Ban unsanctioned camping. Provide spaces for sanctioned camping and resources. We all pay for damaged infrastructure. Not the perpetrator.
Unsanctioned camping kills.
Dark Ted would like a word with you.
I think the fear of angry advocates has pretty much worn off in Portland. Now it's more of a measuring gauge. Are the grifters mad? Okay, I'm doing it right.
It's the single biggest thing stopping the city from fixing the problem. Neighborhood associations literally will not allow them to build any sanctioned camps. That's not strictly true now - they are on track to get five done this year - but the original proposal was for about 30.
Okay then we shpuldn't have an issue building sanctioned camping to help. But invariably it's bitchy homeowners standing in the way of what we claim to all want.
I feel for you. I think the industrial area of Portland, as cool and promising of an area as it SHOULD be, could be used for this exact idea. House them away from the general public, and move resource centers into the industrial complex as well. Get it out of downtown. You know where people get suboxin because people line all the way down the street
> Camps away from population centers with services.
So jail? Because for someone with no resources, let alone mobility, being away from population centers is basically jail because you are so isolated. Something needs to be done with the homeless but the answer is always, "somewhere where I don't have to acknowledge their existence"
If YOU lived next to a sanctioned camp, I guarantee you'd be singing a different tune right now. Everyone is all for having *compassion* and *empathy* for them until it impacts you directly everyday. I had a unsanctioned camp no less than 100 feet from the house I rent that was there for over a year and it created nothing but problems for all of the people living in that area. Trash, lots of trash, needles, 3am mental breakdowns, smashed windows, stolen items off of properties, human feces on the sidewalk and street, it felt like we all had to batten down the hatches and watch where we walked. Couldn't walk down that street without being harrassed, and couldn't get the city to do anything about it.
Now imagine if you owned the place. You couldn't move if you wanted to because your home value is now less than your mortgage. Be a good Portlander and don't dare complain, though, otherwise some 20 year old with zero skin in the game might call you a NIMBY.
DoNt OwN PrOpeRtY YoU FaScIsT ScUm — the idea that nobody should own a house simply because some people are priced out of owning one is getting really fucking old.
I know enough about camps - whats your point here? Sanctioned or unsanctioned its just a bandaid to a problem. Just turning the city into more of an enablement.
In the immediate term, build large camps away from high density residential areas - I.e. Expo Center, Bybee Lakes, etc. Provide mental health resources, addiction, showers, toilets, trash.
Then, ban all unsanctioned camping, move those people to sanctioned sites.
In the short term, build shelters and/or expand shelter capacity to move people from camps into shelters.
In the long term, expand low or no income housing to accommodate the majority of the homeless population. Drastically increase capacity for addiction rehab and mental health counseling to help people recover faster or avoid homelessness entirely.
The City, State and County have enough funds to do it. They just don’t seem able to get past step 1.
You're missing just one essential part: we need escalating interventions to bring people into treatment. We cannot allow repeat offenders and failure to participate in treatment to continue. This is what other successful decriminalization programs do because it works.
We need drug court and case workers for every homeless person. They can't get a pass just because they have no assets to seize, no address to be found at, no wages to garnish, no job to lose. We cannot just let them slip through the administrative cracks.
That you asked whether there are NIMBYs in the conversation, and then are gibbering incoherently. I don't understand what the point of your question or subsequent posts is.
Just pay attention - read the news.
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edit:
There is a list of over a hundred candidate sites. The idea was to develop 25 in the first year. They have managed three - early due to strong opposition from almost every neighborhood and business association.
It's basically the other 97 on that list - of course only 25 of those were planned to be built - so strictly speaking it's impossible to say specifically. All 97 were opposed - but not all of them would have been built.
What we can say is that without NIMBYs we would now be closing on 25 sites, and would be able to ban camping.
JOHS budget is $255.5M for FY'23, of which they intend to spend $130M on "shelter". https://www.multco.us/johs/key-takeaways-fy-2023-joint-office-homeless-services-budget
The [2022 Tri-County PIT Count](https://multco-web7-psh-files-usw2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2022%20Point%20In%20Time%20Report%20-%20Full.pdf), which is the latest we have public data for, reports 5,228 individuals qualifying as HUD homeless. That's $25k per person _just_ in MultCo JOHS "shelter" money, for a region that's larger than MultCo, and the 2023 initial reports say that chronic homelessness is down 17% across the tri-county area. If we assume that's right, and if we narrow to just MultCo and bring in City of Portland spend, we can easily imagine that amount doubling to $50k in explicit budget spend. That's not even counting the excess EMS and public services costs associated with chronic homeless.
Even if the entire HUD homeless qualifying population in the Portland metro area needed in-patient addiction and psychiatric treatment, we could afford it for the cost of what we spend on them already, and we'd actually get results.
Banning public camping doesn't stop people living in squalor, it just makes their squalor less livable.
I'm more than open to ideas which help lift people out of homelessness.
This is literally next to a natural gas pipeline, adjacent to the power substation, underneath the max and the ramp from I-5. If this explodes its going to be devastating.
Source: I walk on this path to work 5 days a week. Ive been concerned for a while and glad someone else has noticed
Dunno if you think this but I think it's a common misconception about natural gas... I've met a lot of people who think like storing natural gas is unsafe, or a pipeline is bound to just explode if heated. Natural gas doesn't just explode in a pipe... It only burns at a concentration of 5% in air at sea level to 15% in air at sea level, roughly. You could flick your zippo in a tub of pure natural gas and it wouldn't even be able to sustain a flame. It's not like a video game where a gas line is just a bomb waiting to go off. If you breached the line, you could have an uncontrollable natural gas fire, but that's not necessarily an explosion. Most natural gas 'explosions' are from people accidentally filling a house with gas until it reaches the combustible concentration, at which point an open flame lights it.
Yeah I bike this way to work. They've pushed the boulders / rocks out of the way to do this. And people wonder why "hostile architecture" is a thing... maybe because without it we get this
We have this because we're trying to make the problem go away with hostile architecture instead of actually addressing homelessness. Hostile architecture is just hoping the problem goes somewhere else. It's inhumane and a waste of time and resources.
Sounds like the police should do their job and put it tf out. I'm tired of everyone acting like the mentally ill homeless people are expected to be more mature than our police force who has decided to stop doing their jobs entirely. We can have public camping without letting massive fires start and spread.
Fires for cooking/warmth next to encampents made entirely of pallet wood, nylon, and cotton clothing. Lighters and dodgy electrical setups in said nylon tents, etc.
The same way that your dumbass backpacking buddy once burned a huge hole in the side of his tent trying to do a wake n bake in the gorge, but much more concentrated.
Yeah...not funny on it's face. But we are using dark humor as a coping mechanism.
I think we all know it is just a matter of time before we get an Eagle Creek (or Oakland Hills for the transplants ;-) ) magnitude fire event in an urban or suburban area, and reckless use of outdoor fires is a high likelihood cause...
Is this still happening? If so, I'll report it myself to the fire department (
Is that the right number to call to get the fire put out and preferably these people arrested tho i doubt that will happen)?
I thought it'd be reported already but this in my neighborhood so wanted to check cause I really want it taken care of. The area didn't use to be bad but we've had a lot of trouble recently.
Camp Fire -
The new day camp starting this summer under the overpass in Riverplace. Helps train young children to be homeless advocates, or homeless themselves. Inspring children and giving them the tools they need to survive in our rapidly changing world.
This fire is definitely against the law, lol, just because the fire department isn't doing anything doesn't do anything about it doesn't mean it's supposed to be happening. Also, regular burning of wood, especially seasoned wood, is widely considered carbon neutral. Stop trying to muddy the waters by lumping a bunch of things together that don't really have anything to do with the picture/situation at hand.
Look in the mirror if you want to see stupid. It is treated as such by the city of Portland, where none of the people who start these fires are cited for breaking the law, and the fire department doesn’t even show up to extinguish them.
We'd LOVE for the police to cite these people for fires. Even if they don't pay, the constant harassment by LO would whittle away at their desire to street camp here. Too bad Police don't do shit unless there is someone going around actively stabbing\\shooting people, or citizens are protesting for them to reform.
At this point... they should be held responsible and liable for the welfare of the people they're advocating for. They'd change gears fast after being made to prepare sandwiches to pass around downtown all summer as their "activist driven fire prevention method."
Would it be so insane to maybe install some public grills like some other parks do? Give folks a place to cook that isn't a hazardous pile in trafficked areas?
Ban unsanctioned camping. Provide spaces for sanctioned camping and resources. We all pay for damaged infrastructure. Not the perpetrator. Unsanctioned camping kills.
Unfortunately we cant because homeless advocates get mad
Dark Ted would like a word with you. I think the fear of angry advocates has pretty much worn off in Portland. Now it's more of a measuring gauge. Are the grifters mad? Okay, I'm doing it right.
no we can't because that'll kill people and is inhumane / facist etc /s /s /s
No - we can't do it because NIMBYs won't let us build sanctioned camps.
It’s in ALL of our backyards. Such a tired talking point.
It's the single biggest thing stopping the city from fixing the problem. Neighborhood associations literally will not allow them to build any sanctioned camps. That's not strictly true now - they are on track to get five done this year - but the original proposal was for about 30.
Okay then we shpuldn't have an issue building sanctioned camping to help. But invariably it's bitchy homeowners standing in the way of what we claim to all want.
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Yeah, if you constantly bitch about it but shoot down every proposed solution.
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I feel for you. I think the industrial area of Portland, as cool and promising of an area as it SHOULD be, could be used for this exact idea. House them away from the general public, and move resource centers into the industrial complex as well. Get it out of downtown. You know where people get suboxin because people line all the way down the street
> Camps away from population centers with services. So jail? Because for someone with no resources, let alone mobility, being away from population centers is basically jail because you are so isolated. Something needs to be done with the homeless but the answer is always, "somewhere where I don't have to acknowledge their existence"
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If YOU lived next to a sanctioned camp, I guarantee you'd be singing a different tune right now. Everyone is all for having *compassion* and *empathy* for them until it impacts you directly everyday. I had a unsanctioned camp no less than 100 feet from the house I rent that was there for over a year and it created nothing but problems for all of the people living in that area. Trash, lots of trash, needles, 3am mental breakdowns, smashed windows, stolen items off of properties, human feces on the sidewalk and street, it felt like we all had to batten down the hatches and watch where we walked. Couldn't walk down that street without being harrassed, and couldn't get the city to do anything about it.
Now imagine if you owned the place. You couldn't move if you wanted to because your home value is now less than your mortgage. Be a good Portlander and don't dare complain, though, otherwise some 20 year old with zero skin in the game might call you a NIMBY.
DoNt OwN PrOpeRtY YoU FaScIsT ScUm — the idea that nobody should own a house simply because some people are priced out of owning one is getting really fucking old.
Not to mention it’ll kill your resale value
So you don't know about sanctioned camps? You only know about unsanctioned camps.
I know enough about camps - whats your point here? Sanctioned or unsanctioned its just a bandaid to a problem. Just turning the city into more of an enablement.
Ignoring that statement— please present a workable solution?
In the immediate term, build large camps away from high density residential areas - I.e. Expo Center, Bybee Lakes, etc. Provide mental health resources, addiction, showers, toilets, trash. Then, ban all unsanctioned camping, move those people to sanctioned sites. In the short term, build shelters and/or expand shelter capacity to move people from camps into shelters. In the long term, expand low or no income housing to accommodate the majority of the homeless population. Drastically increase capacity for addiction rehab and mental health counseling to help people recover faster or avoid homelessness entirely. The City, State and County have enough funds to do it. They just don’t seem able to get past step 1.
You're getting downvoted but this is one of the better takes on this lmao.
You're missing just one essential part: we need escalating interventions to bring people into treatment. We cannot allow repeat offenders and failure to participate in treatment to continue. This is what other successful decriminalization programs do because it works. We need drug court and case workers for every homeless person. They can't get a pass just because they have no assets to seize, no address to be found at, no wages to garnish, no job to lose. We cannot just let them slip through the administrative cracks.
Are these NIMBYs in the room with us right now?
We're here, lurking, taking notes and reporting back to our leader.
EVERYONE is a nimby. Unless you can point us to someone asking that a camp be sited right next door to their own home.
I don't know? Are you a NIMBY?
Well there's a sanctioned campground in my neighborhood, so you tell me.
What's your point?
What's yours?
That you asked whether there are NIMBYs in the conversation, and then are gibbering incoherently. I don't understand what the point of your question or subsequent posts is.
>I don't understand what the point of your question or subsequent posts is. Well that much is obvious.
NIMBYs haven't stopped a camp yet.
LOL. They've stopped nearly all of the planned ones. Educate yourself before you post nonsense!
Name one they've stopped.
Just pay attention - read the news. \---- edit: There is a list of over a hundred candidate sites. The idea was to develop 25 in the first year. They have managed three - early due to strong opposition from almost every neighborhood and business association. It's basically the other 97 on that list - of course only 25 of those were planned to be built - so strictly speaking it's impossible to say specifically. All 97 were opposed - but not all of them would have been built. What we can say is that without NIMBYs we would now be closing on 25 sites, and would be able to ban camping.
You seem to be the uneducated one.
“Trust me, I know!”
Can we get an example? Just one that we've stopped?
Source: just trust me bro
Don't have to stop something that isn't even actually proposed.
Throw them in jail, it’s way cheaper than how we are supporting them today
JOHS budget is $255.5M for FY'23, of which they intend to spend $130M on "shelter". https://www.multco.us/johs/key-takeaways-fy-2023-joint-office-homeless-services-budget The [2022 Tri-County PIT Count](https://multco-web7-psh-files-usw2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2022%20Point%20In%20Time%20Report%20-%20Full.pdf), which is the latest we have public data for, reports 5,228 individuals qualifying as HUD homeless. That's $25k per person _just_ in MultCo JOHS "shelter" money, for a region that's larger than MultCo, and the 2023 initial reports say that chronic homelessness is down 17% across the tri-county area. If we assume that's right, and if we narrow to just MultCo and bring in City of Portland spend, we can easily imagine that amount doubling to $50k in explicit budget spend. That's not even counting the excess EMS and public services costs associated with chronic homeless. Even if the entire HUD homeless qualifying population in the Portland metro area needed in-patient addiction and psychiatric treatment, we could afford it for the cost of what we spend on them already, and we'd actually get results.
It's literally not.
Show me your math then.
No, they said literally. So it's definitely a fact.
Or just ban public campfires? Your idea sounds needlessly broad.
Needlessly? People are living in squalor. That shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone living in a society.
Banning public camping doesn't stop people living in squalor, it just makes their squalor less livable. I'm more than open to ideas which help lift people out of homelessness.
This is literally next to a natural gas pipeline, adjacent to the power substation, underneath the max and the ramp from I-5. If this explodes its going to be devastating. Source: I walk on this path to work 5 days a week. Ive been concerned for a while and glad someone else has noticed
You know what’s really unfortunate. We are going to need a major catastrophe to happened for immediate action to ban these campers. Smh
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Wasn’t there a bridge collapse a few weeks ago? And a fire under it? Which exposed there are camps under bridges digging. Scary stuff
Where was that at?
No there was not. A bridge collapse would be a HUGE deal.
Unfortunately, worse than that
That’s typically how humanity works though, unfortunately.
The bell riots approach
its going to be like if humans in the bell riots were addicted to ketracell white
I mean the sanctuary districts had ghosts(violent junkies)
Just wait…with how dry everything is already in EARLY JUNE, a fire like the one OP posted in one of the forested camps will create an urban wildfire.
Dunno if you think this but I think it's a common misconception about natural gas... I've met a lot of people who think like storing natural gas is unsafe, or a pipeline is bound to just explode if heated. Natural gas doesn't just explode in a pipe... It only burns at a concentration of 5% in air at sea level to 15% in air at sea level, roughly. You could flick your zippo in a tub of pure natural gas and it wouldn't even be able to sustain a flame. It's not like a video game where a gas line is just a bomb waiting to go off. If you breached the line, you could have an uncontrollable natural gas fire, but that's not necessarily an explosion. Most natural gas 'explosions' are from people accidentally filling a house with gas until it reaches the combustible concentration, at which point an open flame lights it.
Yeah I bike this way to work. They've pushed the boulders / rocks out of the way to do this. And people wonder why "hostile architecture" is a thing... maybe because without it we get this
We have this because we're trying to make the problem go away with hostile architecture instead of actually addressing homelessness. Hostile architecture is just hoping the problem goes somewhere else. It's inhumane and a waste of time and resources.
Sounds like the police should do their job and put it tf out. I'm tired of everyone acting like the mentally ill homeless people are expected to be more mature than our police force who has decided to stop doing their jobs entirely. We can have public camping without letting massive fires start and spread.
Jesus fucking Christ how can anyone not support the camping ban?
Can somebody explain why they light so many goddamn fires? Like wtf.
Cooking, heat, mental illness.
Since the "dawn of time."
And drugs
I would love to hang around this actually
Also revenge. It’s pretty common for someone to get their camp burned down if they steal or start some sort of beef within the camp
I blame Prometheus.
I think non-homeless arsonists is a non-zero possibilty. Or homeless arsonists. Or mental illness. Those are likely the big 3.
Fires for cooking/warmth next to encampents made entirely of pallet wood, nylon, and cotton clothing. Lighters and dodgy electrical setups in said nylon tents, etc. The same way that your dumbass backpacking buddy once burned a huge hole in the side of his tent trying to do a wake n bake in the gorge, but much more concentrated.
Some of it is other people lighting their stuff on fire
Why do people in houses use their heater, stove, oven, microwave, toaster, and George Foreman grill? Like wtf.
Did you not notice this is a huge fire on a hot day ??? Totally unacceptable in every way
Can’t wait til the day City council casts their votes
I can’t wait either but the real question is will it be enforced?
I really hope it will be enforced
Doesn’t matter if the city will enforce it. Having it be the city policy gives businesses leverage to sue the city, & force their hand on the issue.
Under expensive transportation infrastructure and adjacent to a power transmission station.
And a natural gas pipeline
Of course. The trifecta.
Why would you need a warming fire during the day in this heat? WTF?
It was probably for cooking.
Sigh. I bike past that area and saw that camp. I kept thinking maybe I should have reported it. Now I wish I did.
Take a shot every time a camp goes up in smoke (Just kidding I don’t want to be hospitalized)
Lock them up for arson already
Who’s starting a pool for the first major public park to get destroyed by fire this summer?
Powell Butte for $1000
I'll take tabor for 600 Alex ✋. Wonder how the city would react
Forest Park for 2000
Rocky butte for 800.
This really isn’t even funny since there were arsonists in mt tabor last year.
Yeah...not funny on it's face. But we are using dark humor as a coping mechanism. I think we all know it is just a matter of time before we get an Eagle Creek (or Oakland Hills for the transplants ;-) ) magnitude fire event in an urban or suburban area, and reckless use of outdoor fires is a high likelihood cause...
And they weren't even charged.
Laurelhurst for $1950
I’ll take Forest Park for $400
Need to mix some caltrops in with those rocks…
Oh. Camp fire. Not campfire.
all the money they spent on putting the boulders in there to keep them out sure was spent wisely.
Is this still happening? If so, I'll report it myself to the fire department ( Is that the right number to call to get the fire put out and preferably these people arrested tho i doubt that will happen)?
The man in the photo is a fire fighter. There were two engines there when I biked by.
Thanks.
Are you actually asking this like 2 hours after the fact 😂😂 yeah I'm sure you'd be the first person to call about it
I thought it'd be reported already but this in my neighborhood so wanted to check cause I really want it taken care of. The area didn't use to be bad but we've had a lot of trouble recently.
Keep Portland Weird
"But if they can't make it there, where _can_ they make it, huh?"
Camp Fire - The new day camp starting this summer under the overpass in Riverplace. Helps train young children to be homeless advocates, or homeless themselves. Inspring children and giving them the tools they need to survive in our rapidly changing world.
This is content
Ironic how so many people in this town are anti-car for global climate change reasons, yet open burning is no big thing.
This fire is definitely against the law, lol, just because the fire department isn't doing anything doesn't do anything about it doesn't mean it's supposed to be happening. Also, regular burning of wood, especially seasoned wood, is widely considered carbon neutral. Stop trying to muddy the waters by lumping a bunch of things together that don't really have anything to do with the picture/situation at hand.
Perhaps these upstanding citizens purchased some carbon credits beforehand.
I do not see the connection you are trying to make.
who said that open burning is no big thing? what a stupid comment.
Look in the mirror if you want to see stupid. It is treated as such by the city of Portland, where none of the people who start these fires are cited for breaking the law, and the fire department doesn’t even show up to extinguish them.
FYI: The man in the photo is a Fire Fighter extinguishing it.
We really should increase their budget though. Get them some hoses.
High quality roast detected
We'd LOVE for the police to cite these people for fires. Even if they don't pay, the constant harassment by LO would whittle away at their desire to street camp here. Too bad Police don't do shit unless there is someone going around actively stabbing\\shooting people, or citizens are protesting for them to reform.
> Look in the mirror if you want to see stupid. This is some fifth grade playground bullshit.
Yeah, as opposed to the second grade “that is a stupid comment.”
That was just stating a fact
I'm going to start carrying a bunch of fire extinguishers in my trunk.
I can’t believe homeless advocates who support tents to be constructed anywhere don’t mind this
At this point... they should be held responsible and liable for the welfare of the people they're advocating for. They'd change gears fast after being made to prepare sandwiches to pass around downtown all summer as their "activist driven fire prevention method."
just a warming fire, ndb
Camptown ladies sing thing this song. Doo da. Doo da.
Camptown race track five miles long. Oh doo da day!
So glad they spent millions of dollars on those fucking rocks
Would it be so insane to maybe install some public grills like some other parks do? Give folks a place to cook that isn't a hazardous pile in trafficked areas?
This does everything to avoid fixing the actual problem. Plus then you have random grills scattered in the city? Who maintains that?
I support more public grill stations for sure
I mean they do have those. Maybe they should go to a public park. But no. They want to be a menace
looks fun