The September fires. The February freeze. The June heat dome. Weather disasters have come at a furious clip this year, amplified by a pandemic in which sheltering people indoors holds additional dangers.
These weather disasters have changed the way we do our work at Street Roots. A disrupted climate disproportionately impacts people in poverty — globally and locally. There’s no escape hatch when you live on the streets — no air filters, no doors sealed off from the ashen air, no indoor heating for the freezes, no central air to mitigate the heat
The storms of global warming engulf people already living outside and render more people homeless, which means climate justice is front and center in issues of homelessness and poverty. It is the work we must do.
While exposure to the elements through street homelessness puts people at health risk, people isolated indoors in poverty face risks too. They were particularly prone to deaths by heat exposure. The Multnomah County’s Public Health Division analyzed the deaths of people who died during the heat dome of late June and found the majority were older and isolated in their dwellings. Nearly none had functioning air conditioning. As we argued in a recent editorial, we need non-police systems of welfare checks.
We’ve come to see public health communication as an aspect of our media work. Town criers of urgent news, Street Roots vendors don their ambassador caps and fan out to camps. Last September, a few ambassadors went out to Forest Park to warn them of how dangerous the area was when the fires were spreading; now, this summer, we’ve teamed up with Portland Fire & Rescue to get the word out to people in areas before any fires reach us.
Ambassadors will distribute tips for how people can reduce their exposure to fires, and let them know the areas that are so dry and brittle that Portland Fire and Rescue deems them hazardous.
Gone are the damp woods of yesterday. Fire Marshal Kari Schimel describes Forest Park as more of a tinderbox. “It feels more like Central Oregon now.” Street Roots has always timed the winter edition of the Rose City Resource guide so that we can include winter warming shelters.
But now, the Joint Office of Homeless Services has had to stand up emergency cooling shelters, as well as shelters to gain reprieve from the air thick with smoke. We launched a digital guide this past year (Rose City Resource) to accompany the print guide and account for some of the more quickly changing circumstances.
We can’t simply react to these storms and fires as unexpected acts of nature. We need to expect them. For many of us, these storms demand long adrenalin-based hours of emergency response. But how do we shift to a model of endurance? How do the emergency responses themselves weave into a steady new status quo of infrastructure? We shouldn’t always play catch-up.
The motels of the pandemic — including the motels purchased to shelter survivors of the last fires — provide a model. But we need to have those ready for people to move into before the fires strike. If the city simply sweeps people in fire-vulnerable areas, they are compounding traumas and providing no options. The city should prepare quality options for people now; a motel program that’s preemptive.
This column is my summoning: issues of homelessness and poverty are issues of climate justice. In a year when a deep breath is more challenging — lungs compromised by an aggressive virus, air that we can’t share with each other, air quality that, at one point, was the worst in the country — we all need to take a deep breath. This is the work before us.