OPINION | Sweeps force people out of sight, but do nothing for long term housing options
We sat down for our weekly meeting but there was no way Street Roots editor in chief K. Rambo and I could concentrate.
The blue and red police lights flashed in the window at West Burnside Street and Third Avenue, and we could hear shouts of distress. We hustled downstairs and out to the corner. Several police officers stood with city-contracted Rapid Response workers who were loading a truck with bags. A man who I’ve long chatted with — earlier this spring, I wrote a column describing his daffodil-festooned tent — stood looking over his belongings bundled in clear plastic bags. He showed quiet resolve, what I recognized as endurance for survival.
Other people began to help him, wheeling up a shopping cart and piling bags. They made multiple trips to a new location on the other side of the block, where he once again pitched his tent. Within days, the city swept him again, and I haven’t seen him since.
That was the first sweep of many we witnessed on our Old Town block in recent weeks, but the police and Rapid Response workers kept coming and, according to the so-called “Old Town 90-Day Reset Plan,” will keep coming. Police officers and Rapid Response workers are blitzing through the neighborhood. It’s been a neighborhood of flashing police lights, shouts and mounds of clear plastic bags full of possessions, people in tents one day and sleeping on the bare ground the next.
I have been thinking about a line from the poet Irena Klepfitz: “I am the keeper of accounts.” This is one city block I know, so I keep track, a small ledger of trauma, one page of a book of city-sorrow. I’ve been watching and talking to people. Over half the people I spoke with are Black or Indigenous; homelessness disproportionately impacts Black and Indigenous Portlanders. The traumas of systemic racism reverberate, and that includes the city’s system of sweeps.
One man had been recently evicted from his nearby apartment, so he had a lot of possessions. The day the police and Rapid Response workers came, he simply sat next to these possessions, vacillating from what looked like that exhausted resolve to a fighting spirit, yelling out that he was human and has rights.
There’s the man who had a tent tall enough to stand inside upright. He used to play music as dusk settled, about the time I’m usually leaving Old Town, so sometimes I’d stop by and chat. He told me he didn’t want trouble; he just wanted stability. He wondered about moving closer to the river. While the latest battle cry is about driving unhoused people out of Old Town, those battle cries shift, and at other times, it’s about people camping near natural spaces like the river. People keep moving. A man once told me that he’d sleep in trees to hide. Desperate people get resourceful.
Then there’s the woman who after she was swept, trudged up Burnside with her items in those telltale clear plastic bags. A day later, she returned to her original spot: it’s what she knows, and there’s a tiny bit of control in that. She no longer had a tent, so she slept in a soggy sleeping bag.
Another woman was swept on Monday and then again that Wednesday, clear plastic bags now mounded all around her. I don’t know if she’d also been recently evicted. There’s that certain look I’ve seen before possessions lumped together like a mountain range. It’s like the walls fall away and, because there’s no place to go, a person doesn’t pack moving boxes. Possessions look lumpy rather than angular.
She sat on a low lawn chair, not moving for days. The rain fell on her as she slept. When I’d talk to her she sounded very tired. Later someone found a tarp to throw over the items. Last I saw, she was still there, still in that lawn chair rather than inside a tent.
There’s another woman who is camped nearby – I don’t know yet whether she’s been swept – who until recently, had her grandmother’s ashes and a painting of her in her tent. She’s the next of kin, she received her ashes, she loved her. That’s not the first time I’ve heard of this: We all have our relationships and our histories, but when we don’t have a house, our keepsakes are both precious and precariously held.
Despite the fight, despite the exhaustion, this sheds light on why someone might not want to separate from their possessions when the police and Rapid Response workers say they will store them for 30 days. Additionally, if someone does separate from their possessions and go into a shelter, they don't have a solution for where their possessions go after 30 days because there isn’t the possibility of housing around the corner.
So instead, I saw people trudging around the neighborhood with plastic bags of their possessions, seeking a new place to collapse for the night.
It may seem like there are less people who are homeless after a sweep, but camp sweeps provide the spectacle of progress while people are forced to move and hide.
Failure is built into this system Police officers at the scenes of sweeps say to me people weren’t taking the shelter beds. On Twitter, I read a lot of comments blaming unhoused people for not going into shelters. I wonder why we don’t look at what’s not working, and aim for what can work, instead. No matter how angry anyone gets, if what our city does isn’t helping people, it’s illogical to keep piling on the trauma and money.
A bunk bed offered by a law officer or agent of the city would not feel safe when a person is in fight-or-flight mode. Instead, people turn to each other, and to what they know about survival. Some people bide their time and move back because the neighborhoods where they camp have become familiar, and thus survivable.
Here’s what mostly happens: people experience the trauma of displacement and further erosion of trust. Then, it’s that much more difficult to trust other services offered by the same city that sweeps you.
Non-coercive outreach and real housing options Here’s one thing I do know: relational outreach matters, and it matters that we are investing in this through the Metro Housing Services measure. It’s important that outreach workers can come to know people, and what they need, and it’s essential that they are in non-coercive roles. Trust matters.
Certainly, garbage is a problem. Our city’s systems for trash removal serve property owners much better than low-income people and people experiencing homelessness. Groundscore has shown a trauma-informed model of reliably removing garbage from camps; a model that should be built upon.
And outreach workers need real housing options to offer people. Our community must open up more housing options for people — where they can feel safe and have their belongings. That’s why Street Roots Advocacy is focused on the “3000 Challenge,” challenging our local governments to quickly open up 3,000 additional housing or transitional housing options that would be stable places for people to choose.
One initiative is Portland Turnkey — based on the successful statewide Project Turnkey. This is a call for local governments to buy hotels to both open up housing in the short run and move this land into public or community ownership. These options, then, will need to be coupled with the Housing Services tax measure over the long-run to operate, and some can be renovated into longer-term housing, while the land itself can be in community ownership. These are rooms where people can bring their possessions, and be supported with a locked door, a bathroom, a microwave, a bed.
If outreach workers can connect people with a safe, secure room — not at a coercive moment but through a relationship — we will see much more success. But the outreach workers need those rooms to offer.
Too much of our city response is traumatic, futile, expensive and a spectacle of progress. Instead, our city should be doubling down on getting more quick housing options, and connecting that with the resources we now have for outreach and other services.
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