The Battle of East Burnside St.

"Homelessness" gets real on my doorstep

“Homelessness” is someone else’s problem—until it isn’t.

Let us hope that most Portland Dissent readers live in the few small oases on the official Portland measles-map of current, reported camp-sites…

…which simply proves that, despite the expenditure of $-mega-millions, including the county cueing-up $255-million to do, well…something, the feral continue to make headlines.

Even leafy Irvington got some ink, when a man living in a car, kept as a sort of virtue-pet by the Metonia Peace Community Church (showers, food, clothing—but no permanent housing), was stabbed to death recently. It was just the latest homeless-connected crime following a fatal stabbing in Old Town, among other incidents.

The Tribune, in the space of the week, offered this headline…

Businesses, residents complain of homeless camp crimes

…assuming, oddly, that this is “news.”

Meanwhile, the Oregonian’s homeless advocate, Nicole Hayden, reported that…

Portland residents with disabilities sue city for allowing homeless encampments, tents to block sidewalks

…and in telling her tale managed to lecture her readers…

Without enough resources to transition unhoused people from the streets to housing, encampments will continue being built. While the city continues to shuffle encampments from one city block to another, homeless advocates have repeatedly said that creates causes trauma and can delay people from making progress on obtaining housing.

…which assumes that—for some reason—the people of Portland (who pay hefty taxes to, among other things, build public housing) owe the feral a cornucopia of free stuff.

Lots of stuff.

Which, if you read the heavily-moderated NextDoor group, Portland Houseless Policy Neighborhood Impact, is a prospect that drives some folks nuts. They’re NIMBYs, of course, high on the list of progressive villains.

It all makes for terrific TV, with shots of crappy tents surrounded by the nimbus of weird trash interspersed with interviews of hapless homeowners trapped in neighborhoods that, frankly, aren’t high on the Zillow rankings. Other peoples’ problems are…entertaining

And then the problem arrived in my neighborhood.

So let’s start with a bit of social geography. I live east of 82d…’nuff said. It’s far from the worst Portland east side neighborhood, and the sight of young couples with dogs and toddlers walking around is a reassuring sign. The maps say it’s called Montavilla—but no mountain and—for sure—no villas.

Burnside St. bisects the neighborhood; go a few blocks south and you’ll run into busy Stark St.; the neighborhood is a traditional short-cut between the two arteries, although the deeply potholed gravel street that fronts my house slows the traffic.

The first indicators of social breakdown popped-up on East Burnside during the pandemic when the city, for no reason that made any sense, suspended cleaning-up the camps. Which boomed. A squad of clapped-out RVs parked a few blocks away; a little tent popped up across the street behind some bushes. Nothing to worry about…

Then Mayor Whatshisname, prodded (one guesses) by Sam Adams, who had leaked a “get tough” memo to the media on handling the homeless (discussed here), got serious about cleaning up Old Town. There’s lots of money riding on the dumpy neighborhood, and the Goodman family has big plans for some run-down buildings close to the district. The tents had to go.

Just a coincidence, but a few days ago, this appeared suddenly on a stretch of what one might call “no man’s land” that slopes down to Burnside. It has a few trees, the grass gets cut every once in a while, and there is a weird little piece of public art—a circle of lumpy stones, kind of our neighborhood Stonehenge.

Suddenly, there were tents.

…and a moral quandary. Clearly, for whatever reason, these were fellow citizens living in unspeakable squalor—the kind of degradation you might tsk-tsk about in India or some Third World hellhole.

This wasn’t something glimpsed out of a windshield at 30 mph; it was a few footsteps away. And as I peered into an actual, real tent, I noticed it was unoccupied…and I wondered: what is the person who lives here doing to pass the empty day?

And then, with a soupçon of guilt, I begin to wonder about the locks on my doors, the burned-out porchlight, the flimsy gate to the backyard, the stuff scheduled to arrive from Amazon...

And I remembered that the big house being built next door (not quite a “villa,” but close) had been site of an intinerant tweeker who liked to sit on the roughed-in backporch and shoot up between his toes.

Close call.

And then, as I looked down at the tents, a camper emerged: young, female, grimy, tattooed to the nines. She walked up the hill, giving me a wary look.

“You planning on staying here?” I asked.

“Yah.”

A late-model shiny blue Japanese car pulled up and the camper jumped in and the rangy dude behind the wheel yelled, “who you lookin’ at?” As he opened the door and started to step out, it occured to me that it was time to retreat.

It wasn’t my neighborhood anymore.

That night, my insomnia was especially bad as I wrestled with the conundrum that had been presented to me, up close and personal, as they say. On the one hand, the official word, especially in the Oregonian and WillyWeek and from the bully-pulpits of the numerous “advocates” and the ACLU and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and PSU professors of whatever and the various people monetizing Homelesness Inc. is…

Compassion.

On the other…give these half-dozen tents a week or two to proliferate, with the appearance of stuff from god-knows-where, with the merchants of various freshly-legalized mind-altering drugs hovering to open a new sales territory…well, do the moral calculations for yourself.

When I finally got to sleep at 5am, I hadn’t been able to do the computation.

And then, next morning, I drove past the encampment and…

…and within a day, the grizzled crew from Rapid Response Bio-Clean, doing one of the crappiest jobs in the city, was making the tents go away.

Was I happy?

You know the answer.

I returned home from a visit with my family, where my telling of the tale caused a response of their encounters—also up close—with the bundle of problems sewed up in the “homelessness” bag. The many ways Portland drives us nuts; the feeling that things are slipping out of control; that the path is an inexorable route to (among other things) saying to hell with it and bailing out. Watching a city that we like—a lot—becoming unlikeable. Untenable.

As I returned home, my headlights swept the little yellow hillside…

Back. Again.

A quick trip to the city’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program web site gave scant promise that the Rapid Response Team would be revisiting. After all, this corner of Montavilla had to compete with a city agency that…

Received 3591 new campsite reports in which 708 were reports regarding three locations along SE Powell Blvd; including 437 reports of people living in vehicles

Observed about 389 active campsites, accounting for duplicate reports about the same locations

Assessed approximately 736 campsites, engaging with people living there, collecting garbage and biohazardous materials, and coordinating with service providers

Cleaned 2 campsites, removing only identified garbage and biohazardous materials 

Removed 50 campsites that posed a risk to health and safety, safely storing campers' personal property 

…in just the week of September 5-11. The odds didn’t look good.

And, besides—back on the compassion front, didn’t the Oregonian’s Hayden say in July that removing campers was a cropper…

…the evidence to support that claim of success is all but non-existent, an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive shows. That is largely because city officials have failed to collect meaningful data or coordinate with outside groups or agencies it works with, the analysis found. The city has no evidence any individuals it rousted from sleeping on the streets got permanent housing or other needed services.

…and wasn’t I guilty of “rousting,” if only by proxy? And how about those “needed services,” whatever the hell they might be?

And shouldn’t we give the feral a free…something somewhere?

Next morning…

…Rapid Response responded. Again.

Why? The crew foreman (management at Rapid Response doesn’t answer questions) allowed that the camp got “a rating of 70,” which sped-up the action. Where does the rating come from? Beyond his pay-grade, but “lots of complaints” might do the trick.

The neighborhood had complained. Loudly.

And did we mention that there’s an election coming up.

As of this writing, the yellow hillside is clean. But the refugees from Old Town and downtown and from the other neighborhoods that can hit 70 on the complaint-o-meter are on the move. Where?

They may decide that Montavilla won’t stick. But there are other neighborhoods. Maybe yours.

While we try to figure out what we “owe” them, Rapid Response will do the dirty work. It’s just one small part of their portfolio, as their business card states…

• Suicide cleanup

• Unattended death

• Hoarding and gross filth

• Human feces removal

• Vehicle accident cleanup…

All in a day’s work.