OPINION | Two cycling events show how simple it is to be considerate, inclusive of unhoused neighbors
The sun was low in Old Town as bikers pulled up to the corner of West Burnside Street and Northwest Third Avenue. Soon, the corner was bustling with cyclists and a few folks in wheelchairs. On Friday, Aug. 26, Street Roots editorial producer Kanani Cortez organized a high-energy Street Roots Pedalpalooza ride of about 40 people.
The Street Roots Pedalpalooza ride is one of a series of Old Town events — some impromptu — hosted by Street Roots to promote joy in the neighborhood with our houseless neighbors.
Street Roots prioritizes relationships across housing status. For unhoused people to participate, this can mean looking at access issues, as well as hospitality (how are people welcomed into a space?). Cortez arranged for BikeTown staff to be on-site to prepare bikes for people, so as Street Roots vendors wandered up, they were welcomed and given a bike and a helmet.
And then, “a festival of bikey fun,” complete with corkers – people who volunteer to help crowds stay safe – assigned to make sure no one got left behind. We biked over the Burnside Bridge, up Ankeny, to Laurelhurst Park where Street Roots vendor Duane “Casper” Reynolds arranged the crowd into a circle, leading people in a slightly raucous human wave. Before everyone biked off into the night, Cortez raffled off hats and t-shirts.
Outreach can reduce the trauma of sweeps
The first-annual Street Roots Pedalpalooza ride was just a week after another novel effort to engage houseless folks. It was, from everything I can gather, a successful exchange between Mayor Ted Wheeler’s staff, event organizers and houseless folks.
Yes, you read that correctly: I’m lifting up a healthy interaction between the Mayor’s office and houseless folks.
I’ve written plenty about the struggles and traumas houseless folks experience from sweeps that are directed by the Mayor’s office (through the city’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program, which contracts out sweeps, and the Portland Police Bureau, which engages in “abatements” Street Roots has reported on over the last few months), some of which are connected to preparing streets for parades and other events.
But when Steven Beardsley began organizing the Portland Criterium through a contract with the Mayor’s Office, he insisted on another approach. He wanted to do what he could to avoid unhoused people getting swept in the lead-up to the time-bound road bike race on August 20 in the north park blocks.
“What can we do to make it so that, you know, the houseless can at least make decisions on their own? And have the information to make decisions about what's best for them?” Beardsley asked. "How can we help them get to a point where they can stay in place and not be subjected to sweeps?”
So he asked the Mayor’s Office to contract Ground Score, a peer-run waste workers organization. Usually, Clean Start (a program under Central City Concern) assesses camps for HUCIRP, which assigns scores. Camps that register over a certain score are posted, and then swept by Rapid Response BioClean (a city contractor).
But when Ground Score enters the picture, unhoused people support other unhoused people.
“I have a unique personal lived experience with how they do campsite assessments,” Barbie Weber, a Ground Score founder, said. “I know how to ask questions.”
Communication with people suffering the effects of trauma should be clear and calm, letting people know what to expect, and what power they have in a situation.
So in the days leading up to the Portland Bike Criterium, Ground Score workers engaged unhoused people camped around the park blocks, letting them know about the event.
“With so many things going on in a person's life living out on the street, it's nice to get somebody to remind you, 'hey, this is coming up' so people know what to expect,” Weber said.
Ground Score also told them how the city was scoring their camps, and what adjustments they could make so their camps wouldn’t be swept. Sometimes they helped people lower their scores by shifting tents over to increase wheelchair accessibility on sidewalks.
They brought brooms and garbage bags for people cleaning their sites and they hauled away garbage.
Then, a few Ground Score workers contracted with the city to support the event which, Andrew Fitzpatrick, Mayor Wheeler’s Director of Economic Development, estimates brought 2,000 spectators to the north park blocks.
“We should always be willing to see what we can learn from hosting these events like this in order to improve in future,” he told me.
It’s clear that there’s something to learn from the Portland Bike Criterium: work with Ground Score on the lead-up to events.
“It’s about having event promoters bringing this to the city and saying ‘this is something we want,’” Beardsley said of requesting the city work with Ground Score to communicate with unhoused people and reduce the use of traumatic sweeps.
Event promoters need to insist on this more thoughtful approach, Weber said.
“It took Steven (Beardsley) to make a fuss about not wanting to sweep people." Weber said. “I was really glad that I was able to navigate those waters for him.”
If you are planning an event with the city, take note.
“This kind of outreach is really not that time consuming,” Weber said, because Ground Score has the know-how and the trust. “I mean, come on, for a couple hours and save everybody's trauma, drama and all that stuff. It's worth it.”
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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