The bright daffodil stood upright like a spring flag against the blue-tarped tent on West Burnside Street.
It was nearly 70 degrees last week and people were quick with the flowers, festooning camps with signs of spring.
Then winter came back within days. The blue-tarped tents were thick with snow.
Oregon's wild, changeable weather is experienced more deeply by unhoused people.
But in truth, this is not the only storm that determines daily survival for people living their lives in public.
Campaign fixations and pandering politicians, wealthy people with plans to clean the streets — all this underpins much of the stormy backlash.
Meanwhile, unhoused people adjust their lives over and over, gripping onto their survival.
“The worst part is just trying to get yourself out of homelessness requires a lot of dedication and concentration, and exactly the kind of mental state you can't have because you're living in a panic,” Street Roots vendor George McCarthy said at the "3000 Challenge" press conference a few weeks back.
“It's like trying to do proper organizational things when you got the mind of a person late for work looking for their car keys. It's frightening, it's demoralizing, and it will infantilize you. You have curfews, you have people that will speak to you like you're a child and it just doesn't seem to end.”
Last week, a man who has camped in one spot long enough in Old Town that I knew where to run down and deliver a message, was swept. Like a strong wind, the latest Old Town plan simply knocked him four blocks west, but the bottom of his tent was punctured in the move.
The People for Portland Ballot measure — which, as of last week, Metro lawyers have disqualified — was like a heavy sky ready to burst. Next, people were threatened with new whims, calls to build spaces — shelters inside or outside — and enforcement of anti-camping laws.
The outdoor spaces — sometimes called “alternative shelters” — are a strange, new situation. Street Roots helped found Dignity Village more than two decades ago and we have long championed Right 2 Dream Too, Hazelnut Grove and other village efforts.
In the earliest days of the pandemic, when the services shut down and shelters seemed dangerous places for virus spread, we championed C3P0. A number of Street Roots vendors stayed and worked in those camps, helping govern.
But now the sanctioned encampments of tents, tiny homes or other manufactured structures have caught on in ways that bode ominously.
The Western Regional Advocacy Coalition is holding a webinar on April 21 to examine “the implications of these encampments as a 'service,' namely how they will and are being used to sweep and warehouse unhoused people on the streets, and how they are part of a larger trend whereby local governments fabricate and formalize 'service resistance' in order to continue the criminalization of homelessness under Martin v Boise.”
So given this larger trend, I am grateful for the timing of “The Village Research and How-To Guide,” by researchers Todd Ferry, Greg Townley and Marisa Zapata of Portland State University Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative, which parses out elements of a village.
After two years of research, including interviewing 42 villagers at Dignity Village, Hazelnut Grove, Kenton Women’s Village, Clackamas County Veterans Village, Agape Village and St. John’s Village, one thing was clear: people need agency in their own lives.
This report makes clear what the difference is between the villages. People need a role in governance, so they aren’t simply subjected to the storms of others, sentenced to whatever conditions a person tells them they must live in. Support the good ideas of people who live there.
The concept of the "village" — with its origins in Dignity Village — has these key features:
- “Non-congregate, safe and private shelter/quarters off the street that provides for the use of shared common facilities.
- Sense of community that includes shared agreements on communal behavior and commitments to the whole.
- The ability for the villagers to have some agency over their social and physical environment (with self-governance seen as essential by some in the movement to meet the definition of village).”
Victory – employed by JOIN as the single staffer at Dignity Village – describes their role in this way:
“Villages are mutual aid communities democratically operated and governed by villagers. I simply serve and support their cause.”
So as the city calls many of these spaces “alternative shelters” and introduces systems of control, it’s worth watching how these aspects of villages do or don’t prevail.
Read this village report. Measure whether these alternative shelters provide the benefits of the village. When they fail to deliver those benefits and cost more because of layers of systems that are about reducing city liability or creating structures of control, consider why we would choose that approach and not housing.
That’s one reason why, given options like this, a person might choose to stay where they can build their structure and plant their own daffodil into the folds of a tarp.
And that is why, in this moment of bitter social winds, Street Roots advocacy has shifted focus to quickly investing such funds in housing with supportive services.
I don’t mean to just use weather as an extended metaphor. I mean to use it as a contrast. Governance and planning are not actually stormy weather. These are human systems that we are responsible for.