Mike leaned slightly on his cane as he walked, his white pit bull strutting jauntily next to him. Randy’s bag of cans clanked like the sound of a car pulling away with a just-married sign. Reminiscent of lady justice holding her scales, Mark balanced two equally weighted bags at either side. I felt a surge of gratitude as I looked at these Street Roots vendors walking down Northwest Second Avenue. They reminded me of why I am hopeful about the resourcefulness of people who survive the streets.
Our community knows that homelessness is a pressing struggle of our time. We need to at once insist that our public sector is robust and resource-abundant while lifting up the creativity and resourcefulness of unhoused and poor people.
The months ahead are full of promise from the public sector. The state Legislature is considering a state of housing emergency that would fund shelters, navigation centers and housing, as well as proposals to get more money to help youths on the streets. Mayor Ted Wheeler is convening big community conversations around homelessness, and there are two in early March. Metro is set to vote Feb. 20 on whether to refer a homeless services measure to voters in May. This measure would complement the past, brick-and-mortar-housing bonds with the assistance necessary to house people in extreme poverty, along with urgently needed mental health and addiction services.
There are individual efforts from private entities to step up, and while these are important, they will never be enough when, in the tri-county area, tens of thousands of people experience homelessness each year. Many more are a catastrophe away from ending up on the streets. Which is why we need a big public-sector response with an emphasis on public health to tilt the balance and redirect abundance toward an equitable society.
At the same time, there needs to be room for the can-do ideas within the culture of people who live on the streets who have plenty of leadership and talent. At Street Roots, we celebrate creativity and resourcefulness as essential to problem solving. The earliest vendors joined with other unhoused people to call attention to the plight on the streets by lining up their shopping carts and calling it a parade. Scattered, they were isolated. Walking in a festive line, they found new meaning. The writer Rebecca Solnit describes stars in this way. It’s only by drawing a line between the stars that we find a constellation, and the associated stories of “bears and scorpions and centaurs and seated queens,” she writes. “The stars we are given. The constellations we make.”
It’s a particular way of seeing the world. Given few possibilities, new possibilities arise. Outside my window, a man has constructed a lean-to with tarps over shopping carts, the south-facing wall a broken Pabst Blue Ribbon umbrella. Every item is turned into something else. I once witnessed a man transform a junked wheelchair into an elaborate storage cart. People find discarded items on the streets — ground scores — and designate them treasures. This morning, Melissa brought in a sparkling, blinking ornament to the delight of other vendors.
I’m convinced that this creativity and resourcefulness is connected to the larger problem solving that’s necessary.
Before I worked at Street Roots, I had the fortune of working in an artist residency in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2015 while my husband, Jules Boykoff, had a fellowship to write a book on the Olympics. Through his work, we came to know people in Vila Autódromo, a middle-class favela near the race tracks abutting a lagoon. The people in Vila Autódromo were facing demolishment to make space for the Olympics.
They resisted by creating “People’s Plans,” throwing parties and trying to show city planners their community — the children’s play areas, the gardens, the community gathering spaces, the lagoon where one of the women, Heloisa Helena Costa Berto, was a spiritual custodian. But none of this stopped the city from bulldozing the favela and all its corridors and gardens. Left standing were stairwells to nowhere. Some of the organizers fought until the government built 20 houses for them, and organizers created memorials to their community out of the ruins.
I returned to Portland with new appreciation for Right 2 Dream Too, and its model not just to protect people while they sleep in Old Town, but to lift up the knowledge and leadership of people who stayed there. The disbanding of that community in Old Town meant the loss of more than 100 places to sleep a night, and a community that lifted up the knowledge and leadership of its residents, some of whom then moved on to jobs, school, housing. I am grateful for the new version that holds fast near the Moda Center, but my heart aches at the site of the empty block at Fourth Avenue and Burnside, while people pitch tents precariously on the sidewalk next to it.
Self-governed camps and tiny-house villages won’t house the tens of thousands of people who experience homelessness in our region. Nor do they work for all people. But it’s important to keep the solutions and creativity of unhoused people in the vanguard while striving to provide housing and services on a grand scale. That paradoxical vision is one I urge our community to embrace — and trust. We must have a robust public sector while making space for the resilience of people who survive desperate circumstances. It is from both perspectives at once that we can fight for a housing for everyone.
Director's Desk is written by Kaia Sand, the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach her at kaia@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @mkaiasand.