Tiny house villages on city land. Car and RV safe parking. Motels purchased for housing. Public toilets. Cash for the poor.
These are some gains made for people living without housing in our region during the past year as a result of the pandemic and regional fires.
There’s apprehension about life post-pandemic because, as Leo Rhodes told me, going back to normal isn’t good for people for whom the norm has never been good. Rhodes is a Street Roots vendor and board member and co-founder of Right 2 Dream Too.
These transformative gains could easily be lost once the pandemic, which made it possible for barriers to be circumvented, subsides.
We need to press into the transformations and build from there.
Shelter-in-place camps and villages
For people living without shelter, it was impossible to shelter in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and it was clear congregate indoor shelters create more conditions in which COVID-19 and other ailments can spread. Street Roots joined other organizations in calling for safe places for people to shelter in place in fresh air. While in the past creating camps and villages on city land has been very difficult, a month into the pandemic, the city managed to erect three such camps. The camps were first administered by JOIN and now by Right 2 Dream Too. They began as tents placed on pallets, and before winter, the city replaced those tents with small, white, prefabricated houses.
Car camping
We saw many emergency responses to the fires in September, including car and RV camping.
I visited one such lot at Clackamas Town Center where campers were supported with food, showers, a mail center and phone charging provided by combinations of mutual aid, nonprofits and government.
Those opportunities were temporary, in support of people fleeing fires. It’s worth grappling with: Do we as a society value certain reasons for homelessness more than others? People fleeing fires but not people fleeing long-ago fires? A domestic abuse situation that’s tangled with additional traumas? Generations of poverty leaving people with no wealth, only debt and the possibility of jobs that, at minimum wage, pay half the housing wage? Do the reasons why someone is living without shelter determine how much society is willing to make mere survival better?
We don’t have a precise number on how many people are living in their cars and RVs in our region, but it’s widespread. People living in vehicles have certain advantages over sleeping on the ground: doors that lock, places to store some valuables, a roof to keep them dry. But they rarely have access to water and garbage disposal. They are in limbo, always needing to move to avoid being towed or ticketed — and when the vehicles break down, these options run out. Safe camping lots can provide people with some organization around shared resources: toilets, water hook-ups, garbage service and some protection from getting towed or racking up fines.
OPINION: Without parking, car and RV dwellers have nowhere to go
Motel purchase
The combination of the pandemic and the fires drove the emergency board at the Oregon Legislature to put aside $65 million to purchase a dozen distressed motels across the state and transform them into housing, a project administered by the Oregon Community Foundation. Purchases should be complete by June.
This shouldn’t be the last of this effort. The lesson of the 2008 financial collapse is that private equity firms purchased distressed properties as wealth generators. Instead, vacant property should be transformed into housing so that, in fact, people can move out of homelessness. We need to keep creating public and deeply affordable housing for people.
DIRECTOR'S DESK: Today, save motels. Tomorrow, housing.
Public toilet infrastructure
I often think of those early days of the pandemic as a receding ocean tide that revealed a bare beach where unhoused people were left standing. Because so many services receded as the city shut down, it became more clear that unhoused people were left with nothing. Even pre-pandemic, people had to go to great lengths to locate a restroom at a day space, a library or a coffee shop. And, because those options were still not enough, people were sometimes desperate enough to go to the bathroom outside, which ignited community rage against the unhoused people themselves.
The city of Portland primarily used FEMA and CARES money to place 114 red portable toilets around the city. These are COVID-19 funds, so this gain is particularly vulnerable post-pandemic.
A few weeks ago, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times came to Street Roots to talk with Raven Drake, Max McEntire and others who have lived outdoors. Max told him that, without access to toilets, “People lose their dignity, they lose their pride.”
Kristof wrote a column calling for a national infrastructure of public toilets.
How do we not lose what we gained?
The current red portable toilets are made possible through the city’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program. Let officials know the importance of keeping these toilets by emailing the program at reportpdx@portlandoregon.gov. Make sure City Council knows, because there are possibilities of several city bureaus paying to have toilets placed throughout the city. Metro government is another route.
Basic income
Another key area we’ve seen is short-term access to cash. The federal stimulus money meant that cash could get directly to the poorest people. During the first round, Street Roots signed up about 200 homeless folks from our office, and we are working with the Low Income Tax Clinic to do this again.
DIRECTOR'S DESK: People who struggle need more direct cash from the federal government
The federal stimulus package includes a temporary child tax credit that is a straight-up antidote to poverty.
Confronting homelessness means confronting poverty, requiring the political will to not accept poverty in our nation. People simply need money, and the stimulus payments showed what could be further developed. There are examples of basic income programs internationally. Locally the Black Resilience Fund also gave a glimpse of how reparations programs could combat poverty based on generations of people denied wealth.
Read about a national plan for reparations in this week's edition of Street Roots
All of these gains during the pandemic have been necessary all along. The pandemic made it possible, but now we can’t slide back. We need to build from here — and across all levels of government. Please demand that housing is a right, and survival, in the meantime, must not be so desperate either.