The day after the homeless/industrial complex vacated a cluster of 30 tiny homes in Old Town, an agitated young man with a shaved head stormed around the camp, as if he were looking for something he couldn’t find.
The gate on the security fence at the camp, occupying a block at Northwest Hoyt Street and Broadway, was wide open. While many of the residents had been moved to a tiny home camp in Multnomah Village, this guy said he was relocating across the river.
He hurried back and forth among the tiny one-room, white cabins that have doors that lock, small windows, heaters, air conditioners and mattress pads. The man scrounged discarded items left here and there – bicycle parts, 5-gallon water jugs, assorted tools, a suitcase, an almost full box of needles, clothing. Some of the tiny homes were empty and tidy. Others had doors hanging off the hinges, and contents strewn about.
It looked like any frantic moving day where someone finally threw up their hands and said, “Enough!” and couldn’t pack anymore. Among the debris scattered on the ground were empty prescription bottles from Central City Concern and Idaho State Hospital in Blackfoot, ID (the facility specializes in mental health treatment for persons in the criminal justice system).
A rat darted under tiny home Number 8. The occupant in Number 28 hand-scrawled on one side of his door: “5/18/22 I’m taking off for a few days. Need to get my (shit) right. See you soon. Aaron.”
On the other side of the door: “If you always do what you always did you’ll always get what you always got. It is what it is.”
Commentary elsewhere: “Punk’s not dead.” “This is just a phallic symbol” next to a picture of an automatic pistol. “Guns kill people so do people.” “Never trust a hippie.”
Leaning against one pile of stuff in the yard was a large sign advertising “Washington Lottery Eat, Sleep, Play, Scratch.”
Staff advice to residents on a posted notice: “When stocking the plastic wares, please be sure to place the handles up!! Unsanitary to place them with the handles down.”
A sign on the gate: “Please yell your name when you leave; we don’t always see you!”
“For medical emergencies or serious threat, call 9-1-1. If you need a police response, you can ask for an officer from the Enhanced Crisis Intervention Team.”
A couple of days before the Old Town tiny home camp shut down, a 60-year-old resident named Lee stood across the street from his tiny place where he had lived “a year and some.” He heard about the news stories blaming the closure on gunfire, but he felt safe inside his home.
“It isn’t the residents who live here that are afraid. It’s the staff. They don’t want to work here anymore,” said Lee. “If media could help Black Lives Matter … every life matters. We’re getting booted out for no reason because a staff member was scared.”
His companion, 44-year-old Jubilee, weeks earlier had been moved to a former Motel 6 at Southeast Stark and 182nd streets. She was visiting Lee at Old Town. They looked across the street at the camp where the roofs and windows of the tiny homes are visible above the fence. Jubilee pointed to their units.
“That was his, that is mine.”
She still had some belongings in her unit – “family heirlooms, my grandma’s china, pictures of my sons and random crap.” Jubilee said she grew up on a farm in Vancouver and has spent years homeless.
“I’m the woman who asks people downtown what their favorite color is,” she said.
Lee credits the Old Town camp with helping him get off hard drugs. He did odd fix-it jobs in the camp and was paid $20 an hour.
“I saved some money. … That place got me out of my old ways, stopped me from doing dope. All I do now is smoke pot. This is great for the right person. … I wish they’d had these a long time ago.”
Lee looked wistfully across the street.
“That was my house. I don’t want to walk away. It was literally built for me. That’s my house!”
The Old Town camp had been run by All Good Northwest, a nonprofit that also runs Queer Affinity, a tiny home shelter for LGBTQIA+ on Naito Parkway that opened last month. When All Good Northwest pulled out for safety reasons, the nonprofit’s executive director, Andy Goebel, told news outlets the county couldn’t find another vendor to run it.
All Good Northwest was preparing to open another tiny home camp in Southwest Portland’s Multnomah Village, so that’s where many of the Old Town residents were moved to this week via chartered bus.
Compared to Portland’s Old Town camp, the Multnomah site is suburbia. It’s located in the parking lot at the former Sears Armory on Multnomah Boulevard, where there’s a sign greeting visitors to Multnomah Village – “The Village in the Heart of Portland.” It’s a pleasant, walkable community with some distinctive small shops, restaurants, bars and an independent bookstore, Annie’s.
The 30 tiny homes surrounded by a security gate are also referred to as a “village” by the staff and city officials. But it is more accurately a camp or outdoor shelter. It is situated between city-owned property, where construction equipment is parked, and an adjacent neighborhood with homes on leafy, rose-filled streets.
“It’s really decent, clean, better staffed … I don’t hear no shootings,” Lee said a few days after he settled in. “I smoked a cigarette to calm myself, and I could hear it crackling it was so quiet.”
The only downside, he said, is that Jubilee remains in the motel on the east end of the county. For reasons he doesn’t understand, she isn’t allowed to move to the Multnomah camp. So Lee set up a tent near Washington Park where Jubilee can come and visit.
“I’m not near anybody or bothering anyone,” he said. Three other tents have since joined his.
If Lee felt protective of the tiny home assigned to him in Old Town, his next-door housed neighbors in Multnomah Village feel even more protective of the houses they have been paying for and living in for years.
While staff members at All Good Northwest are allowed to complain about fears of violence in Old Town, the established neighbors in Multnomah Village have been ridiculed for their concerns over what the new residents might bring.
In a commentary four months ago in The Portland Tribune, Multnomah Village resident Frank X. Rudloff wrote about neighbors’ frustrations at being dismissed as NIMBYs by city officials.
“It is time for the city to treat their neighbors with all the dignity and compassion they propose to offer homeless residents…,” Rudloff said.
Far from showing sympathy to the neighbors living closest to the camp, a group called Friends of Multnomah Safe Rest Village was formed. It has further politicized the issue into YIMBYs vs. NIMBYs.
The Friends group, coordinated by former Portland Public Schools Board Member Ruth Adkins, who lives in Hillsdale, offers lawn and window signs to Multnomah Village residents and businesses welcoming the newcomers.
Adkins has established a Friends website, www.fmsrv.org, with a template borrowed from a tiny home camp in St. Johns for homeless veterans, run by the nonprofit Do Good Multnomah –not to be confused with All Good Northwest that ran Old Town.
In their mission statement, the Friends group said it wants to “help address the crisis of homelessness in Portland.”
For move-in day, the group donated blankets and pillows. (Perhaps they should have retrieved and cleaned some of the bedding left behind in Old Town.)
The Friends website invites “discussion” but lays down so many subjective restrictions on what can be said that honest conversation is clearly not the goal.
Comments elsewhere on social media display a virtuous smugness by those who welcome the tiny home camp vs. those concerned about the consequences to their neighborhood:
Lisa/Moxie MacLane: “NIMBYs abound in Portland. They demand “GET HOMELESS OFF THE STREETS & INTO SHELTER” but never want any housing/shelter in their neighborhood. Performance liberalism is a disease in Portland. I appreciate REAL liberals who welcome local housing/shelter of our unhoused neighbors.”
Marie Wolfe: “So you don’t have a problem if I drop all their trash off at your driveway? It will only run you about an extra $20-25 per month to have Portland Disposal and Recycle to collect it from your home. I am sure you are willing to chip in and help out. Right? Oh, and do you have garage space for their returnable cans. Many houseless neighbors have several friends who donate bags of bottles on weekly basis.”
Justin Diller: “It’s telling that when you see your neighbors struggling, the first thing you notice is trash. I hope you can re-examine your priorities and put humans first.”
It’s telling that Diller sees the humanity in the homeless but not in folks like Dave Mitchell, who now lives next to the tiny home camp.
“I don’t take kindly to losing $100-200,000 of my retirement equity from a city decision that sought no input from those of us who pay a lot in taxes,” Mitchell posted on a Facebook thread. “If you find this approach to governance commendable, then you and I clearly have different ideas on how a democracy is supposed to function.”
The tiny home village concept has been promoted by Portland City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who practically goes on autopilot when he talks about his homeless, alcoholic brother who died on the streets.
It’s a sad story. It’s revealing in ways that Ryan may not appreciate.
President John F. Kennedy also had a sibling who guided his political conscience. His sister Rosemary was mentally disabled. Kennedy’s wealthy father, following the best advice from the experts of the day, had Rosemary undergo a prefrontal lobotomy. She ended up requiring 24/7 care for the rest of her life, which fortunately her family could afford.
Kennedy later signed the Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Construction Act. This was supposed to provide mental health services so people who were institutionalized in large state hospitals could move back into their communities. Did anybody consider whether the institutionalized patients were wanted back in their communities, or who would pay for them?
A compelling personal story like Ryan’s or Kennedy’s doesn’t automatically translate into good public policy.
(When the Oregon Historical Society did a retrospective on Kennedy five years ago, the exhibit did not mention Kennedy’s New Frontier in mental health – even though it was on display right outside the door.)
Neighbors immediately adjacent to the Multnomah tiny home camp may have reason to be cautious. The problem isn’t necessarily the homeless residents, but other persons the shelter could attract – drug dealers, thieves, squatters.
The St. Johns tiny home pod, which has been open for a year, appears to be well-integrated into the neighborhood. It is surrounded with an attractive wooden fence, and there is staff on duty 24 hours.
Even so, when I visited it last month, there were vans with busted windows parked on the street in front and an SUV, a pickup truck and an old delivery truck that looked like people were living in them.
Will Multnomah Boulevard start attracting car campers and tents?
If so, Adkins and her Friends group can bring pillows and blankets.
Just read about Jerry Sears. Was looking for the inspirational angle. That boy died hard. I miss him now and I never knew him. Perhaps like Arthur of olden times...
https://valor.militarytimes.com/hero/7306
Idealism starts with a rhetorical question. Say, "why can't we, say, give everyone free housing?" It dies with bitterness, blame and accusations. If only we would have done it our way. If only people weren't so greedy. If only we put human life above money. If only, if only.
Human beings are imperfect not to frustrate idealists but because everything else in this world is as well. The ultimate problem with idealism is its refusal to compromise with knotty reality itself. Certitude is easy when you believe you are right.. You know, just like everyone else.
Portland is a city that confuses runaway idealism with lofty virtues. "If we weren't so greedy, nobody would ever suffer! But neoliberal corporatists love money more than people!"
Portland is filled with earnest True Believers who dare to ask difficult questions while refusing to admit the complexity of the problems themselves. When everything is extremely simple, chances are the questions it asks are the real problems.