The Tent City

 By Matt Rockwell

One of the first things I noticed when moving to Portland in 2016 was that there were a large number of people living on the streets. Under the overpasses, parks, sidewalks, and in the door ways of buildings, until the aggravated building owner would move them along, people were looking for any shelter they could find. The more I expanded out in unfamiliar Portland neighborhoods I would see more and more homeless camps. Without knowing any information at the time, only seeing what I saw, the initial reaction was “it seems like the city isn’t doing anything to help these people”. 3,801 people were documented as homeless in Portland that previous year.

As the years went on, as a way to clear homeless camps, the city of Portland would make spaces inaccessible, they began closing off these areas of overpasses with bars so people could not sleep there. Unoccupied patches of land off the sides of roads, where people would pitch their tents, were then covered with large, jagged boulders, so it was impossible to set up a makeshift shelter. The city's efforts to do these things seemed motivated only by trying to push these people out of the city instead of actually helping them. 

Which brings us to this year, a total of 6,633 people were documented as living on the streets or in a shelter in the city of Portland according to the Point-In-Time (PIT) survey which was conducted in one single day. This was the first population count since 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. The PIT survey in 2019 counted 4,015 people. That is a 30% increase in three years and 25% of that population say that their homelessness was brought upon by the pandemic. 

From the outside looking in, as the pandemic unfolded, more homeless camps popped up all over the city. Areas of land, which the city would have likely tried to place boulders on before the pandemic, became amassed with tents for the unsheltered. Many of these makeshift communities became permanent fixtures throughout the year. It had seemed that the city of Portland had gone from making efforts to push the homeless away to doing nothing at all.

The existing homeless shelters within the city only can take so many people a night, and taking people in during the height of COVID became a logistical nightmare. As the danger of the pandemic has subsided, I wonder what is the next step for the homeless community. Do city officials start making a concerted effort to decrease the now even more increased number of homeless? Or do they continue to do nothing at all? Regardless, the issue needs to be treated with more compassion and viable solutions for these people. 

Ways that you can help is by volunteering or donating to your neighbors in need. The Blanchet House is a great organization that helps provide food, shelter, and essential needs for the unsheltered people in Portland. You can donate by going to https://blanchethouse.org/donate/