A $500,000 investment in anti-homeless benches raises alarms for homeless people, advocates
Laurelhurst Park is a beautiful, tree-lined park with running trails and a duck pond that sits at the heart of the Laurelhurst Neighborhood, straddling the border between Northeast and Southeast Portland. It’s also a hotspot for intense spats about how local leaders have handled Portland’s homelessness crisis at large.
A recent $500,000 plan from city leaders to deter homeless people from erecting shelters at Laurelhurst Park and other similar sites is drawing outrage and opposition.
The city’s latest plan to curb unsanctioned camping at Laurelhurst Park includes constructing benches where tents currently sit on the outskirts of the park. Some homeless people and advocates are asking questions about who is and isn’t allowed to exist in public spaces — and the harm tactics designed to exclude certain groups of people can have.
Local homeowners from the Laurelhurst Neighborhood Association (LNA) have directed their ire at a homeless encampment on Southeast Oak Street and 37th Avenue for some time. Several city-conducted sweeps have taken place at the camp in the last 13 months. Street Roots covered the Nov. 2020 sweep that took place amid an intense COVID-19 surge in Oregon. In July 2021, city officials conducted another sweep just hours before an extreme heat warning went into effect. That sweep also received substantial media attention .
Though some homeless people — many of whom have stayed at or around the Laurelhurst Park site for years, cultivating a community there — moved back to the site. Members of the LNA have put increasing pressure on city officials to remove this encampment. Some housed neighbors near the park have even reportedly taken it upon themselves to act as vigilante camping policy enforcers.
Instead of a sweep similar to previous ones, during which officials have placed easily-removable temporary orange fencing around the camping areas, the city of Portland now appears to want to do something more permanent. In mid-November, the city council passed a $44 million public safety spending bill that included a proposal to allocate half a million dollars to install deterrents like benches at the most hotly contested strip of Laurelwood Park — and other similar encampments throughout the city — making it more difficult for people to set up tents there.
There was immediate backlash to this proposal, with homeless advocates denouncing the idea as “hostile architecture,” an urban design strategy used to deter homeless people from resting in public places. Hostile architecture ranges from somewhat subtle acts like dividers on benches to inhibit people from laying down on them, to more overt acts like loud noises aimed at deterring homeless people from congregating in a particular area.
Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who submitted the proposal along with Commissioner Carmen Rubio, made a statement responding to the criticism, saying she does not and will not support hostile architecture to “cut off access to public space for everyone and (is) designed exclusively to prevent any camping in an area.”
Hardesty said she proposed adding benches to places like the camping site at Laurelhurst Park that are accessible for anyone to use and lay down on and would not prevent all camping in an area, but would mitigate the size of encampments.
But Portland, along with cities across the country, has a history of using hostile architecture as a method to determine who is and isn’t allowed to exist comfortably in public spaces. A 2019 Street Roots story investigated the impact of this type of architecture has had on Portland’s unhoused population.
“Public space is why cities are creative places. Real creativity only happens when people who don’t know each other get connected (through public space).” Also in 2019, the Oregon Department of Transportation received attention , both negative and positive, for placing boulders on a former rose garden in Goose Hollow in order to keep homeless campers away. ODOT has continued using boulders as a deterrent for homeless people, including placing boulders along Interstate 5 near Delta Park in September.
Michael Mehaffy said that implementing hostile architecture is a harmful waste of time that only addresses surface-level problems, ignoring the root causes of why people are sleeping outside in the first place. Mehaffy is a well-known urban design and architecture researcher who spent a large part of his career living and working in Portland.
“It’s sort of like the game of Whac-a-Mole,” Mehaffy said. “We have to train our energies on the real problem and not the manifestation of the problem.”
To Mehaffy, who has done extensive research on why public space is crucial for a functioning and flourishing city, this type of architecture is not only useless for dealing with the underlying reasons for homelessness, it also contributes to the commodification and privatization of public space. And with less public space, people aren’t able to collaborate or connect in a way that is necessary for making a city truly innovative and liveable.
“Around the world, public space is being privatized, fortified, diminished and not taken care of,” Mehaffy said. “Public space is why cities are creative places. Real creativity only happens when people who don’t know each other get connected (through public space).”
Seth Gates, who stays at the Laurelhurst Park encampment, is concerned about what benches would mean for the process of deciding who is allowed to be in public spaces like this.
“I guess we’re being excluded from the public because we’re unwanted,” Gates said. “But who has the authority and the jurisdiction to dictate what these parameters are?”
Gates said he has been at or near the Laurelhurst site for several years and can attest to the spirit of community there. Compared to camping downtown, he said, Laurelhurst is mellow and relaxed.
“Everybody knows everybody,” he said. “It’s a better place to camp than anywhere in the city.”
Instead of building benches to deter campsites, Gates has suggested the city use event-style tents to cover the encampment so neighbors and housed park-goers won’t have to see it.
Gates said that he usually is able to stay out of trouble because he can move around when necessary and keeps a minimal footprint. But he said not everybody is able to do that, and they shouldn’t have to.
“It’s a public park,” he said. “What’s the problem?”
Since Hardesty’s Nov. 18 statement, which does not state specifics about a timeline or implementation, no updates to this plan have been provided. But advocates feel it’s important to stay on top of holding the city accountable for making Portland a safe space for everybody, which includes calling them out for plans like this that perpetuate exclusionary beliefs and practices about who can spend time in a park.
“We’re seizing on proxies that might make us feel good to attack because we want to do something to deal with the problem. But that’s not the right solution,” Mehaffy said. “We are making terrible mistakes as a society when we blame the victim.”
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