Caught in the Middle
One neighborhood is dragged into the civil war over bums
I happen, by the vagaries of a long-ago Portland real estate hysteria, to live in a neighborhood known as Montavilla. It’s not quite in east Portland, clinging, as it does, to the “nice” side of the 205. But it is bisected by that ageless Bad Boy street, 82d Ave., home to about a jillion used car lots and the usual scrum of franchise fast food joints, massage parlors, strip malls, and, improbably, an elementary school that Wikipedia describes as “a school for social justice.”
It’s the kind of neighborhood that’s borderline affordable (which is why I’m on one of the neighborhood’s unpaved streets) and has some above-average dive bars and possibly the city’s greatest barber and some quirky little shops and a classic movie theater and some historic four-squares.
The neighborhood actually, back in 2017, was named one of the nation’s top ten neighborhoods by the Lonely Planet travel guide, which must have startled even its boosters. Speaking of which, few locals will forget the run that Antifa took back in 2017 to load the Montavilla Neighborhood Association with a roster of candidates including the guy in a woman’s bikini who said wolves should do the policing since they don’t kill humans. (They lost and went away to try their hand at Molotov cocktails.)
All of this sets the scene for what is the deeply unreported civil war going on right now between the city and the county with—as usual—the social disaster known as “homelessness” putting Montavilla in the cross-hairs.
First, let’s set the scene:
At one end of the neighborhood is a patch of land called “the embankment,” which I wrote about under the headline “The Battle of East Burnside St.” It starred a tent favela that appeared suddenly—just a coincidence!—after Mayor Wheeler* cleaned-up a neighborhood whose employers had enough clout to get his attention, thus squeezing the feral upstream…
…in an effort that might go down in history alongside Roman Emperor Caligula’s battle with the North Sea.
Amazingly, the city’s hired shock troops, Rapid Response Bio-Clean, came and bagged and tagged the tenters’ belongings (including the top-shelf tents that the county had handed out) and, effectively, kicked them out.
They came back, by my count, five more times. Bums in/ bums out. Bums would arrive in a panel truck or late-model hatchback (where’d they get ‘em? Don’t ask)/ bums bagged and tagged/ bums out. A merry dance that now is due for yet another round, as of yesterday with this avatar-tent…
…but on the whole, word seems to have gotten around the homeless community: Lay off the embankment because the neighbors will bombard the city’s homelessness complaint website which somebody—God bless ‘em—actually seems to read.
A bureaucratic first!
That Wheeler, laboring under the general view that he’s a disorganized wimp, is serious about this stuff was indicated by the mayor’s reshuffle of the city’s too-numerous bureaus (this will all go away in two years under the flakey new charter). The tell was Dan Ryan being unceremoniously dethroned from his former perch overseeing the bloated bureaucracy of the Joint Office of Homeless Services and being reassigned as something harmless called the commissioner of “culture and liveability.”
The mayor, with tough guy Sam Adams whispering in his ear, will now “run” the Joint Office part that belongs to the city. He has already lobbied the merciless ladies of the county to help fund hyper-shelters, which will be the only option offered (beyond vaguely promised housing years in the future) to the feral. This will, presumably, get the ACLU and other “advocates” off his back and help skate past the disastrous Boise decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which never got the memo from the Supreme Court that making policy isn’t really what courts should be doing anymore.
It was, like it or not, a naked “Go Somewhere Else” policy and the first really effective response to the “crisis,” since Mayor Charlie Hales turned on the homeless spigot back in 2016…which seems like a century ago.
Meanwhile—very much under the radar—the county had its own ideas about Montavilla and the homeless. As Wheeler bunted them off the embankment, the county was ever so quietly shopping for real estate.
It came to light when one of the town’s best journalists, Jacob Loeb, dropped this little nugget into his micro-news platform, Montavilla News.
In the second half of 2022, Multnomah County purchased two automotive sales lots in Montavilla along SE 82nd Avenue. At least one location will become an outdoor alternative shelter serving houseless Portlanders next year.
Typically, the county grabbed the spots without having any end game in mind. Or as Loeb put it, diplomatically…
JOHS staff have yet to determine the type of alternative outdoor shelter planned for 333 SE 82nd Avenue. The site could support either a safe park site for non-RV passenger vehicles or a village-style shelter with small freestanding shed-style Pallet shelters.
Loeb, anticipating obvious questions, added…
Residents are pre-selected for both types of alternative shelters. These sites will not support drop-in services, and site operators will discourage unsanctioned camping around the property. County staff point to another JOHS-funded shelter in the neighborhood as an example of what they intend to create at this site. Beacon Village opened its 10-pod village to residents earlier this year near NE Glisan Street and has successfully housed a small group of formerly unhoused people within a church parking lot.
Short version: these will be nice bums. Our kinda dependents. And don’t worry about how they’ll be “selected.” Or about the ones who won’t make the cut.
A quick drive-by shows the Beacon Village church—proudly flying the LGBTetc. flag—has tucked the little pods behind a high fence behind their parking lot in a leafy neighborhood far from, shall we say…the distractions of 82d Ave. And, although Loeb says the tenants are “successfully housed,” he offers no metric for the judgment. It’s unlikely the county will either.
It’s 10 pods…so do the arithmetic. Drop in the bucket, anyone?
So now there will be two more whatevers, an archipelago of sorts, all within an easy walk of one another. Unlike a church parking lot (for which the church undoubtedly receives rent from the county) the two lots on 82d Ave are in a different league.
Portland Maps indicates that the property at 333 SE 82d sold for $575,000; Loeb says the owner told him that the county paid $2,250,000. The property at 1818 SE listed a sales price of $2,015,000.
$4-million and change for how many feral souls? Again, do the arithmetic.
And that number doesn’t include what the county will pay non-profits to operate those lots…nor does anyone bother noting that the two properties generated a total of $37,133.31 in property taxes last year alone. Wonder what Portland Public Schools and the other bureaucracies with their snouts in the trough might have to say about the deal.
The folks who owned those lots got a great deal. Back in 2008 the property at 333 SE 82d was purchased for $1,075,000; in 2006 the lot at 1818 was bought for $790,000.
Do the arithmetic.
The county, as it turns out, seems to see Montavilla as a great place to shop ‘n’ spend.
One of the “affordable” projects financed by a county bond issue will be built almost around the corner at 75th St. and Glisan. It caught our eye back in April, 2022 under the headline In the Belly of the Beast.
It will be massive…
…and in keeping with our socialistic architecture, it will be ugly. It will also, coincidentally, have cubicles for 41 households “who have experienced chronic homelessness.”
As Loeb has reported…
For the two affordable housing buildings the cost has increased from $56.5 million…to about $72 million over the past year.
Lucky Montavilla!
Lucky developers!
Lucky used car lot owners!
It’s striking, isn’t it, that within about six blocks the two opposing city/county philosophies are battling it out. Wheeler moves ‘em out; the county moves ‘em back in.
Wheeler, say whatever you will about him, seems to grasp that “compassion” was only working for the benefit of a sub-class of people who were contributing nothing—beyond the jobs in the Joint Center and non-profits—to the betterment of a city in deep, deep trouble. There is no available, credible metric that would indicate that having thousands of the feral on the streets, out there for a whole bookshelf of psychological, sociological, drug, crime, bad-luck reasons, in any way benefits the city. Instead, they cost middle-class taxpayers (and don’t forget those awful people making more than $125-grand who are targeted for a Metro tax) a ton of money for, well…the foreseeable future. Like, maybe, forever.
And note: none of this capital goes directly into the pockets of a single “houseless” person. Simple truth.
Local media, no surprise, is oblivious to this. Take, for example, the huzzahs over the opening—finally, after $26-million was spent on a derelict building—of the Behavioral Health Resource Center, with speeches from folks who will pay their housing costs with paychecks from the county.
Why, you might ask, was it built downtown? Because…
… that’s where the bums are.
As the Tribune’s Joe Gallivan reported…
The center is aimed at helping some of the most critical homeless cases downtown, whom many blame for scaring away tourists, shoppers and suburbanites.
The building…
…where anyone can get food, showers, book a time to do laundry or just rest….small rooms for consulting with contractors who can help with finding housing, work and medical care…color coding and no dead ends where people can feel trapped…for biophilia, lots of wood slats are used where possible, and the fluorescent lights are timed to human circadian rhythms…rooms where 19 people can live for up to a year…
…sounds like a permanent deal. If there’s an off-ramp, the county is schtum.
Anyone think that the little colonies on 82d Ave. won’t be there for a very long time? Does the word “embedded” suggest itself?
Wheeler is a lame duck. The county buys ‘n’ builds.
Guess who’ll win.
And Montavilla?
If I owned a used car lot on 82d, I’d be on the phone to the county even as we speak. Doubling your investment is a hell of a deal.
*Now that Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty has been booted out of office, her priceless epithet for the mayor is hereby retired.
The BOISE decision is not what the city of Portland and other cities claim it to me.
They use the Ninth Circuit decision to claim that they have no ability to pass any rules forbidding street camping or other homeless invasions.
That is simply not true.
That decision, which hopefully will be reviewed at some point by the US Supreme Court and overturned, only forbids criminalizing homelessness by allowing police to make custodial arrests for those obstructing the sidewalk, and were living in the street. The vast majority of lesser laws in Oregon are called “infractions“ and do not carry any possibility of jail time. Virtually all traffic offenses from speeding to careless driving fall into this category, and nothing would legally prevent Portland, or any other city, from continuing to pass regulations forbidding “street camping.” The only thing they can’t do is arrest them, which in Portland wouldn’t make any difference because the current district attorney would never prosecute anybody.
"Bums to the left of me, vagrants to the right
Here I am, caught in the middle with you...."