OPINION | Too often, the city of Portland does battle with communities like Hazelnut Grove rather than building from the leadership on the streets
Scott placed the small ship by his window, light streaming through its sails.
“We like to think that’s the ship that we get to sail through all this stuff in,” Scott said, explaining he found it discarded on the sidewalk — a “ground score.”
A ground score, explained his wife, Barbie Weber, is “anything you find on the ground that aids to your survival.” She gestured to the row of painted canvases — a pastel sunset, a muted stretch of houses not unlike the ones they lived in, solid-printed leaves and twigs — all ground scores.
Scott and Barbie, both Street Roots vendors, had invited me to Hazelnut Grove, where they have lived since February, to explain why they did not want to uproot in a month — which the city of Portland has mandated. And their ground-score mentality (Barbie co-founded a local waste-pickers collective called Ground Score) illustrates a great deal of why: They wish to draw from their own inner resources and creativity to, in turn, make a positive impact on the land where they live.
STREET ROOTS NEWS: Ground Score puts homeless Portlanders to work for a fair wage
“People decorate, they make their places homey,” Barbie said of her neighbors at Hazelnut Grove, which is a self-governed village located in North Portland. Just down the planked walkway that runs between all the tiny houses is a neighbor’s elaborate system of raised gardens. Two signs are propped as garden art: One reads “Imagine,” and the other is a Trail Blazers “Rip City” sign.
The gleaming propane barbecue where Barbie and Scott do all their cooking was a ground score, too. They found it near Providence Milwaukie Hospital, a “free” sign taped to it. It needed minimal repairs, and they manage to cook their meals, as well as heat their tea water, making frequent pots of French press coffee. Even the way Barbie described cooking on it demonstrates a creative salvage: A frozen pizza had thawed, so she added more ingredients and folded the now soft dough into a calzone.
Barbie explained that they support St. Johns Village, operated by the nonprofit Do Good Multnomah, which the city has offered as a new place for Hazelnut Grove households to move, but that the city shouldn’t be substituting one option for the other.
“We want more housing, not less,” Barbie explained.
The St. Johns Village is a different model than Hazelnut Grove. It’s focused, as indoor shelters are, on transitional shelter — a stable location where people can stay until moving into housing. An enormous challenge, of course, is having the housing into which people can move and afford, so thousands of people inhabit those liminal spaces — tents along sidewalks, shelter beds, friend’s couches.
Scott, Barbie and others want spaces that aren’t liminal, but spaces they love.
“This is the American Dream with the resources we have,” she explained.
“The walls are thick,” said Barbie, of the tiny houses at Hazelnut Grove. “They’re built more like ship-building.” Scott shows a corner of their walls where he’d love to build a hutch for dishes and a shower. He walks me around the outside of their house, just to the side of a cyclone fence that abuts a bike path and North Greeley Avenue.
“We’re helping our environment by using our natural resources like solar power, gravity-fed water,” he said, showing me their panels, as well as the elaborate tarping system he created to protect the house from moisture. He also pointed to how they’ve cut brush along the bike path.
Barbie pointed out a triangle-shaped raised bed filled with cans and water bottles that they call their “can garden.” When the cans reach the top, the accumulated deposits reach $20.
“When a person contributes to their survival, it picks up their self-esteem,” Barbie explained.
And that gets to the heart of the matter. This is about more than four walls and a locked door, but also the people who live there. Too often, our city razes creative solutions that unhoused people build, replacing them with systems of control.
Barbie and Scott moved into this stretch of tiny houses at the base of a steep slope that plunges down from the Overlook neighborhood in February, just before the pandemic hit. Barbie talked about how she had absorbed so much stress from living outside — especially when she’d see the city-posted signs announcing a pending sweep — that she “just collapsed.”
“It was the torsion of it, the lack of stress. Just the consistency of being in one place.
“When I wasn’t feeling good, I had people cooking meals for me. I had people checking on me.” At Hazelnut Grove, she said, “I’m engaging back in life. This place saved my sanity.”
Hazelnut Grove belongs to a proud legacy of innovative camps and villages dreamed up by the people who live there.
Right 2 Dream Too also belongs to this history. Now a small village near the Moda Center, it began as a safe-sleep option on Northwest Fourth Avenue and Burnside Street for more than 100 people a night. Three years after the city removed Right 2 Dream Too, the parking lot remains empty.
STREET ROOTS NEWS: Read Street Roots coverage of Right 2 Dream Too
Dignity Village launched 20 years and 42 days ago under the Broadway Bridge. It followed a similar trajectory — outrage, displacement — but now endures at the Sunderland Yard.
STREET ROOTS NEWS: Read Street Roots coverage of Dignity Village
There is a clear pattern based on the history of Dignity Village and Right 2 Dream Too: when housed neighbors are angry, environmental concerns prove a tool to evicting unhoused people from land. The city of Portland has been working on shutting down Hazelnut Grove for a couple of years, navigating outrage from some housed neighbors in the Overlook neighborhood and citing concerns about fires and landslides. Barbie argues that, if need be, they could move to new land, but that they should still be able to create a new Hazelnut Village.
These are projects of survival, but they are also projects of community and artistic expression. Quashing the hope, the city too often does battle rather than build from the leadership that’s on the streets,
Before I leave, Barbie wants to show me the Hazelnut Grove library in a beautiful tiny house. She slides open its tall red doors. I scan up the floor-to-ceiling rows of books — all stocked by Street Books — until my eyes land on the hammered copper ceiling. People are builders and dreamers, and that should not be lost in the narrow policy. Many of those builders and dreamers from Dignity Village, Right 2 Dream Too, and yes, Hazelnut Grove, are still here, and we are all best served if we remember that. We don’t have to continually destroy and replace projects. The vision is so often already there.
ADVOCATE: Organizers at Hazelnut Grove plan to present this Save Hazelnut Grove petition to City Hall on Feb. 1
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
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