Golis: Once a model, Portland now faces its own struggles

PORTLAND, Oregon

Just in time for summer and tourist season, Portland officials in late May ordered a sweep of downtown homeless encampments. Videos from earlier in May show a mashup of tents, makeshift shelters and detritus strung along sidewalks and freeway rights of way. Portlanders were not happy.

Downtown looks better now. When we visited last week, we saw only a scattering of tents, a few folks sleeping on the sidewalk and two people screaming at each other in a park while children played nearby.

Reviews of the city sweeps remain mixed. “Mayor Ted Wheeler says Portland’s new homelessness strategy succeeds,” reported the Portland Oregonian, “but there’s no evidence it helps house the homeless.”

One downtown worker thought the situation was “getting better,” but another insisted it was still “terrible” with people shooting up and relieving themselves on street corners.

This was not the Portland we saw in 2008 when cities all over the country were sending delegations to learn how Portland created such a livable city.

Portland then was a city proud of its regional approach to planning, its revitalization of once-gritty neighborhoods, its network of bike lanes and a successful transit system that relieved pressure on streets and highways. A visitor could ride the downtown transit system for free. Yes, for free.

“After a couple of days,” I wrote then, “it is easy to see why Portland is held up as the gold standard when it comes to smart growth. This is how cities are supposed to reinvent themselves, reducing the clog of automobiles and creating neighborhoods on a human scale.”

Whether it’s the pandemic or homelessness, Portland has surrendered some of its vitality. Once-gritty neighborhoods are becoming gritty again. Official estimates say the number of homeless people in Portland has increased by half in the past three years.

A short visit 14 years later doesn’t make me an expert, but locals acknowledge the reality. “Homelessness is a real and visible problem in our city,” admitted the Travel Portland website.

Portland — like Los Angeles, San Francisco and other West Coast cities — struggles to come up with solutions that go beyond moving homeless people to some other part of town. In Portland, complaints from neighborhoods away from downtown are more frequent now.

Homelessness in combination with violent political protests of the past few years has taken some of the luster off Portland’s reputation as a city on the move.

Of course, I don’t need to travel to Oregon to see the problems associated with people living on the streets. With mixed results, my hometown has struggled for years to help homeless people and spare neighborhoods from the squalor and bad behavior sometimes associated with homeless encampments.

In recent days, homeless people managed to reoccupy the Joe Rodota Trail in west Santa Rosa. It took months for city and county officials to figure out what to do about the first encampment, and then they got to do it all over again.

And, once again, the principal players were back in court, trying to convince a federal judge to be on their side. Judges are being left to balance the rights of the homeless against the rights of the neighbors affected by these encampments.

More than any other aspect of contemporary life, homelessness in California has become the presence that leaves people cynical about the ability of government to effect change.

The city of Rohnert Park aims to adopt new rules to limit the location of homeless camps and to mitigate fire and public health risks, Staff Writer Paulina Pineda reported last week.

“It looks great on paper,” replied longtime resident Raquel Guinn, “but it’s never going to happen.”

The homeless folks we encounter on the streets become a daily reminder that something has gone wrong, whether it’s the high cost of housing, an inequitable economy or the scarcity of services for people who suffer from mental illness or addiction.

While politicians talk up one response or another — and concerned groups advocate one solution or another — the homeless crisis remains a fact of life. Los Angeles has spent a billion dollars to house homeless people, and the number of people on the streets has increased.

Unable to produce a sufficient number of permanent shelters, Sonoma County governments have employed an array of stopgap measures, including temporary camps and tiny home villages. County officials also fenced off the Joe Rodota Trail, a popular corridor for walkers and cyclists, in order to keep more homeless people from settling there.

But temporary measures are just that — temporary. As a Press Democrat editorial noted, fencing off a public trail won’t be confused with a permanent solution.

In June, the Los Angeles Times reported: “Portland’s homelessness problem now extends well beyond the downtown core, creating a crisis of conscience for this fiercely liberal city that for years has been among America’s most generous in investing in homeless support services.”

Progressive cities grapple with their ambivalence. They want to be humane, but they also don’t want to be confronted each day by the debris and by people acting out.

In Portland and elsewhere, liberal cities are being forced to rethink their approach to homelessness. The reason is simple: Too many people are still living on the streets. Most people wish it were otherwise, but the likely result will be more sweeps and other short-term solutions.

Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com.

You can send letters to the editor to letters@pressdemocrat.com.