OPINION | Commissioner Rene Gonzalez's decision to halt tent distribution is punitive, performative and dangerous
There are details I remember — the winter rain, the distraught woman with her hands shaking and red with cold. Her husband, feverish, lying in water pooling on their tent floor. The firefighter picked up his phone right away and called her by name.
Other details are fuzzy. Was she in a wheelchair or a walker? Was her tent purposefully slashed, or did it rip under the wear of use?
It was a new-paper Wednesday several months ago when that woman approached me, the sidewalk busy with vendors lined up to buy their newspapers wholesale, so they could hustle out to their posts and begin selling.
She was clearly distressed as she told me about her husband, the tent, and that she needed to call a man whose name she said as if I should know him.
I took her inside the office. She had a phone — one of the many people who survive on Portland streets who works hard each day to keep it charged, a lifeline. But she was shaking too much to place the call, so she told me how to do it.
The man on the other line answered quickly, brightly calling her by name — her number must have been saved in his phone.
“What can I do to help you,” he asked.
She explained her circumstances, and he told her he’d meet her back at her tent and check on them and bring a tent, tarp and blankets.
This was a firefighter she called. She clearly trusted him deeply. Firefighters are charged with saving lives, and saving lives in our city involves the fact that unequal access to housing means some people fight for their lives daily.
While he wasn’t a member of Portland Street Response, I don’t know if he was affiliated with another Community Health Program at Portland Fire and Rescue, such as Community Health Access and Treat, or CHAT. CHAT connects medical professionals to community members, such as those who call 911 frequently when, as a previous CHAT manager, Tremaine Clayton, described to me, their emergency is homelessness.
These memories — the distressed woman and the firefighter she so wholeheartedly trusted — came back strongly as I reflected on Commissioner Rene Gonzalez’s commanding the fire department to stop handing out tents.
On one hand, banning tents simply performs a stance. The fire department is only one place where people get tents. People on the streets save up money to buy tents. Nonprofits, mutual aid groups and neighbors all deploy to fill in needs.
But this approach follows a logic that’s more punitive and includes bans and, at the extreme end, arrests (camping in public spaces in Tennessee is now considered a felony). Over half of arrests in Portland targeted unhoused people from 2017-2020.
These approaches are popular with some Portlanders. As with many others who participate on Twitter, I have a cadre of “trolls” who rarely identify themselves, and some use extreme language, such as an individual who appears to be a particularly — ahem — devoted reader. In a recent tweet they referred to the people on the streets as “trash.”
This language makes me think of how Angela Davis described the treatment of people in prisons as “disposable populations.” And Charles Dickens — whose 19th-century commentaries are too often applicable today — had his notorious character, Scrooge, suggest people in poverty should die to “decrease the surplus population.”
When people’s most foundational needs are treated as not worthy of intervention through policies of disregard, the outcome can be life-long suffering and early death. In Portland, the average age of death for people who die on the streets is mid-to-late 40s.
Tents make street survival more possible, affording people a little privacy as well as a structure that, combined with tarps and blankets, provides warmth and dryness. Taking them away does not magically transform a person’s circumstances and transport them into a shelter or housing.
Our city government too often operates as though coercion is a method of connecting people to their needs, using, for example, sweeps as a point of contact to offer people shelter.
What’s really needed is trust, and that’s something that takes time to build. Through a trusted relationship, a person on the streets might be connected to shelter or better yet, housing.
For the woman with shaking hands and a sick husband, the firefighter who gave her a tent cared about her humanity. This is how trust is built.
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