Homeless in the city where he was once mayor

BEND, Ore. – Craig Coyner, a man from one of the most prominent families in Bend, Oregon, rose through an acclaimed career – as a prosecutor, a defense lawyer and then a mayor who helped turn the town into one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities.

But by age 75, Coyner was occupying a bed at the shelter on Second Street, his house lost to foreclosure, his toes gnarled by frostbite, his belongings limited to a tub of tattered clothing and books.

Coyner had been pulled through a vortex of the same crises that were churning through many boom towns across the West: untreated mental illness, widespread addiction, soaring housing costs and a waning sense of community. After a life spent as a pillar of Bend’s civic life, Coyner had somehow reached a point of nearly total destitution, surrounded by the prosperity he had helped create.

Once a tiny timber town, Bend had undergone a striking transformation in recent decades as moneyed newcomers discovered a getaway that managed to be both trendy and a throwback to what everyone imagines small-town America can be.

But as housing costs strained the budgets of Bend’s nurses, teachers and police officers, homelessness soared in the city of 100,000 people, much as it had in far larger West Coast cities. The shelter where Coyner had finally found refuge had been over capacity for months.

Coyner had been born into a family committed to civic duty.

In the early 1900s, his great-grandfather was mayor of Bend, then a newly incorporated outpost in central Oregon where timber prospectors were scooping up forestlands. Before long, a community once known as a place to ford the river was a key stop on a growing railroad network. Some of the largest pine mills in the world processed logs so massive that some first needed to be split by dynamite.

By the mid-1970s, after getting drafted for a stint in the Marines, marrying his girlfriend from college and getting a law degree in Portland, Coyner returned to Bend, following his father into a career as a lawyer and settling into a compact one-story home, purchased for $25,500 in the northeast corner of town.

The couple had two daughters but split up a few years later.

In 1981, Coyner joined the City Council. He married Patty Davis, who worked selling radio advertising around Bend, and as his former wife also remarried, he stopped connecting with his daughters.

In 1984, his fellow council members elected him as mayor.

It was a time of tumult for the city. The global recession had gutted the timber industry. Locals feared the community was on the path to becoming a ghost town.

Homeless people congregated along the railroad tracks that had helped establish Bend as a timber capital. Coyner worked to raise funds for them, at times going out to the railroad tracks himself to distribute donated clothes and 19-cent cheeseburgers. His connections helped people find cheap places to live at a time when rooms could be rented for as little as $75 a month.

Coyner saw it as a time to transition Bend’s economy to something that would harness the surrounding natural beauty in new ways, welcoming visitors who sought to ski, hike, camp and bike. He and fellow council members began drawing up plans to expand the sewer system and improve road capacity.

The timber mills were shutting down, but the old mill district began evolving into what today is a ritzy shopping district with an REI, a spa and a designer jewelry store.

Some people were wary of such swift change, and in 1992, Coyner was ousted from the City Council by rivals seeking to rein in growth. It did not work: Over the subsequent decade, the county’s population grew faster than anywhere else in the state.

Coyner returned to his work as a defense lawyer, and he regularly reminded younger peers about the importance of continuing to fight for those who were less fortunate.

Coyner had long been a personable, intelligent lawyer who got along with judges and clients, said Tom Crabtree, who was the head of the public defender’s office at the time. But in later years, Crabtree said he watched as Coyner’s amiable nature started to grow caustic.

When a judge removed him from a case one day, Coyner’s startling outburst in the courtroom led Crabtree to decide it was time to terminate Coyner, who responded, he said, with a death threat.

The underlying problem was an emerging bipolar disorder, Coyner said, compounded because he had turned to drinking as a way to cope.

On the day after Thanksgiving in 2003, a few years after losing his job, Coyner was arrested, accused of damaging a woman’s car and resisting a police officer. The state bar suspended his license in response to complaints that he was neglecting duties to his clients.

Then, in 2008, came the worst blow of all: His wife, Patty, died after an illness.

Coyner had already pushed others out of his life – not only his daughters but also his sister, who had started to distance herself when late-night drunken phone calls had turned abusive.

Police encounters twice led him to being placed briefly placed in psychiatric care, and he struggled to get his life back on track. But he managed to find a connection with a new friend, Cheraphina Edwards. She moved in with him to serve as a caregiver.

Even then, Coyner was regularly welcoming people who had lost their housing to stay at his small house or out in the yard. But without a job, he was falling behind on his mortgage, and the bank began foreclosure proceedings in 2012.

Coyner had worked in prior years to help others facing foreclosure, and he resisted his own fate vehemently. Still, by 2017, the police were closing in on plans to evict him.

When deputies eventually removed Coyner from the house, he and Edwards found few living options in a changed city. Rents had jumped 40% in five years. Many people who had lived in town their whole lives could no longer afford to live there.

Coyner and Edwards crashed for a bit on a friend’s couch. They spent other times sleeping in a truck, parked in the woods next to a golf course. Eventually, they heard about an abandoned cabin in the nearby community of La Pine, driving out to find that it looked more like a shed and would require them to bathe from water heated on a wood stove.

Things were not going that well between Coyner and Edwards, and in spring 2022, he moved out of the cabin and was again on his own.

By then, the coronavirus pandemic had heightened awareness of the attractive, small-town life that Bend offered, and remote workers with lucrative salaries were scooping up homes. The median home price jumped to nearly $800,000, with houses often snapped up by all-cash buyers.

Coyner found himself camping sometimes in a tent along the Parkway, the road he had helped get built to prepare Bend for the growth city leaders had anticipated. Other times, he set up on the property of a group that served homeless veterans – an organization where he was once a board member. Sometimes he would venture near Coyner Trail, a walking path through town named for his family because of all they had done for the city.

Last fall, as overnight temperatures were dipping below 20 degrees, Frankie Smalley, a homeless friend, walked through town to track down Coyner. Then he came upon a yellow tent near the Walmart. “Hey, Craig, you in there?” he called out.

He heard a voice inside and pulled back the tent flap. Inside, Coyner’s shoes were soaking wet, his feet so frostbitten he was hobbling with pain when he tried to stand up. When he refused to go to a shelter, Smalley contacted Edwards, and she called the police for help.

He wound up at the hospital, where he was treated for frostbite, but he was soon discharged to the city’s new low-barrier shelter.

The frostbite had damaged Coyner’s toes so badly that he had to go back to the hospital at the end of January for an amputation. There were complications. After the surgery, he had a stroke that left him unable to speak.

Days later, on Feb. 14, Coyner died.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.