OPINION | Leo Rhodes reminds us that people’s needs vary: ‘You might not need it, but somebody else will’
“I think it’s great,” Leo Rhodes told me of the range of camp villages the city and county governments are floating for Portland.
“What I like about what they are doing now is different types,” the longtime organizer of tent cities and safe sleep sites in Seattle and Portland explained to me as we stood talking in the hot sun of Old Town last week, shifting our conversation as the mottled shade shifted. Leo advocates that what’s needed is creativity, “not cookie-cutter approaches.”
After all, people who live on the streets are diverse, and so are their needs.
City Commissioner Dan Ryan has proposed building six "safe sleep villages" before the end of the year using federal funds allotted to the city through the American Rescue Plan. Last month, the nonprofit Do Good Multnomah opened the 19-tiny-house St. Johns Village, funded by the city-county Joint Office of Homeless Services, which in the coming months is committing more of its shelter funds toward other outdoor-based projects. JOHS fielded community proposals this spring for more safe parking camps, villages and hygiene space, with the plan to fund some of them this year using Metro tax dollars. Additionally, the city and county committed new money to continue funding the three C3PO tiny-house villages, which were launched early in the pandemic. (Street Roots was one of the organizations that pushed for these villages as safe shelter for people on the streets.)
Today, there is more afloat regarding creative uses of outdoor spaces than ever before. (Read about the status of the Shelter 2 Housing initiative in the June 9 edition of Street Roots.) So, as we move into this active time, we should draw knowledge from our local history of hard-won camps, villages and safe sleep – including some that were launched and quickly swept. Throughout the summer, I’m dedicating column space to people who worked hard to make those work, interested in lifting up their accumulated wisdom.
“Too much,” Leo told me, is “reinventing the wheel.”
In 2010, Leo Rhodes helped start Right 2 Dream Too, a space that was originally based on Northwest Fourth Avenue and Burnside that provided safe sleep for upwards of 100 people in Old Town every night. The city’s Prosper Portland purchased that property from a private landowner in 2017, and the lot remains wired off and empty four years later. Right 2 Dream Too has a particularly interesting history to follow because it went from a contested space to a city-hosted village that now helps run C3PO. Dignity Village followed a similar course in 2000.
Before Right 2 Dream Too, Leo sharpened his advocacy and organizing chops working with the Seattle-based organization SHARE/WHEEL, launching tent cities throughout the region.
Exhausted by hours logged in city council and neighborhood meetings, fending off threats and lifting up allies, even staying awake to provide security in camps, Leo moved to Portland. He wrote about his organizing in a Street Roots column for years, and he’s a board member of Street Roots and Right 2 Dream Too, as well as a Street Roots vendor who spent years on the streets in both Portland and Seattle.
One thing Leo learned from his mentor, longtime Seattle organizer Scott Morrow, is, “Don’t ever downgrade a shelter or tent city or organization dealing with homelessness, because you might not need it, but somebody else will. And I have to add now the tiny houses and the rest areas. And other things that might pop on up.”
This lesson around a diversity of approaches has been driven home for Leo over the years: “Whenever I went into a shelter, a tent city, some organization dealing with homeless people, a lot of times I was, ‘Whoa! What the hell. Why do they have this?’ But homeless people always came up to me and told me, 'If it wasn’t for this place, I’d be dead on the streets right now. This place saved my life.'”
Embedded in this lesson around a diversity of needs is this: “Not everyone needs programs. There’s people that are couch-surfing, living in their cars, RVs, that are working. All they need is a place to stay. There’s a lot of people out there.”
Don’t “micromanage everything and say, ‘we are only going to work on this set of people,’” he urges.
Leo was once asked what the hardest thing about being homeless is, and “without skipping a beat, I said it’s the mindset.” You are told “you can sleep here. You can stay there. All of a sudden: no you can’t! You’ve got to go.” People’s lives are controlled by forces outside their control, and too often, people have prejudicial views of what is a diverse population.
Addressing the prejudices of housed neighbors, Leo explains, is an important component of the work necessary to set up safe places for people to sleep.
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 weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
© 2021 Street Roots. All rights reserved. | To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657, ext. 404.
