Bamboozle, the Finale

Montavilla gets some new "guests" and "good neighbors."

If you read the town’s dinosaur media, you wouldn’t be aware that the Montavilla neighborhood’s fate as the site of the Joint Office of Homeless Services’ plans for a car-camp on 82d Ave. was up for a vote on the Multnomah County Commission on Thursday.

We covered the ongoing controversy—golly, it was lonely—here and here.¹

Just to cut the suspense, the vote was 3-1 to approve the bum-camp.

They bought the pitch from the Joint Office, headed by Dan Field, the $220K-a-year chief executive, who showed up with the usual number of well-paid minions, and happy-talk slides, and personal pronouns…

…golly, all white!

Julia Brim-Edwards, who represents the east side, and the targeted neighborhood, voted Yes, along with county chair Jessica Vega Pederson and councilor Lori Stegmann. Councilor Sharon Meieran cast the sole No vote. (She’s term-limited and won’t be around much longer to vex chair Vega Pederson, who did a lousy job of hiding her disdain for her fellow Big Girl.)

You can watch the proceedings on YouTube, if you have nothing better to do; the discussion starts at 3:27 after the rag-tag public comments, rants, and incoherent spiels.

Despite the media indifference, this was a pretty big deal, especially for Brim-Edwards, not to mention Montavlla. B-E attended one of the Joint’s neighborhood meetings (a staffer made it to the second) and a follow-up meeting of the Montavilla Neighborhood Association where she took copious notes but remained inscrutable.

Now we know why.

Meanwhile, as we mentioned in our last post, the Neighborhood Association’s president has put her house (across the back fence from the camp) up for sale.

Departing councilor Meieran pretty well nailed the arguments for her thumbs-down…

She wondered why the county had paid $2.5-million for the lot and how it compared to other real estate values on the avenue; and wondered about paying a total of $5-million, after renovations, when “half of that site is going to be for parking derelict vehicles that cannot be lived in;” and wondered about the project’s award to a nonprofit cut-out, Straightway Services, although “I am not familiar with (them) ever having done this kind of service before;” and wondered about the charity getting the nod, “because they were the only applicant;” and wondered that “the community should not have to tell us that we need to have security…”

Basic stuff, much of which is up in the air. (The county hasn’t even finalized Straightway’s contract, which lacks—after blah-blah about equity and cultural awareness—any finalized metrics for judging whether Straightway will actually be able to run a 24/7 operation.)

Councilor Stegmann had a few questions: would the pods have insulation seemed of great interest (no; but there will be AC and a little hotplate thingy, the Joint replied); and what staffing the place would cost, which prompted a garbled semi-answer from the Joint. Best we could make out is that Straightway will be paid $420K.² With no sunset date, in a “you should live so long” contract.

Ms. Brim-Edwards…

…who usually exudes the confidence of a former top-rank Nike lobbyist, was (in our view) visibly nervous, probably for good reason. The kind of people who show up at tedious community meetings (carefully facilitated to keep the natives from getting too restless) are also the people who vote.

Ironically, her questions made a pretty good case for a No vote.

Among other things, she held up a page (above) showing all of the “unhoused” people scattered around the neighborhood and wondered whether the camp would reduce the spots on the chart.

Joint honcho Field gave her a winner’s smile and said he couldn’t promise that “three days after we open” there wouldn’t be any camping in “either direction.” Odd: your garden-variety tent-campers won’t be allowed into the facility.

Then there was the matter of the much-discussed cordon sanitaire pledged around the camp (150-feet was mentioned at the neighborhood meetings); well, said Field, he couldn’t “commit to that by law,” since it’s against Portland city code. And added that there’s a “lot beyond our control.”

Nice to know.

As for the ticklish question of who will be allowed into the car-camp once what B-E called the “opaque” admissions procedures have been ironed out; well, the Joint replied that the issue of visitors was “something we’re working out,” and that, “likely only guests will be onsite,” but then maybe some “community groups, things of that sort,” might get admtted. And, please remember, they’re not “residents,” but “guests.”

Mere taxpayers? Nah.

B-E also pointed out that it was “important” for future schematic drawings of the project to actually portray the adjacent houses, rather than the abstract blocks on the current rendering.

Finally, she raised the issue that probably got her Yes vote: the Good Neighbor Agreement.

It hasn’t been written yet; a committee made up of functionaries from the Mt. Tabor/Montavilla Business Association and the Montavilla Neighborhood Association is working on it—no telling when it will be done. They’re modeling it on the Clinton Triangle Village GNA—another oddity, since (as we wrote before) the camp doesn’t actually have any non-industrial neighbors.

If one reads its 29-pages, with various requirements and metrics, one might notice that there are no penalties if the metrics go down.

As one neighbor in the Joint’s dog-n-pony show had observed, the baseline of comparison for any metrics measuring the camp’s impact in Montavilla will be artificially low. That’s because the camp is right across the street from the infamous Sts. Peter and Paul Church, which has trashed the neighborhood with its anything-goes tolerance of camping and rampant drug sales. (The church is technically shut down, waiting for a government handout to put up a slab of “affordable” housing; but new charities have taken over and are running, in effect, a daycare center for bums. The tents and drug dealers are back.)

Still, one got the feeling that the GNA, whatever it says, is a life raft that will get Brim-Edwards over the rapids of the Yes vote. Who knows; she’s a media darling, which might explain the blackout. Even PDEX.Real’s Angela Todd, who lives a few blocks away, didn’t hold B-E’s feet to the fire on her Instagram site.

It’s a good bet for B-E; as anyone who pays attention knows, voters’ memories are on a par with a gnat’s. Plus, whatever you can say about B-E, it’s likely any future opponents will be an embarrassment (which is why she glided into office in the first place).

No; it’s a done deal. The Joint crammed something risky, loaded with potential disasters, and with no idea about its duration down the neighborhood’s throat. Which is a final oddity: all of the county councilors pointed out that, in effect, every other neighborhood in Portland is watching this to see if it works. Pretty big stakes, you’d think—maybe even an argument for hanging back, since it took the Joint over 16 months to come up with their “exciting” plan.³

Maybe that’s why our local media blacked out the story. The lesson is already self-evident: What the Joint wants, it gets. Despite all of the project’s negatives, “we hopes,” “workouts,” “no commitments,” unwritten and unenforceable agreements, its record of mismanagement, its staff turnover, its messy books, its weird position between two governments that hate each other, its housing-first fixation, its personal pronouns …

They win.

1. Just to be fair, KOIN did a brief piece about the shelter, leaving “several neighbors displeased.” KGW covered the first meeting and even had a clip of yours truly asking half a question. The Oregonian did a perfunctory piece back in March; homelessness reporter Nicole Hayden got a basic fact wrong in her lede—campers won’t be able to sleep in their cars.

2. Not bad for essentially a two-person charity which reported gross receipts of $353,560 on its most recent 2020 federal form 990, against $170,027 in grants.

3. It’s also unprecedented; the closest car camp, Safe Parking Zone, is in Vancouver. Unlike Montavilla Village, RVs are allowed. It has no immediate residential neighbors.