Portland city leaders adopted a code change in April intended to get houseless people off streets and into shelters. But with camp sweeps already accelerated, how and when those shelters will open remains unclear.
On May 28, during a meeting of A Home For Everyone, Portland City Commissioner Dan Ryan proposed the city allocate $20 million in federal funding to create six managed villages that provide hygiene, laundry, food and case management.
Margaux Weeke, a spokesperson for Ryan’s office, said it’s not clear how many people the villages — called “safe rest villages” for now, though the name is subject to change — will be able to accommodate, or where exactly the sites will be.
The tentative plan, Weeke said, is to find sites for the shelters in July and August and begin construction in September.
Ryan’s statements on the proposal noted that it’s possible because of the Shelter to Housing continuum plan, a set of code changes adopted at the end of April to make it easier to site homeless shelters and to relax the regulatory framework for outdoor shelters.
In the past, outdoor shelters — for example, the Kenton Women’s Village — were approved on a one-off basis, said Eric Engstrom, the city planner tasked with overseeing the project.
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While the city is eyeing the creation and funding of new outdoor shelters, the new code also makes it easier for private organizations to create new ones as well, with less red tape.
But just how many there will be — and when they’ll be online — is also an open question.
Denis Theriault, a spokesperson for the Joint Office of Homeless Services, estimated that the office is reviewing about 30 proposals for new outdoor shelters, but won’t be tracking the number of beds available at privately run sites.
“That’s a question we are still working out,” Engstrom told Street Roots when asked about the tracking issue. The answer is probably yes, he added, but there are still some pending conversations about the code and “the logistics are a work in progress.”
Shortly before the new code change was formally adopted, real estate developer Homer Williams announced plans to build a housing community of 50 insulated 64-square-foot pods. (In an email to Street Roots sent at the end of May, Dave Northfield, spokesperson for William’s nonprofit Oregon Harbor of Hope, said Williams is “pretty confident about the pods/modular units being rolled out quickly. But he doesn’t have a site.”)
John Mayer, the executive director of Beacon Village, a service organization that works with houseless people in the Sunnyside/Laurelhurst neighborhood, is working to develop a site with 10 lockable “microhomes” — about 8-feet by 8-feet — in the parking lot of Bridgeport United Church of Christ in Montavilla.
Each unit will cost about $10,000, he said, including hardware, electricity and plumbing for hygiene services, and services such as job support, addiction and mental health treatment.
“I’d say we need one to two of these (sites) within each of the 95 named neighborhoods,” Mayer said.
Ryan’s proposal comes after the city’s mid-May announcement that officials would take a more aggressive approach to cleaning and removing sites.
That announcement left many houseless people and advocates rattled.
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“It’s absolutely maddening to have both of these things happening at the same time — to have the speed of sweeps happening at the same time as many of us are being asked to provide shelter,” Mayer said.
Mayer said previous guidelines required that outreach workers make contact with people sleeping outside and help them try to get shelter beds — but the new guidelines have done away with that requirement. He said people have told him they’re being asked simply to move 200 to 400 yards away from where they’ve been camping.
“To me that’s also ludicrous, that that’s the best we can offer within this policy framework,” Mayer said.
Marci Cartegena, emergency services director at Human Solutions, told Street Roots the organization is keeping an ear to the ground — and has been asked to reserve more shelter beds for police drop-offs — but has so far not seen an uptick in referrals related to sweeps.
“I’ve just seen the statements in the media, you know, that sound a bit foreboding,” said Andy Miller, executive director of Human Solutions. “But it seems like even amongst City Council right now, there’s not the alignment that they thought they had about whether these sweeps should proceed or not.”
Miller also said he was troubled that the announcement of more potential sweeps came after it was revealed that the city is not fully funding Portland Street Response, envisioned as a more humane response to calls involving behavioral health and homelessness.
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Steve, who spoke with a Street Roots reporter at an outdoor meal site in Southeast Portland and asked to be identified by his first name only, said he has been camping in Northwest Portland since 2013. Steve said he hasn’t had any recent contact from police but did recently notice a cluster of five tents vanish from the area near where he sleeps.
He avoids camping in groups with other people, saying, “I think it’s a bad idea. You just draw more attention to yourself.”
The city’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program’s weekly reports show a slight uptick in the number of campsite removals since the Shelter to Housing code change was implemented: in the week of May 24-30, 10 campsites were removed, 19 were cleaned up and 263 were assessed, meaning people in camps were connected with service providers and garbage and biohazards materials were removed.
During the week of April 5-11 — a few weeks before the city’s new policy was adopted — nine campsites were removed, 13 were cleaned up and 277 assessments were conducted.
In the last week of May 2020, on the other hand, the city reported that it cleaned 78 campsites and ran 195 assessments — but did not report any removals. (The format of the agency’s reports has changed over time, and it’s not clear whether removals were usually reported by HUCIRP at the time.)
While it’s not clear how many outdoor shelters are coming online in the coming year, Theriault said funding from Oregon Metro’s regional housing bond, which passed in 2018, will enable local governments to add about 400 shelter beds to its public shelter system.
He also said the net number of shelter beds in the Portland area is actually slightly higher than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic hit — with just under 1,500 beds, where previously there were a little fewer than 1,400. Both those figures are more than double the number of shelter beds in Multnomah County just five years ago.
On June 2, Willamette Week reported the Portland Business Alliance had sent a letter to Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury saying the current plan to bring the number of beds to 2,200 is insufficient, and as such, is out of compliance with Martin v. Boise, a 9th Circuit Court decision ruling that cities can’t criminalize homelessness, such as by removing camps, unless they provide alternative places to go. The county has pledged most of its ballot measure money to case management services and housing vouchers, rather than shelters, which has been focus of the city’s ballot funding.
Theriault also said the Joint Office is planning to continue to operate the three motels it opened to house people during the COVID-19 pandemic — and that at the beginning of July, 1,300 rent assistance vouchers will be available to help get people into permanent housing.
“The approach to the unhoused situation right now is very layered,” Cartegena said. “It’s all kind of happening at once — at the end of the fiscal year, starting a new fiscal year.”
“I think it’s just so important we get out of these binary conversations — sweeps or no sweeps, shelter or no shelter,” Miller said. “It’s a complex puzzle because the solutions for individual folks are as complicated as the reasons why folks become homeless. And I think these binary conversations are tearing us apart as a community and they’re really unproductive.”