When Portland Commissioner Dan Ryan introduced the Safe Rest Village initiative last year, he planned to have six new tiny home-style homeless shelter villages operating around the city by the end of 2021.
But progress has been slower than expected, and the team behind the project has had to overcome hurdles they say were unanticipated. Throughout last fall, Ryan’s team made occasional announcements about securing site locations and some logistics about how these shelters would operate. Still, community members had unanswered questions and concerns.
On Feb. 24, the project team announced the completion of a crucial element of the SRV project: they’ve secured locations for all six sites and are moving forward with other parts of the operation, like figuring out which organizations will be contracted to run the wrap-around services at these facilities and how referrals will be made.
The city securing the locations for SRVs is a significant step in the process. The repeated delays in siting the SRVs was cause for skepticism from people who had doubts if this project would ever come to fruition.
More and more problems were popping up when it came to finding site locations. First, Portland Audubon asked the city to reconsider placing a Safe Rest Village at an announced location near the Springwater Corridor in Southeast Portland, which they said is located on a floodplain. Housed neighbors in Southwest Portland unsuccessfully protested a Safe Rest Village at the Sears Armory parking lot. The Portland Public School board successfully fought against a proposed village at a vacant lot in Northeast Portland where Whitaker Middle School and Adams High School used to stand.
Thanks to an emergency declaration issued by Wheeler in February, however, Ryan’s team was able to announce the locations of all six sites. Along with the site at the Sears Armory parking lot, there will also be SRVs in the following locations: the Menlo Park “Park and Ride” lot in East Portland at Southeast 122nd Avenue and Burnside Street, the Reedway Site at the 106 block of Southeast Reedway Street in the Lents neighborhood, the Peninsula Crossing Trail village at 6631 N Syracuse St. in North Portland, a downtown site on Northwest Naito Parkway and an RV parking site at 9827 NE Sunderland Ave.
According to Ryan, these sites are all “ground zero locations that are experiencing a lot of humanitarian and environmental pain.”
This list doesn’t include the previously-announced SRV site at the 2300 block of Southwest Naito Parkway because this location will house the relocated Queer Affinity Village shelter and likely won’t be available to new residents.
Up until last month, Ryan’s team was referring to the Southwest Naito Parkway site as an SRV and including it in the count, but now it has been grouped in with the Creating Conscious Communities with People Outside (C3PO) emergency shelters run by the city and All Good Northwest set up during the pandemic. The C3PO sites include the Queer Affinity Village, a site focusing on Black, Indigenous and People of Color located near the Lloyd Center and the Old Town Village, which is non-identity-specific.
At the Feb. 24 press conference announcing these new sites, Ryan acknowledged the challenges he and his team have faced in the push to get these shelters up and running.
“If this was easy, perhaps it would have been done a long time ago,” Ryan said. “As such, we faced a few headwinds, both from the community and from internal bureaucracy. We’re working through the concerns and questions with neighbors, and we’re actually happy to see progress. We are now able to lean in as one big organization and know that this is a priority … and this time, we’re going to get our city out of a ditch.”
Location, location, location
The SRVs have fallen far behind the original planned timeline for implementation. But now locations have been secured, what’s the current status?
Advocates have raised red flags about other problems with the announced SRV sites, especially the location in the Lents neighborhood. In 2016, after then-Portland Mayor Charlie Hales’ office attempted to relocate unhoused campers to this plot of land, it was discovered this site contained contaminated soil that was causing some people who took up residence there to feel sick.
A 2016 Portland Mercury article brings up advocate concerns about asking homeless people to stay on contaminated land, and points out that even if people are willing to camp in dangerous places because the alternative is being swept by the city, they shouldn’t have to make this choice.
A technical memorandum issued in 2016 indicates contaminated soil was removed from this site and concentrations are now “protective of potential homeless campers, recreationalists, occupational workers, construction workers and excavation workers.”
But people asked to stay there may be wary of the site, given its history and the troubles the SRV team has had in securing sites for this project.
To advocates working to help homeless people and address the long-term housing crisis for years, this chaos is par for the course.
Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, or WRAP, an organization advocating for homeless people in the Western United States, said there has been plenty of time for policymakers to come up with ideas more extensive than sanctioned encampments.
“This is 39 years after the advent of contemporary homelessness,” Boden said. “This is how pathetic the absence of housing in addressing homelessness has become.”
The wrong solution
Boden said cities ignore a solution right in front of them: the hotel shelter model, which was popularized during the pandemic. Now, they’re going back to the old tactics that didn’t work in the first place.
“We’re not learning from the mistakes that were made creating the old shelter system, where people were just warehoused without a second thought,” Boden said. “When this doesn’t work, (politicians will say) it’s the homeless people’s fault.”
Ryan’s team managing the SRVs insisted this is different. They want people to move in and out of the shelters quickly, exiting into long-term, affordable housing.
According to Ryan’s team, a maximum of 60 people will stay at each village at a time. But the goal is to help these people get into permanent housing quickly so space can be made available for new residents.
“This is a time to build your resilience,” Ryan said at the Feb. 24 press conference. “So we’re projecting that a villager will be on site for six to nine months.”
“You just spent 35 years demonizing (homeless people) and then you want to put these places in people’s neighborhoods?”
— Paul Boden
Executive Director
Western Regional Advocacy Project
In order to decide if people are ready to move on or not, Ryan said the team will be doing data testing about their mental and behavioral health and how they’re doing as a member of the village.
In terms of getting people into the sites in the first place, the SRV team says organizations contracted to run the sites, as well as outreach and navigation teams, will make referral decisions curated to individual needs.
As of now, there is only one social service organization contracted to run a Safe Rest Village site: Cultivate Initiatives, an East Portland-based nonprofit, will be in charge of managing the wraparound services at the Menlo Park Safe Rest Village.
High-impact or not?
The city says these villages are alternatives to “high-impact encampments,” which are defined by evidence of conspicuous drug use and criminal activity, among other characteristics. Some housed neighbors are worried this means the people coming into the Safe Rest Villages will be a threat to their communities.
This concern was also cited as the reason nonprofit Helping Hands, which runs the Bybee Lakes Hope Center at the former Wapato Jail, pulled out of its agreement to operate the SRV at the Sears Armory in Southwest Portland.
Advocates say this wary response from housed people isn’t a surprise — it’s a natural response to the messaging they’ve been given about homeless people.
“It’s always, ‘these people are unhealthy, dangerous drug addicts,’” Boden said. “You just spent 35 years demonizing (homeless people) and then you want to put these places in people’s neighborhoods?”
A main point of concern for homeless activists regarding the SRV project is the fear that unhoused Portlanders will be required to move into these shelters or risk prosecution. As a result of the landmark Martin v. Boise case, cities cannot cite or arrest people for sleeping on public property if the city doesn’t have enough shelter space for each homeless person.
Advocates are concerned the city is creating more shelter space with the ultimate goal of justifying a crackdown on homeless Portlanders, rather than providing a stable starting point for people navigating their way to permanent housing.
If shelter is made available to all unhoused people, whether that’s through sites like the SRVs or mass shelters city officials have proposed, will people who don’t want to move into these shelters be criminalized?
Jake Dornblaser, the community engagement coordinator for the SRV initiative, said he hopes to be able to find a right place for everyone, even people who have indicated they don’t want to live in a Safe Rest Village or similar site.
“If somebody is on the streets, and they feel like their best option is the street, I think it’s really important that we develop and continue developing different options for them to move into,” Dornblaser said. “The idea is to create a place where those people can be successful.”