Close ties raise questions about fairness in the city’s effort to alleviate homelessness
After weeks of failed attempts to get homeless Portlanders cleared from several streets downtown near Northwest Third Avenue to make way for a pending event, Daniel Klinkert sent a frustrated email to public officials demanding their removal.
“We need a commitment that the tents will be moved well before the event to allow for the necessary cleaning and preparation,” Klinkert wrote in May 2021. “If these tents cannot be moved we will have to cancel this event series that we have been planning for months and had intended to run for the whole summer.”
Klinkert, community development director for the Old Town Community Association, said community businesses wouldn’t be able to host an upcoming event if the tents weren’t moved because they were blocking vendor spaces.
“We are facilitating a large outdoor event that is being run by a Black-owned business and last year this event series brought upwards of a 50% increase in sales for adjacent Old Town retailers,” Klinkert said. “If the convenience of street campers has now become more important than facilitating what I have just described then the battle for downtown Portland has already been lost.”
The recipients included members of the Portland Business Alliance, or PBA, and the Old Town Community Association, or OTCA, Sam Adams, director of strategic innovations at the mayor’s office, Portland Police Bureau Cpt. Rob Simon and PPB Sgt. Matthew Jacobsen. Mark Wells, director of operations for Downtown Clean and Safe, and Commissioner Dan Ryan, who oversees the Joint Office of Homeless Services and the Portland Housing Bureau, and several members of the business community were copied but did not respond.
Klinkert sent the first email on Thursday, May 13, 2021. Later that day, Simon responded saying he was told the area was not posted for a campsite sweep, but PPB would help clear the tents.
By Friday night, the tents were gone, Klinkert said in a subsequent email.
A pattern of priority
Public records show this instance likely isn’t an outlier. Local business owners and employees sent emails to city officials and members of the Portland Police Bureau requesting the city sweep homeless camps. Emails obtained by Street Roots show in both instances the camps were removed without the standard procedure of posting a 72-hour notice (this is legal when camps are blocking a permitted event space).
Still, the chain of events reflects a pattern of recent decisions placing economic considerations at the core of city homelessness policy.
At a March 2 press conference, Mayor Ted Wheeler announced an emergency declaration and corresponding actions to address homelessness. During the conference, Wheeler said the declaration was in anticipation of summer weather and loosening COVID-19 restrictions, both considerations linked to business needs, not CDC guidelines for unhoused populations, an approach the city has implemented for much of the pandemic.
“With the decline of cases in COVID and the relaxation of restrictions, as well as warmer weather we anticipate, this moment is a unique opportunity and we must not squander it,” Wheeler said.
“In addition to the waste of valuable resources, there’s a fairness issue here if well-connected businesses get one set of services and everyone else is subject to a different process.”
— Ed Johnson, Director of litigation at the Oregon Law Center
In a statement to Street Roots, Cody Bowman, communications and social media specialist at Wheeler’s office, said Wheeler supports the city responding to business owners and prioritizing their requests for camp removals, the city’s preferred terminology for sweeps. His office declined to say if city officials make requests for camp removals at the behest of business owners.
Legal experts warn a cozy relationship between prominent businesses and city officials can compromise the infrastructure the city has worked to put in place, even if the actions city personnel are taking on behalf of businesses are technically legal.
“The City (sic.) has set up a prioritized system for when and where to sweep that is based on reducing harm to public health and safety,” Ed Johnson, director of litigation at the Oregon Law Center, said in an email to Street Roots. “If that system is abandoned when business owners with greater access and influence want sweeps, that turns the City’s stated priorities upside-down, and funnels even more of the limited resources away from what we know works — permanent, affordable, supportive housing.”
It also raises questions about special treatment.
“In addition to the waste of valuable resources, there’s a fairness issue here if well-connected businesses get one set of services and everyone else is subject to a different process,” Johnson said.
Clearing the streets
The emails suggest a pattern of communication between vocal businesses and city officials that circumvents the established Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program (HUCIRP), which creates a single point of contact, protocol requiring notices for homeless encampment sweeps to be posted at least 72 hours in advance and the use of a codified ranking system for determining camp removal priority.
In the same email thread, Klinkert tells officials the homeless sweeps will need to happen consistently for several months, allowing for a series of bi-monthly events downtown taking place from May through October. He also complains about the “last-minute” nature of PPBs response because it makes event prep difficult and asks for sweeps to happen with more lead time, something Simon says he can’t guarantee.
Simon also reiterates to Klinkert that PPB can’t take homeless people to jail for trespassing in order to make way for events.
“As we talked about this on Friday evening, my officers can’t take people arrested for trespassing to jail, as it is a cite only (sic.) offense,” Simon said in an apparent reference to a conversation that happened outside of the email thread obtained by Street Roots.
Sam Adams later responded, with Klinkert copied, saying the situation was “very troubling” and asked Simon to look into the question of whether or not event permits meant campers were trespassing, a point that would establish whether or not camps can be swept without a 72-hour notice.
Adams and Klinkert did not respond to requests for comment.
Jacobsen, of PPB, told Street Roots in an email that no emergency abatements were conducted in advance of the OTCA events referenced in email correspondence, but said they did “contact campers and ask them to relocate in advance of the PBOT permitted street fair.”
A similar instance took place June 10, when Wyatt Savage, co-founder of Produce Portland, revived the email chain to say two tents on Fourth Avenue were “obstructing event space.” Cpt. Simon responded the same day assuring their removal.
“Officer Flohr and Sgt. Stensgaard will get them moved after 2 p.m. tomorrow,” Simon wrote.
On Dec. 23, 2021, Bryan Huitt, a corporate procurement administrator at the Pendleton store downtown, sent an email to recipients including Ryan, Wells and Jacobsen. Huitt begins with the statement “The culmination of failed leadership,” and went on to detail repeated window breaks at the Pendleton location, noting unhoused camps on a nearby street were blocking access to the street along Northwest Sixth Avenue in violation of federal Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines.
“Employees are terrorized and angry,” Huitt wrote. “Broken glass, needles, garbage, human waste/vomit strewn across the sidewalk. Drug distribution/use continue along with active prostitution …Let’s hope we see some improvement.”
Commissioner Ryan responded the same day, saying he would forward the email along to members of city council.
“You have every right to use the language you do,” Ryan wrote.
Later, Jacobsen replied and said the area was sent to the city contractor to be posted for removal.
Jacobsen did not answer questions regarding whether or not homeless Portlanders were associated with the broken windows.
A clean appearance
Legal experts say prominent businesses having access to officials doesn’t help address homelessness.
“Here the request seems to be that the city remove homeless people and make the area ‘appear’ ‘nicer’ which does nothing to actually solve problems associated with homelessness,” Walter Fonseca, special projects counsel at the Oregon Justice Resource Center, said in an email. “You solve it by having housing.”
The correspondence with city officials aligns with a growing frustration on the part of business owners in the downtown area, who have thrust homelessness into the political spotlight as a core issue hampering economic recovery. Some have increasingly amped up advocacy in local government, demanding solutions to the prevailing homelessness crisis, as well as the unrelated rise in gun violence and dire need for pandemic recovery.
The Portland Business Alliance meets with Ryan on a monthly basis to discuss the impacts of unhoused populations on businesses and city homelessness programs. A meeting agenda dated April 9, 2021 contained charts with stats on counts of trash, needles, graffiti and biohazards, as well as agenda items for Downtown Portland Clean and Safe updates, the Shelter to Housing Continuum project and the housing emergency extension.
In a similar vein, the Old Town Community Alliance has become another vocal advocate from the business community, demanding the city take action on homelessness and drawing media attention. After months of dialogue, the city recently tapped the OTCA to help draft objectives for the city’s ongoing efforts to “revitalize” the economy downtown.
On March 8, the OTCA hosted a press conference led by chair Jessie Burke announcing the results of that request — a 90-day plan with specific goals to address crime, safety, cleanliness and access. The bulk of strategies for these goals revolve around homelessness in the downtown area, including reducing the unauthorized tent count by 33%, ensuring all sidewalks have 60 inches of clearance and a request for the city to make good on its promise to enact mental health safety teams with Blanchet House.
While the city is not formally beholden to the goals, they have allowed — and requested — the OTCA to shape the dialogue about what the goals are for city homelessness policy.
The close relationships between prominent business associations and officials contradicts the ongoing public stance of city officials saying decisions regarding homelessness policy and sweeps are not influenced by business interests.
“The interests of businesses and ensuring that people who need housing are housed are not always aligned, and we can see that businesses are essentially just demanding that those people just be moved elsewhere in the city, instead of working with the city to create solutions,” Fonseca said.
“Commissioner Ryan does not support, nor has he tried to influence the work of the Impact Reduction Program in favor of a specific site or situation,” Bryan Aptekar, communications liaison for Ryan’s office, told Street Roots.
“I believe in using data to drive decision-making,” Ryan said in a statement. “Last summer, I championed the ordinance that insulated the Impact Reduction Program from political whims and the loudest voices by codifying the criteria they use to assess camp conditions. The ordinance also ensured the Impact Reduction Program’s data-driven approach could not be overridden by any one elected official.”
Swept aside
Sweeps are at the heart of debates about what is considered humane treatment of homeless populations. City officials often publicly attempt to straddle the interests of businesses and those of homeless populations, but these interests are in direct conflict downtown: Homeless people don’t want to be forced to move and businesses want them swept. Evidence has shown, again and again, that sweeps trigger a cycle of trauma and displacement that doesn’t get to the root of homelessness, said Fonseca.
“The city constantly ‘sweeps’ but those do nothing to address homelessness,” Fonseca said. “They simply move people from one place to another, to another, to another. And the city is quite good at it.”
For homeless people, sweeps are a form of societal dismissal upending their lives, often resulting in an interminable cycle of trauma, loss of possessions, arrests and displacement. Moving people, Fonseca said, also doesn’t address the underlying issues contributing to homelessness in the first place.
The result is a constant push by advocates for actual solutions that are slow to arrive. In the meantime, the needs of businesses and housed people typically prevail — sweeps are the continued and common way homelessness is addressed; while their result is consistently ineffective, they are still often viewed by housed populations as a solution.
“The failure is that they do not seem to be able to implement many policies beyond sweeps that would actually address homelessness and help solve the problems,” Fonseca said. “Instead of just issuing band aids (sic.) that only cover up the appearance of homelessness.”
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