OPINION | How should Portland and Multnomah County funding be spent for what is, in fact, a diversity of needs?
How could the city of Portland possibly sweep unhoused people when there’s nowhere to go?
And about those places to go — where and what should they be? Apartments? Shelters? Camps? Villages?
When there are nominally enough places to go — is the city then going to sweep everyone who’s not within the designated walls, so to speak?
This is the enduring chorus of conversations — but with new stakes.
First of all, there’s swelling pressure to scapegoat unhoused people for visible poverty amid alarmist coverage of a downtown where businesses are quiet after more than a year of people avoiding public places for the sake of public health.
Secondly, because of the confluence of new federal money with the earliest funds from the 10-year, Metro-wide homeless services measure, the Multnomah County budget and its allotment for homeless services is the largest it’s ever been.
The chorus of conversations has hit a crescendo.
I’ll start with the pressure: The city program that instigates sweeps announced "a more assertive approach" to sweeps based, ostensibly, on public health reasons. Because people are simply told to move along — the city declared it won’t try to match people to shelter — there’s good reason to question this logic.
This is after the pace of sweeps slowed down during the pandemic, following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Sweeps paused over the summer, but once the city began listing “camp removals” in September, I could only locate one week in November that the city listed no camp removals. Since January, the city through its contractors has swept at least several camps a week.
“What are they accomplishing by making people move? Where are we supposed to go?” a man who went by Black said to me, standing with friends near Skidmore fountain downtown. He and his friends — all of whom said they were experiencing homelessness — had heard the news that the city was going to be more aggressive with sweeps. “As soon as you tell them to leave, they are going to come right back because they don’t got nowhere else to go,” he said.
Announcements of sweeps create a culture of fear. People are anxious about leaving their camps to meet basic needs. Black describes how people might leave their camp to use the bathroom only to return to find their tent missing from a sweep.
“And you could have just bought it. And you have to start all the way back from zero. It’s hard to get a tent. Especially if you’ve got no income coming in. Or you’ve got to go to a place like Salvation Army or Portland Rescue Mission. They’ve got to put you on a waiting list to get you one. So where are you going to sleep in the meantime? On a cardboard box? Up under the bridge?”
But Black also wanted to talk about the money he knew was coming into the government.
“Where is that money going to?”
What would you do? I asked.
He told me he’d find a big lot for people to live, but when I asked whether he would move into that camp, he demurred.
“Me personally, I wouldn’t. But for folks who want to go in and get off the streets.”
And that brings me to the conflicts between the city and the county, and between commissioners. How should this funding be spent for what is, in fact, a diversity of needs? Having this money means we can build that local safety net and infrastructure, but it’s also within a larger context of a gaping chasm between poverty and financialization of housing that drives up housing costs.
A local response lags behind a structural behemoth of a problem.
The majority of funding shows up in the Multnomah County budget — and this is because of how the city and county set up the Joint Office of Homeless Services in 2016 — that Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury proposed. The city of Portland contributes to that funding. The record-large county budget includes $52 million revenue from the brand new Metro Homeless tax measure as well as contributions from the city of Portland and new American Rescue Plan federal funding.
The Joint Office of Homeless Services has led a months-long process of gathering feedback to inform the local implementation plan of that Metro tax revenue, turning to rent assistance as its primary method of supportive housing. This is, quite simply, a means to make apartment housing affordable for people with little to no income. Current estimates of wages necessary to afford housing in Portland are upwards of $24 an hour.
It’s important to note that this Joint Office implementation plan centers race, because if it doesn’t, history shows, racial disparities drive fissures. So this means investing in strategies to reach Black and Indigenous people who are overrepresented not only in street homelessness but also in housing insecurity. That’s why rent assistance and outreach that is centered through organizations designed to support Black and Indigenous people are so important. Income levels are severely strapped for Black and Indigenous Portlanders.
But there is additional funding outside the Homeless Services measure that can be used, as Multnomah County Commissioner Sharon Meieran and others argue, to set up more camps, villages and hygiene spaces. Some of that funding is designated for that, including the city funds for the C3PO camps. And, an important frame is health itself.
And also importantly, people argue for organized camps with polar opposite motives. There’s the humanitarian crisis that Meieran argues. And then there is the goal of disappearing people (once the camps are there, people are forced to stay there or be swept). That’s, of course, at complete odds with a humanitarian perspective. Anything good can be flipped on its head. We have to watch vigilantly.
In a rather convoluted way, current hygiene responses (limited garbage management as well as portable toilets) are financed through the city budget in the same program that administers sweeps via the Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program, which is housed under the Office of Management and Finance.
It’s a mind-bending Chutes and Ladders of budgets and programs often at odds with each other. Sweeps run counter to other efforts.
There are possibilities, there is passion, and there are lives at stake. It’s an important time to be involved.
The county budget gets a vote on June 3.
The city budget gets a vote on June 8.
The increased sweeps, reportedly, begin now.
STREET ROOTS PODCAST: Escalation of sweeps rattles Portland’s unhoused community
Street Roots vendor ambassadors will deliver commentary about these sweeps from the ground, and we’ll post updates online and in our print editions.
Kaia Sand is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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