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Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler unveiled a plan Friday to alleviate his city’s homelessness crisis by consolidating the hundreds of people living in tents along the streets into sanctioned homeless campsites.
Wheeler’s plan would create at least three such campsites at unspecified locations, where people could move their tents and have better access to basic services from the city, such as drug and mental health treatment.
“The magnitude and the depth of the homelessness crisis in our city is nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe,” Wheeler said Friday when announcing the details of his highly anticipated plan.
PORTLAND EYES TAXPAYER-FUNDED CAMPSITES TO EASE HOMELESSNESS CRISIS
He cited a recent city assessment that found Portland is home to roughly 800 homeless encampments spread out over just 146 square miles.
Critics have accused city leaders of making the problem worse by enabling the kind of urban camping that has taken over swaths of Portland’s streets.
A lawsuit filed by disabled residents found that Multnomah County, in which Portland is located, handed out 6,550 tents and 27,000 tarps to homeless people last year alone.
The disabled residents behind the lawsuit have accused local leaders of violating their right to access city streets by allowing tents to proliferate so dramatically that Portland sidewalks are no longer accessible to the disabled.
Homelessness has become a focal point of the gubernatorial race in Oregon, in which Republican Christine Drazan has led recent polls despite the decidedly liberal lean of the state.
Drazan has vowed to declare a state of emergency over homelessness if she wins in November.
Betsy Johnson, an unaffiliated candidate who has amassed a strong following in the governor’s race, has also taken a tougher line on homelessness.
And Tina Kotek, the embattled Democratic candidate, has worked to distance herself from unpopular Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, who has presided over an explosion of homelessness and crime over the past two years.
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Wheeler’s plan to deal with the problem also involves a greater push to build affordable housing units in the city.
A lack of housing, along with the decriminalization of even hard drugs like heroin, has contributed to the spread of homelessness in Portland.
Whether the city or the county would fund the homeless camps remains unclear.
Wheeler’s push for the taxpayer-funded camps would be combined with a ban on unsanctioned camping in city streets.
