Portland mayor’s staff pitched creating 1,000-person group shelters to end camping by homeless people, records show

Members of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler’s team have pitched creating as many as three massive, temporary homeless shelters staffed by Oregon National Guard members and others in an attempt to end unsanctioned camping citywide.

The untested, unprecedented and controversial plan was outlined in an eight-page memo that the mayor’s office sent to officials with Multnomah County, the Metro regional government and Gov. Kate Brown’s office on the last day of January.

The memo, authored by Sam Adams, the former Portland mayor and now senior adviser to Wheeler, asked all four jurisdictions join together to launch a coordinated effort by June 1, using available executive and emergency powers to fulfill it.

The document details an incremental, methodical approach to prohibiting encampments across the city, targeting areas that impact schools and hospitals, violate the American with Disabilities Act or line major roadways.

The goal would be to ultimately force up to 3,000 people experiencing homelessness to transition into the giant group shelters, which would operate for three years – the amount of time, said Adams, needed for money from a new voter-approved homeless services tax to begin fully flowing into local coffers.

Officials would site the shelter locations on city-owned land or use eminent domain to use private property, according to the memo. The document also proposes that the mayor, governor, county chair and Metro president could seek federal emergency funding to address the region’s homelessness crisis.

“I understand my suggestions are big ideas. I imagine it will startle some,” Adams wrote. “Our work so far, mine included, has … failed to produce the sought-after results.”

Local nonprofit leaders immediately balked at the proposal.

Marisa Espinoza, policy advocate for Northwest Pilot Project, which provides housing and homeless support services in Portland, called it “outrageously misguided.”

She stressed the need to address the lack of affordable housing instead of creating mass shelters that she said would harm people.

“Super-mass congregate shelters would fly in the face of trauma-informed, client-centered practices which are necessary to assist people experiencing homelessness and overcome barriers to long-term, permanent housing placement,” Espinoza said.

“Introducing a militarized security force to an environment that has already proven to not be effective for many vulnerable populations would only compound the challenges faced by people with disabilities, people disproportionately targeted by law enforcement and people escaping violence,” she continued.

Espinoza described the proposal as an attempt to criminalize homelessness, reverting to prior anti-camping policies in Portland and elsewhere that courts ruled were unconstitutional and harmful.

Andy Miller, executive director of Human Solutions, said the strategy outlined by Wheeler’s office would add to the trauma homeless individuals already experience. Miller also criticized the proposed use of the National Guard.

“An approach to homelessness led by law enforcement and a sector of our military flies grotesquely in the face of our city’s stated goal to advance racial justice and will disproportionately harm our BIPOC houseless neighbors,” said Miller, whose nonprofit develops affordable housing and provides emergency shelter and assistance to homeless families.

He added that many homeless individuals have already stated mass shelters are not a safe option for them.

Tristia Bauman, senior attorney at the National Homelessness Law Center, said she felt shocked by the Portland proposal.

“While we can all agree that human beings should not be living outside and that everyone should be able to enjoy the human right to housing, forcing people into a few congregate shelters is not a solution to homelessness,” Bauman said. “A one-size-fits-all approach to the crisis of homelessness fails to address the diversity of the population and the diversity of needs.”

Bauman said the proposal sounded to her more like a plan to remove visible homelessness by warehousing people from public view rather than a sensible policy attempt to address housing needs. Not all unhoused people are better off in shelters than off the streets, she added.

Some western cities scaled up shelter bed capacity following a Court of Appeals decision limiting cities’ ability to prohibit camping if they did not have safe indoor sleeping locations, she said. One was Modesto, California, where shelter beds were few and far between at the time of the court decision in 2018, she said.

However, no city increased their capacity so much as to warehouse every individual and thus prohibit outdoor living, she said. Instead, she said, many cities experimented with new ways to support houseless individuals.

In Riverside County, California, the county created encampment response teams that spent months providing intensive support to people in the outdoor areas where they were living before transitioning individuals to temporary apartments.