Shortly after moving to Portland, I began working within the city’s continuum of homeless services. While I had some experience with this in Philly, through street counts and staffing emergency shelters, my experience in Portland has been more entrenched.

One misconception I held was that if someone was on the street, they were avoiding the shelter system due to a variety of valid concerns. This may be true for some folks experiencing homelessness, but many people are interested in warm, clean places to sleep and meet their basic needs. The problem is capacity: there are simply not enough beds to house those on the street, largely due to a lack of capital and operational funding. In Atlanta, where thousands have no beds in shelter and the homeless are defacto banned from the city center, one solution has been large warehousing of the homeless. It is not pretty or comfortable, but it is a shade better than sleeping on the street. Most of the funding for those shelters are through private contributions. Our country refuses to fulfill the basic human right of housing for all. Instead, we see homelessness as an inconvenience, an eyesore.  We criminalize homelessness and push it further to the outskirts of society.  As long as we cannot see it, it must not exist.

Along with an incredible list of non-profits, who have taken on the task of providing basic needs and transitioning the homeless to affordable housing, there is also the ground-up solution of tent cities.  Tent cities allow safe spaces for homeless housing. Tent cities have their own governance, all the officers and decision-makers are also residents. Tent cities provide a source of autonomy that many shelters (once you wait 3 months for a bed) cannot provide. Many tent cities are operated on unused private or public land, sometimes in violation of property laws. It seems that a simple solution would be the provisioning of public land for this use, but because tent cities require a degree of visibility, there is resistance from more affluent citizens.

The Pacific Northwest has gradually accepted tent cities as part of the solution toward ending homelessness.  Such efforts in the Northeast have generally been installed as protest, although there is now a tent city in Camden, NJ. Dignity Village in Portland is part of a movement to create tent cities across the country.  Here are 2 videos that give a glimpse into the world of a tent city:

Working in the Winter Warming Center, a more temporary and crude housing option for homeless residents, I’ve seen how much can be done with little resources. We’re able to house about 100 homeless residents for about $1000 a night. Surely we can come up with the funding to support all of our homeless, if we can muster up the political will to do so.

This is classic. Deny constitutional rights to assemble, then crack down with heavy handed police tactics. The result? We’re all distracted from the protest issues (poverty, climate change, militarism) and instead it’s us vs. the police. Then the footage cut for live broadcast makes everyone look crazy. It is not crazy to fight for things you care about, particularly if you have facts and evidence to back it up. Don’t be distracted! This is about economic justice!

Thought I should share my experience today watching a fellow cyclist get CREAMED by a thrown open door on Williams, just south of Russel (outside of a retirement home I believe). If there was a car next to him, the rider would have most likely been another bicycle fatality. Thankfully, he was not seriously injured, and was wearing a helmet which may have saved his life. His bicycle is going to need about $500 worth of work. The kicker is that the driver had no insurance. But you figure, OK, when the police show up she’s going to at least get a ticket for that. Actually, since she wasn’t actually ‘driving’ (car was parked) and they couldn’t prove she was the driver (even though two of us witnessed the driver throw open the driver side front door), there is no crime and technically no one is at fault (this is all according to the PO).

It is very scary that there is such permissiveness to drive (or park) in Portland and not be held accountable for driving insuranceless — and ultimately, whoever these drivers hit are going to pay that price. If this rider was injured severely, he’d have to pay for it completely himself.

Granted, this woman did not mean to knock over the cyclist and was extremely upset about it. Her door couldn’t even close. She apparently had a fight with her passenger and threw the door open in haste. Not exactly safe parking behavior along a bike route. But when I put myself in the driver’s shoes, beyond my own care to look in the mirror to watch for cyclists, there are NO REMINDERS to drivers to watch for bikes approaching in the bike lane. Why is there no law that drives this point home loud and clear?

And through this experience, I think once again we have an infrastructural issue that leads to this perpetual conflict. Why on earth would we put a bike lane on one of the most highly traveled bike routes in Portland, alongside these parked cars? It makes bike lanes actually MORE DANGEROUS to ride in than simply taking the lane.

So, thanks for this opportunity to decompress and hopefully spark (or rehash) some conversation, particularly action items for dealing with Williams and all of our bike lanes that abut parking lanes. If my perception is wrong, I’d love to hear other views on this.

After following the Henry Louis Gates arrest, I believe the racial component isn’t the issue, but perhaps the distraction.

Undoubtedly, people-of-color are unfairly targeted everyday by police.  Since a 911 call was placed with no clear mention of race, I believe the arresting officer was abusing his power to ‘discipline’ Gates for his verbal taunting of the cop.   Because Gates put up a VERBAL fight, it sounds like the cop went for the “let’s teach this guy a lesson” move that I’ve seen too many cops take.

By focusing on the more obvious issue of race, I’m afraid we’ll miss the opportunity to ask some important questions about how police have so much unchecked power, and how they can be better trained and held accountable to respecting civil rights.

I’ve seem too many folks arrested for saying things like “Why are you arresting him?”  I’m afraid Henry Gates is another victim of saying too much.  The big problem is, there’s absolutely nothing illegal about what he or thousands of Americans do every year when they ‘talk back’ to police.  Even though charges may be dropped later in court, often times the damage is already done.  This type of reactionary justice on the part of our police has to end.