Laurelhurst Park is one of the common places for the homeless to set up camp, and the city wants them out. Over the past few months, they have been sending the Hazardous Waste Removal teams that are contracted by the city to forcibly remove these people from their homes. On March 30th, they were sent to clean up the camps at Laurelhurst and further displace the homeless who are living there. They were thwarted by a group of vigilant protestors who kept the HWR crew from stepping in. This highlights a huge problem that Portland (however, this problem is certainly not unique to Portland) has: the city does nothing to help lift these homeless people out of poverty and homelessness, and rather just displaces them to the outskirts of town as often as possible. The problem is that displacing them further makes it even more difficult for them to lift themselves out of homelessness.
The further away from town they are, the harder it is for them to access things like healthy and clean food and water, medical care, and even things like public restrooms. The City of Portland doesn't seem to care about these issues, as their reasoning for kicking the homeless out of Laurelhurst Park in the first place was because of the concern that money being put into 'beautifying' our parks was being wasted due to the homeless encroaching in the area. Nearly every argument made towards getting rid of the homeless camps in Laurelhurst has to do with either this waste of money, or because it is 'unsightly.' Both of these arguments neglect to understand that these are real people's lives that they are talking about, and losing a small amount of money or having to deal with an 'ugly-looking' park is a small price to pay to allow human beings to be able to live in peace.
There are many who claim that they are 'scared' to be in the park now, which only furthers this false prejudice that homeless people are inherently violent criminals or that they wish to do harm in any capacity. In an interview with Fox 12, a former homeless man, Randy Rainwater said “Until they place them in housing somewhere, it’s not doing them no good moving them around from spot to spot because it’s going to be the same problems everywhere that you hear from everyone else,” and it highlights the conundrum perfectly: If the City of Portland just clears Laurelurst's camps without providing even a modicum of support for these individuals, they will either come back to Laurelhurst, or just move elsewhere and still be homeless. Pushing these problems aside, and displacing these people time and time again neglects the actual issues causing homelessness.
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