracted Rapid Response Bio-Clean team, and, Mayer recounted, Debby “lost all of her meds that day. She was on a series of eight or nine medications,” including antidepressants and insulin for her diabetes. “She lived her last days without them,” said Mayer, detailing the arduous lengths that houseless people have to go to in an effort to reclaim items taken during sweeps — from the last of their family photos, heirlooms and mementos, to I.D. and life-sustaining medications like insulin. People are not always able to retrieve the items, and in the cases when they are able to retrieve them, the items are sometimes contaminated and unusable.
The city mandates 48 hours’ notice before sweeps teams are allowed to move on the scene. A 48-hour window for moving, if you haven’t been on site for long, might not be that challenging if you’re in your 30s and don’t have any number of disabilities and health issues that are so common on the street. Of course, according to a recent study in Lancet, which encompassed multiple countries, including the U.S., if you’ve been on the street for any length of time, the odds are pretty good, about 53%, that you will have suffered a traumatic brain injury, whether before or in the course of being homeless. And if you’re pushing 60 like Debby, a diabetic struggling with depression, in the midst of recovering from a hip operation, toting around the last of your worldly possessions, 48 hours might be a bit of a challenge.
But 48 hours is the mandatory window for notice before the team arrives to scour the scene. The 48-hour notice, Mayer tells me, doesn’t apply if the site has been swept within the past 10 days. So on July 24, Rapid Response returned to the site unannounced. And with no one about, they began taking down and collecting tents, whereupon they discovered the body of Debby Ann Beaver.
Mayer said the Rapid Response team “noted her as deceased and did not attempt to revive her.”
I spoke by phone with Lance Campbell, the owner of Rapid Response Bio-Clean, who informed me that on discovering Debby’s body, the workers, who were not trained in CPR, immediately called 911. He indicated that the police arrived on the scene within a few minutes and sealed off access to not only the tent but to the broader area, cordoning it off with police tape.
Mayer said no ambulance ever appeared on site, and at some point, Debby’s body was placed in an unmarked white van, “and everybody just drove away. All the police disappeared at once, and nobody said anything to anybody.”
After the van with Debby’s body had already left the scene, as Rapid Response finished their sweep, Scott arrived back at the camp, and it was left to Mayer to break the news to Scott that his wife of 37 years had died and her body had already been taken away, along with the last of their few possessions.
What Scott and John encountered next was a nightmare scenario that is all too common to the loved ones of people who die “indigent” in Oregon. Debby’s body was taken to the state morgue in Clackamas County. John contacted the Clackamas Medical Examiner’s Office that evening to ask if Scott could come and pay final respects to Debby. John found the Medical Examiner’s Office “kind” but “policy bound.” The office indicated that because there was an active investigation into Debby’s cause of death, Scott could not view her body. And it was during that same phone call that John was informed that even after the investigation concluded, in order to get access to Debby’s remains, they would have to pay for the cost of not only her cremation but the final ride her body took in the back of the white van.
John and Scott had stumbled into terrain governed by Oregon Indigent Disposition Program, or IDP, a program that I’ve grown all too familiar with over the past five years, as houseless and formerly houseless friends labeled “indigent” go prematurely shuffling off this mortal coil. The IDP mandates that in the absence of someone who is not only willing to claim an individual’s remains but able to cover the costs of both cremation and transportation of the body, Oregon funeral homes are not compelled to return the ashes of the “indigent” to their family, friends or loved ones. According to the Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board IDP guidelines for funeral homes, funeral homes “are not obligated to give the remains of any person who shows up and asks for them, just as they could not show up and demand that you give them any other item that is your personal property.”
The costs of transportation and cremation can also be paid by surrendering indigent bodies to area “education/research facilities” for their use for a time, begging, of course, all manner of ethical questions about “consent,” along with a host of questions about the uses to which bodies deemed “indigent” might be put. In any case, John, Scott and the Sunnyside Community House program mobilized their network of friends and supporters to raise the $800 or so needed to ransom Debby’s body from the state, and after 14 weeks, Scott was finally able to collect Debby’s ashes.
To Mayor Wheeler and the Portland Business Alliance, “cleanups” — as they like to term them — are necessary for maintaining public health and ensuring that the Rose City remains a gleaming magnet for global capital.
For sociologist Sandra Comstock, who took point in coordinating the vigil on Dec. 21, there are clear and far more humane alternatives to sweeping the campsites of our houseless neighbors. In answer to people who complain about “bio-waste and trash” generated by houseless encampments, Comstock proposes a simple solution: “Let’s have trash pickup like housed people get. Let’s have places for people to use the bathroom, and let’s have places where people can sleep so that they’re not in the ‘right of way.’”
In September, the Sunnyside Community House was given notice that they would have to find new digs. The building has been rented out to a congregation. Mayer, together with Pat Schwiebert, who had been running the hospitality program Hard Times Supper out of the church for 38 years, moved their ministry to the streets of Southeast Portland.
38-YEAR RUN: The last supper at Sunnyside Community House
Mayer is now executive director of Beaconpdx, a project of the Metanoia Peace Community. Together, Schwiebert and Mayer provide food, community and emotional support for low-income and marginalized people, along with houseless people living in tents along the streets and sidewalks of this perpetually gentrifying neighborhood in Southeast Portland, where many of them used to rent apartments. For now, the days of providing showers to an estimated 100 people a week are gone, along with access to the couch where Debby used to rest during the day.
The new congregation recently informed Schwiebert and Mayer that they want them to stay out of the four-block radius of the church. Schwiebert bears no ill will toward the new congregation and takes pains to explain: “We’re only there because that’s where our people are. We’re not trying to make it hard on the church; we’re just trying to take care of our people. They’re not coming into the neighborhood; they live in the neighborhood. It’s their neighborhood.”
“Nothing is solved by the sweeps,” Schwiebert told me. “Geographically, they’re moving people from one block to the next. The only thing that changes is that people need new stuff, new tents, new sleeping bags. People are still on the street; they’re still in the same neighborhood. They’re not going anywhere. Nothing is being solved.”
She talked about conversations she’s had with police who are paid to move folks like Debby and Scott along.
“I ask the police all the time: ‘Where do you expect them to go?’” “I don’t know,” they tell her, “but they can’t be here.”
In Portland and around the country, houseless people, allies and advocates are bracing in the wake of ominous rumblings from the Trump administration. After a September visit to California, Trump went on one of his customary rants, as quoted in Newsweek: “The people of San Francisco are fed up and the people of Los Angeles are fed up, and we’re looking at it, and we will be doing something about it at the appropriate time. ... We can’t let Los Angeles, San Francisco and numerous other cities destroy themselves by allowing what’s happening.’”
DIRECTOR’S DESK: We stand firm against dangerous White House rhetoric on homelessness
Whatever “final solution” Trump might have up his sleeve to address the cosmetic blight created by our neighbors as they suffer and die on streets across the country, the solution to the problem posed by homelessness has never been anything but obvious. The answer to homelessness is to provide universal housing. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that providing housing is far more cost-effective than dealing with the downstream effects of homelessness, including providing health care for the countless health issues it causes and exacerbates.
Why then, hasn’t the problem been solved? The answer, it seems, is the public has yet to take up universal housing — alongside universal health care — as a policy recommendation and rallying cry that would benefit everyone but the wealthy, corporations, banks and mortgage investment companies. Universal housing would provide a basic threshold that would immeasurably enhance the security, health and wellbeing of not simply people like Scott and Debby, but the dwindling middle class as well. It would provide a safety net and a threshold that would allow workers to negotiate in the absence of the ever-present threat of becoming homeless, of falling through the floorboards of our domestic economies and landing on the streets and sidewalks.
As it is now, the suffering of our homeless neighbors, the endless shuffling of their bodies, moving them along to nowhere, is little more than a public ritual of scapegoating. It’s a rite designed to convince us, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that they are somehow guilty of causing their own condition and that we will not share their fate, as we knuckle under to the boss and scramble for scraps in the gig economy. It is a rite that endangers us all.
As for Scott, I spoke with him briefly after the vigil on Dec. 21. I asked him how he was doing. “OK,” he told me. “A bit lost. … I’ve been with her for 37 years, and I don’t know now.”
He told the story of how Rapid Response swept the camp on July 16 “and took everything we owned. They put all of our stuff in a roll-away cart, with all our clothes and all our medication, and I wasn’t able to get anything back until July 28, and she’d already passed away.
“She was a person. She was a human being. She was my wife. She was somebody. … Debby Beaver. Debby Ann Beaver.”
Aside from a month that he spent at a shelter and service center in Northwest Portland, Scott has spent every night since October sleeping on the spot where Debby passed away, alongside the memorial he made for her the day after she died: a cross he fashioned out of scrap wood and shoelaces.
Later, John messaged me a photo of Scott, taken the day after Debby died, his arms full of sunflowers he will place on the memorial. John asked him why he sleeps there. Scott’s answer: “It’s where Debby is.”
Desiree Hellegers is a co-founder and affiliated faculty of the Collective for Social and Environmental Justice at Washington State University, Vancouver. She has just completed a play based on her 2011 book “No Room of Her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death and Resistance." This piece appears in Street Roots with approval from CounterPunch, where it was first published.
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