Mayor Wheeler announced a much-anticipated proposal to ban homeless camping in Portland at a Friday press conference. This idea, which has been hinted at in various forms for more than a year, follows a growing drumbeat of vitriol from upset Portland property owners, businesses, and other members of the public about the impact that visible homeless camping has on the community—and its reputation. “Simply put, we can no longer tolerate the intolerable,” said City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who co-sponsored the proposal outlined by Wheeler on Friday. “It's time to take some risks to get our city out of this ditch.” Yet, without the needed boost of significant funding, clear support from other government agencies, and interested contractors, the proposal appears little more than a plan to create an eventual plan.

“Calling people ‘service resistant’ helps distance us from responsibility,” says Marc Jolin, director of the county and city's Joint Office of Homeless Services (JOHS). “If someone says they’re not interested in services, it doesn’t mean they want to be homeless. It should make us ask, ‘Are we offering the right services?’”

So, I’ve got a great idea: What might be a better, more accurate, advertisement would be to run a photograph of my favorite public toilet in The New York Times, and alongside it, there can be a commitment by Portland leaders to ensure this is a place where we will not retch at the sight of poverty, where we hold police accountable, where we will not sweep away our most vulnerable people until everyone here has a place to live. What would actually be creative — groundbreaking, even — would be for Portland to see poor people as neighbors, not adversaries. Actual living, breathing humans just like themselves, whose circumstances — not moral failures — led to their situation. Portland needs to make sure everyone has a seat at our table first before we invite the world over to eat.

Four unhoused Portlanders have filed a class action lawsuit against the City of Portland for discarding private property confiscated during city-sanctioned sweeps of homeless campsites. The lawsuit, filed Monday by local civil rights attorneys Michael Fuller and Juan Chavez, states it "does not seek to change Oregon’s laws on camping site sweeps – only to enforce them." […] The lawsuit accuses the city of violating plaintiffs' constitutional rights to property and against unlawful seizure and, by doing so, violating the city's Anderson Agreement. "The City has engaged in a pattern, practice, and custom of depriving individuals subject to their sweeps of houseless encampments of their property and liberty," the lawsuit claims. The suit also accuses the city of "vagueness" in regards to the way it enforces its camping laws, since the city offers unhoused Portlanders "no alternative solution for how to avoid having their property lost or destroyed." Plaintiffs are not requesting anything from the city, aside from requiring city employees and its contractors adhere to its own policies regarding campsite sweeps. That is, all but one policy: The lawsuit asks the city to not enforce the city's latest protocol for increased sweeps announced last week "until it is no longer ambiguous, arbitrary, and unlawful."

Despite coronavirus outbreaks at shelters in other cities, Multnomah County isn’t changing its practices, citing measures in place to separate people. --- But barriers have not been added between beds at the Oregon Convention Center shelter or between beds at other shelters in the county’s system that did not already have them. Originally, placing barriers between beds was among the county’s COVID-19 guidelines for shelters, but that recommendation has since been removed. Toevs has said the guidelines were written when it was expected that sick and well people would be housed together. However, because the virus often presents as asymptomatic and testing hasn’t been conducted at shelters, it’s unknown whether Multnomah County has effectively separated those with COVID-19 from those who are well.

Forty-five tents are slated for each of the campsites which should begin opening early next week — one in Old Town and two campsite in the Central Eastside. A minimum of 135 people will have access to these shelter-in-place camps. Partners who already share tents could increase that total. Since the city began to shut down over COVID-19, unhoused people wandered a suddenly quiet city of shuttered services and boarded-up doors. Gone are the libraries where people would spend days, the Starbucks where some unhoused people would splurge on coffee and use the restroom. Drop-in spaces limit the number of people who come in. At Street Roots, people wait on duct-tape lines spaced 6 feet apart to access mail, income, and sinks with soap.

Multnomah County has at least 4,000 people living in shelters, cars and on the street on any given night. Health officials say they are among the most vulnerable in a pandemic like the one sweeping through Oregon.

It’s easy to see poor people living in public spaces and the trash that accumulates, but this is a particular way of considering impact on public spaces, with a singular disregard for the punitive nature in taking away people’s belongings because they don’t have a home to hide them in. If it’s just about trash — we know how to get rid of trash. So I ask the mayor: if ending homelessness is a defining problem of our city, shouldn’t we demand that everything that impacts the lives of unhoused people also support health and housing? To do anything less is to fall short on vision. […] Navigation teams have been sent to nine camps out of approximately 3,000 camps that have been swept. A more constructive system would send these navigation teams or other outreach workers to build possibilities with unhoused people every single time city is about to destroy their living space. Every single time. […] People need legal places to sleep. And many people actually would be well-served having nearby land to at least camp. A federal appeals court has upheld that it is inhumane to break down active camps without places for people to go. […] A policy entirely driven by complaining is destructive to our city when, in fact, many people in this city want to help. If a private entity wants to open space for camping, fast track this. In fact, staff at HUCIRP has been thinking along these lines, putting together a program for hygiene trailers. If your organization might be able to host one, I urge you to apply. I would like this program to be widely successful, but people need to know that this is possible.

Schwiebert, Mayer, the solid core of volunteers, and the hundreds of poor and marginalized people who have come to rely on the Sunnyside Community House are determined not to lose the special community they have built together over the last 38 years. “We will do what we have to do in a mobile way. We will do one-on-one support. We will find a place where we can have meetings once a week with our people. We will try to orchestrate pop-up meals and community spaces that will let us have one-offs until we can raise enough money or find a space that will open for us,” Mayer said. Mayer has created a new website using the groups new name, beaconpdx.org. All donations will go through Metanoia, the nonprofit Methodist congregation to which Schwiebert, her husband and Peace House all belong. But for now, a legion of helpers are rushing against the clock to fill storage units around the city with load after load of bunk beds, kitchen equipment, tablecloths, blankets, holiday decorations, canned food and a barber chair in hopes of one day having a home again. “The work is not done,” Schwiebert said, “and I’m not done with the work.”

Volunteers from the group Free Hot Soup are intending on taking the City of Portland to court over attempts to restrict their ability to serve meals to the houseless of Portland, according to a press release by the Oregon Justice Resource Center. There are a dozen plaintiffs suing the city according to the press release. The release states, “a group of Portland volunteers is suing the City of Portland to protect the rights of people to provide vital free food services and other necessities for people who are houseless or otherwise food insecure. Their lawsuit asks the courts to block and declare unconstitutional a proposed new policy from Parks & Recreation that would place unfair restrictions and burdens on voluntary groups who provide food to people at city parks.” […] Advocates and activists going against the City of Portland for the way they treat they houseless here have been saying that the city government is unduly influenced by the Portland Business Alliance. The email exchange and actions by Fish suggest these concerns may be semi-valid. Research by a graduate student at Portland State University named Kaitlyn Dey shows how the Portland Business Alliance runs the downtown business district as a Business Improvement District and advocates aggressively for anti-houselessness policies downtown like no sit or lay regulations.

Multnomah County is experiencing a spike in chronic homelessness, according to figures presented to local elected officials Tuesday. As part of his annual presentation to commissioners from Portland and Multnomah County, Marc Jolin, the director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services, warned that the number of people who report being homeless for more than a year has grown — even as the county’s overall homeless population continues to hover around 4,000. The most recent point in time count showed 1,770 people were chronically homeless, a 37% increase from two years ago. Half reported having a mental illness. Half reported a substance abuse disorder. A little less than one-third reported both. Jolin said the office already knows what the solution is. “The fact that we don’t have supporting housing is why we’re seeing a persistent increase in the chronically homeless over time,” he said.

People of color disproportionately experience homelessness on each Point in Time survey. That remains true this year -- and gets slightly worse. While people of color make up less than 30% of the county’s total population, nearly 40% of homeless people in 2019 are not white. Native American people remain the most disproportionately homeless group in Multnomah County. They also are the most likely to be chronically homeless, which is defined as experiencing homelessness for more than a year and having an addiction, mental health condition or physical disability that makes getting and staying in housing difficult. The entire chronically homeless population grew in 2019, though. The county found 1,769 who fit the definition -- 37% higher than in 2017.

Two changes could reduce the interactions police have with homeless people. The first is simple: Portlanders could call someone other than the cops. [...] Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who took office in January, is looking at a second fix. She wants to change who the city sends to talk with people living on Portland's streets.