Camping on public property in Portland, Oregon is an illegal activity. There is an ordinance on the books against doing so. You can go to jail for violating this ordinance, or so it says.
14A.50.020 Camping Prohibited on Public Property and Public Rights of Way.
A. As used in this Section:
1. “To camp” means to set up, or to remain in or at a campsite, for the purpose of establishing or maintaining a temporary place to live.
2. “Campsite” means any place where any bedding, sleeping bag, or other sleeping matter, or any stove or fire is placed, established, or maintained, whether or not such place incorporates the use of any tent, lean-to, shack, or any other structure, or any vehicle or part thereof.
B. It is unlawful for any person to camp in or upon any public property or public right of way, unless otherwise specifically authorized by this Code or by declaration by the Mayor in emergency circumstances.
C. The violation of this Section is punishable, upon conviction, by a fine of not more than $100 or by imprisonment for a period not to exceed 30 days or both.
Really?? Then why does Portland suddenly have such a big problem with people treating their public property like a KOA or a Jellystone Park? In a brief tour around the city, you’d think that it was just fine to set up your campsite any old place. These aren’t just hikers rolling out a sleeping bag to catch some shut-eye before hiking on to a hostel in another city. These are campers who have set up semi-permanent shelters with cooking facilities, tents, tarp-shelters, and even at one site, a mailbox!
This location is at the corner of 12th and Oak Street on the edge of S.E. Portland. Across the street and down a ways is the urban hipster micro-brew beer and wine supply store, F.H. Steinbart’s.
But, unlike a KOA or Jellystone Park, there are no public restrooms. So these urban squatters use the curbs, gutters, sidewalks, bushes, and parks as their bathrooms. If you find it annoying when people don’t pick up after their dogs, try living, shopping, or working around these campers!
Do you have an RV and need a place to set up camp for the summer? No problem! Just find a parking place on a Portland city street and begin your summer living in the Rose City. Choose a place near a bus line or a MAX stop. Why pay those exorbitant campground fees when you can park most anywhere around Portland for free.
These RVers have their propane gas bottle hooked up to their motorhome with it sitting right on the public sidewalk – along side of their shopping cart they hijacked from some local store.
Around the corner from Steinbart’s is this lovely collection of campsites. These people must be a fringe group of Portland’s famed bicycling culture.
The people on the sidewalk across the street yelled threats and obscenities at me for taking their photo. I didn’t stop to tell them they were on a public sidewalk in a public place and had no right to any privacy from people taking photos.
I next ventured into the heart of Portland’s downtown around the area of City Hall. This illegal camping situation has been in the news over the past few weeks. Urban campers have moved into the city in droves – upstaging and displacing the true homeless population from their usual haunts, much to their dismay. It has caused a ton of problems for Portland’s many businesses who have their customers and passers-by harassed and threatened by these campers. The complaints have been pouring into an unresponsive Charlie Hales, the Mayor of Portland, and his posse, the City Council. They have thus far refused to enforce either the anti-camping ordinance or the ‘no blocking of sidewalks rules.’
Some of these campers are less than friendly. Some of them are down-right violent. A couple of weeks ago, a 70-year old employee of an outdoor store was out washing the night’s accumulation of excrement off of the sidewalk in front of his store when a group of belligerent street campers assaulted him. A skateboarder bashed him in the head with his skateboard then calmly rode off on it, leaving the elderly gentleman unconscious and bleeding on the sidewalk. He was hospitalized for several days.
In another instance, a tourist was set upon and beaten up while trying to thread his way out the door of a downtown restaurant where he and friends had just eaten dinner. Two Tri-Met bus drivers were stabbed by people living in an illegal homeless camp near the transit center’s break room. Until this past week, the Mayor and Council have chosen to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the problems happening right outside City Hall’s front door.
Finally on Friday, July 19, after much publicity regarding the situation in The Oregonian, the City put up signs warning the campers that they would begin enforcing rules designating the sidewalks around City Hall as “high pedestrian traffic areas.” Sadly, this will only be enforced in the immediate area of City Hall, and some say only between the hours of 7AM and 9PM. Mayor Hales says he thinks it can be enforced 24 hours per day. Mayor Hales called a news conference to announce the new plan. He stated, “We’ve had people trying to come into this building being harassed and having obscenities shouted at them. We’ve had people having sex on the sidewalks. That’s all not OK,” Hales said. “This is the public’s business in the public’s building.”
City Hall has been the focus of protesters unhappy with homelessness since the fall of 2011. Then Occupy Portland demonstrators took over with clusters of campers with protest signs, sleeping bags and mats and other camping gear. It has ballooned this summer with the arrival warm, dry weather.
When asked how this situation got so out of hand, Sgt. Pete Simpson of the Portland Police stated that they weren’t enforcing the ordinances because when it is cold and raining in the winter, “it really wasn’t an issue.” Now it has become a mess with hundreds of campers even surrounding City Hall.
In the photo above, you can see the entrance to Portland’s City Hall and the wide apron of cement surrounding it. Until this morning, this area was populated by hundreds of campers. You can easily see how anyone coming to City Hall would have to wade through these campers to get into the front door. When I got there yesterday, the campers had been shooed away early that morning and City workers were cleaning off the cement using pressure washers full of disinfectant. The campers had been using the shrubbery around the perimeter as a public toilet.
After hosing down the area with sanitizer, the City posted these signs.
Clearly, Charlie Hales was mis-informed in thinking he could enforce the sidewalk rules 24 hours per day. It’ll be back to the drawing boards for the City Council to come up with some emergency ordinances that will pass Constitutional muster to keep the campers off the sidewalks for a full 24 hours. Hey! ‘How about enforcing the anti-camping ban which is already on the books? Mayor Hales, tell Sgt. Simpson to start writing tickets and arresting the people who refuse to quit camping on Portland’s streets?
Some of the inhabitants from the City Hall area had moved their campsites directly across the street next to a park called the Terry Schrunk Plaza. They were on the sidewalk next to the park.
They were asking people to pray with them to lift the sidewalk rules banning them from living right in front of the door to City Hall during the day. I walked across the street to get closer photos of their shelter. I asked their permission to take some photos and they told me to please take all I the pictures I wanted and post them somewhere so people could see how they were suffering. They said they were protesting to support homelessness.
They had the look of hippies from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco during the 60s. The woman was drawing pictures on the back of her partner with colored Sharpies. They were having lunch from plates of food purchased at one of the near-by gourmet food carts. They were clean and wore ‘cool-looking’ hippie clothes. Their child had on a shirt from Gap Kids. These people were easily distinguishable from the filthy, moth-eaten truly homeless one frequently sees around a big city.
The sign on the back of their shelter indicated they were with the Occupy Portland group.
These people are not part of the usual ‘homeless’ population. These are urban kids from various places looking to spend their summer in some hip, tolerant, indulgent city. So far, Portland has been the perfect place. Its clean, safe, has great food carts to eat from, sparkling water fountains everywhere and many places to get free meals and lodging if one so desired.
Just down the street from these hippie campers was a billboard pedestal listing all the places in the area where people could get free meals and lodging. People have been seen washing clothes and bathing in the City’s famed public fountains. This is, indeed, not OK.
My opinion regarding this deplorable situation is that Portland should begin seriously enforcing their anti-camping ordinance and enact some Constitutional sidewalk rules. These are public places that belong to everyone. To allow them to be hijacked by a few people is pure negligence. People should be able to be safe shopping and dining in Portland. Walking past some of these ramshackle, bizarre hovels, erected along and often right on public sidewalks on city streets, is scary and unnerving.
Is this what you want to see out your living room window of your gentrified Portland home? I don’t think so.
Or how about walking past this to get to your bus stop or go for a quick latte, shop at a business, or go for a late-night gallon of milk from the corner convenience store? Would you want your children playing in this pretty little park next to this sidewalk hovel?
I would also tell the wannabe hippie campers protesting homelessness by pretending to be homeless: You are not helping!! You are taking away from the already scarce resources available to the truly homeless and causing people to have even less sympathy for their plight than they already do. You aren’t raising anyone’s consciousness about homelessness, you are just having a fun, free, exciting summer adventure at the Portland public’s expense.
To Mayor Hales and the apparently impotent City Council, I say: ‘Grow a pair and do something about a bunch of rowdy, trouble-making people who have hijacked your city streets right under your noses. This has gone on too long and is now a far bigger problem than it ever needed to be due to your indulgence and inaction. Tell your police to stop gunning down out-of-control mentally ill people and spend some time and energy getting these pretend-homeless people off the streets and sidewalks. We can’t go out and remove illegal campers from the streets ourselves in vigilante Zimmerman fashion. We pay taxes to have the police keep our public areas safe and clear of third-world style squatting, which is unsafe and unsanitary.
I don’t think this is the kind of ‘weird’ people are talking about when they display their bumper stickers proclaiming, “Keep Portland Weird.”
carpyharpy 