This is NOT my Portland

This is the email I sent to the mayor and other elected officials yesterday.  I didn't get a single response.  
I've been here 22 years.  I used to say I died and went to heaven when I moved here.  I don't say that anymore.  

My habits have had to change drastically in the last few years.

• I no longer go downtown.  The homeless and traffic are too terrible to bear.  I love the downtown farmers market but have mostly given it up.  Nor do I shop downtown anymore.
• I live in a very walkable part of Portland and have always enjoyed walking.  We can do most of our errands on foot..  I have curtailed some of my walking and now feel I have to carry pepper spray, even in my neighborhood.
• I've had so many plants stolen from my yard that I no longer plant things I value.
• There is so much theft, car prowling and break ins that I have baby monitors that I use to listen to whether anyone is approaching my house.  I take the monitors to bed with me so I can listen all night.
• When I have a package coming, I have to watch for it because leaving anything on the porch makes it likely to be stolen.
• I am afraid to use public transportation.
• I am afraid to attend a city council meeting.
• I don't want friends from out of town to visit because I am ashamed of my city.

It feels like I am under siege.  This is NOT my Portland.

Now we have criminals crawling the streets, taking what they want.  This guy has a big knife.  He is on the porch of this house, trying to get in.  The photo is from a security camera video.  The video shows him circling the house,  taking things and trying to get into the house.  Very creepy.

Life in Portland, the city that does not work

My life of late has been consumed by two Portland problems: the homeless and unbridled growth.  Unbridled growth is destroying us.  Our city is overwhelmed. And our elected officials are doing squat.

In the words of  Tom McCall:  " We must respect another truism - that unlimited and unregulated growth, leads inexorably to a lowered quality of life.”

This is a shit bucket provided to the homeless in the park and emptied for them.  They haven't emptied it yet...  I think it pretty well sums up life in Portland these days.

Today is the day of the big Springwater Trail homeless camp sweep.  It's been in the works for at least six weeks and was postponed once.  The news reports that of the more than 500 people camped there, they have relocated 60, including a dozen they put on the bus to somewhere else.  And now they are going to force them off the trail into the neighborhoods.  They have been told to camp in small groups on public property  but not in parks and some other rules that not even I can follow.   They are angry.  Broken down vehicles that people live out of have become the norm on Portland streets.

I get a daily Google News alert on the topic "Portland Homeless".  Here are some of the links from the past few days.

Open Wapato jail to the homeless, says Commissioner Loretta Smith

Fire breaks out at homeless camp near Hawthorne Bridge

Police: Man tired of homeless campers throws bomb under RV

Lents neighbors wrestle with homelessness issues

Harbor businesses to challenge Terminal 1 homeless shelter

'Lents' year from hell:' Neighbors protest new homeless camp

Homeless on the Springwater Trail prepare to leave

Walking in the neighborhood

These people seem to have folks living in their yard.  It's been going on a LONG time....

It isn't this house.  I just like this house.  Things are all jumbled together in Portland, though.  Homeless.  Nice houses.  Etc.

I like these art deco chairs.

Community garden

Homeless car campers

Homeless campers along the edge of the park.

It hasn't gotten better...

"Mike Jenkins, also known as Pork Chop, said he moved to the Laurelhurst Park area from the Springwater Corridor. He said many others will make the same move when the corridor is swept by the city...“They’re coming,” Jenkins said. “Down here in Laurelhurst Park. Put ’em on Hawthorne. I’m gonna put ’em on Belmont, I’m gonna put ’em right in front of shopping centers.”"



Laurelhurst Park camping

And a quote from Nextdoor:

"Is this basically him saying 'If you won't let us utterly destroy a protected natural area, I'm going to make sure we shove ourselves in your face as much as possible.'?

That's the same entitled mentality of the people on SE Hawthorne who painted a sign saying that people had better start giving them moe money when they pass or they're going to be forced to continue breaking into houses to steal. JUST because you don't have a fixed address, that doesn't mean that 1) I owe you ANYTHING, 2) You can threaten me with "Let me continue my criminal behavior or else!''

And another quote:

"This used to be something that I saw more frequently at Col Summers Park last year and the year before-, but I think it was more if we, as neighbors called in. It wasn't proactive, but reactive. To be honest, I don't think police will even come unless there is a direct threat of violence or a weapon involved."

More of how it is here:

Daycare wagon stolen and found on Springwater Trail

Homeless campers build tunnel along river destroying trees

The horror of living in Lents

Springwater sweep postponed

Just a livability issue

Source:

Chuck Lawrence said two of his eight units at Bel-Air Court will soon be vacated after longtime tenants announced area homeless are making them feel too unsafe to remain in their apartments. Lawrence said he doesn’t blame them, , rattling off a list of recent crimes: stealing bikes and water, and frequent cases of trespassing.  “The homeless have been looking in the windows,” Lawrence said.   “Several [of the tenants] are single women.  Lawrence said he’s recently put padlocks on outdoor water faucets and installed several motion-detector lights.

There’s a four foot chain-linked fence around the side and back of the property, but he's hoping the city will allow him to make it taller.  “I've tried to take care of the place,” Lawrence added. "I’ve tried to take care of all of them, and it’s hard for somebody whose trying to make a living off their small rentals." Lawrence has owned the complex in southeast Portland for 30 years.

He said homeless in the area have been an issue for about two years and the biggest problems have come in the last few months. Tenants must cross the Springwater Corridor path to get to their homes, and some of the tents are just feet from the apartments.

“It’s scary,” said tenant Maddie Ingraham, pointing to a homeless camp about 30 feet from her bedroom window. “They’re everywhere, and they just kind of stare you down when you’re driving through your driveway. You just feel uncomfortable going to your own house.” “These people yell and scream all the time, like at three in the morning,” Ingraham added. "It’s just really inconsiderate. When they do move on they leave all their trash everywhere.”

Not ANOTHER stand off...

You might remember the Malheur Refuge standoff not so many months ago.  Now some of the Springwater Trail campers are saying they are having a standoff.  And the mayor is saying the campers are supposed to disperse in small groups into the neighborhoods.

This is the Springwater Trail and the "campers"

source

The mayor says these 500 people (or more)  should camp in the neighborhoods of Portland.  These "campers" have destroyed the land they have been camping on,  have made the lives of the people with houses near them miserable and have made they area they camp in dangerous to be in.

This is the trash "campers" piled up behind a home on the Springwater Trail.

Source

This is insane.  Our police are severely understaffed and can only respond to emergencies in a timely manner.  They can't respond to livability issues and that is how they classify problems with homeless people in most cases, including open drug use, needles left strewn around, noise, fires, trash, threatening behavior, urinating/defecating in public.  Perhaps Charlie Hales, the mayor, has become passive aggressive at the end of his tenure.

Still want to move to Portland?

Just a livability issue

Quote from Koin news story on Springwater issues:

"Neighbors in the area have been protesting the campers there, reporting crimes and overflowing trash for months. One homeowner, who didn’t want to be identified, said she stepped on a needle someone threw onto her porch this morning. She broke into tears telling KOIN 6 News her story.

 "This isn’t their ground to stand on. They shouldn’t be here. It’s an environmental disaster,' she said. 'All these advocates are here for the homeless, but there is no one here for us,” she said. “I hate my life. I hate my house. I don’t want to live here anymore.'"

Just a livability issue

From a Nextdoor comment:

"My husband called the cops on a homeless man the other day who was at Sunnyside environmentally school playground. The man was belligerent and peeing on a tree in front of children. His "privates were in full view of kids. This is just not okay! My husband waited for at least 30 mins until he had to leave to get to work and the police did not show up as it's probably not a priority."

What privilege means in Portland

This homeless situation is so big and so difficult.  I've talked before about the huge camping problem on the Spingwater Corridor which now has at least 500 campers, some say a 1000 campers.  And now the city says they are closing it down.  The campers want the city to allow camping in all neighborhoods, including Eastmoreland where the mayor lives.  This is a quote from their meeting:

"That's where the decision makers for our whole city live," Schultz said, "but they get to have their kids run around and not be confronted with [homelessness]. So they don't have the dinner-time conversation of, 'yeah, I saw a guy [urinating] in front of me or screamed a bunch of profanity at me or there were needles littered around.' They don't have to deal with that. It's a manifestation of their privilege."

So, now we know what privilege means.  It seems to me that the homeless are demanding privileges that the rest of us don't have.  They want all their needs met while they do whatever they want which includes using drugs in public, leaving trash everywhere, pooping and peeing anywhere, acting out, setting fires, taking what they want, destroying public and private property.

The Springwater trail homeless have a list of demands.

* Extend the Aug. 1 deadline to shut down the trail to overnight camping

* Provide additional time to people with disabilities, children or the elderly in the event of relocation

* Relocate homeless people, not displace them.

* Refrain from seizing anyone's possessions

* Cease the criminalization of the homeless community

* Meet directly with the trail's homeless campers

* Levy a tax on real estate projects to benefit social services

* Allow interested homeowners to open their backyards for long-term camping

* Deploy storage units for campers' belongings a week before the Aug. 1 cleanup

Source: Vahid Brown, discussion leader from July 23, 2016 Springwater Corridor meeting

Just a livability issue

Yesterday someone posted this photo of the homeless sleeping in the park playground.  She said:

"My toddler and I arrived at laurelhurst park this morning at 8 am. Up since five and ready to play. Instead of sliding and swinging kids we were greeted by a group of homeless people and dogs sleeping under the playground. I am so sick of this!

I let a park ranger know and it took them about forty minutes to pack up and then he had to once again to tell them to leave as they just hung out.  Now smells like booze and pee here.  Please rain."

A city out of control

As far as I can tell, Portland is out of control.   This is how Portland looks and feels these days.

All of the city departments are understaffed and can't keep up, including the police.  The city website often leads you in circles instead of helping you with your problem.  It used to be a great website.  Not anymore.

If you call about an issue, it takes six to seven phone calls (and a lot of time) to find anyone who might help you.  Every response I get from them talks about how over burdened they are, without the resources to respond.  This is pretty much the standard  response you get to any complaint (I got this one in email):

" Service Level Update:   Due to reduced resources, the Bureau may need to prioritize some  enforcement/complaint types in order to effectively process the more critical  cases with our limited resources.  While  cases are being setup to document all complaints received, not all cases are  being assigned for investigation and enforcement.   We apologize for this service level reduction and plan to respond to  more case types as additional resources become available."

What this means is that if you haven't been shot or stabbed, don't expect a timely response from the city.  If it's "just" a livability issue, don't expect any help.  And people are moving to Portland for its "livability"?   Boy are they gonna be surprised!

Camping along the Springwater Trail

The homeless situation gets worse and worse.  We now have the largest single homeless camp in the country with an estimated 500 to a thousand people living along the Springwater Corridor.  The situation there is very bad and unsafe.  There are shootings and other violence as well as heavy drug use and  fires.  It's supposed to be a bike/pedestrian trail but it's unsafe to be there.   People who live near the Springwater Corridor are very affected by the camps in close proximity to their homes.   The city has  decided to finally clear it out, which will force all those people into the neighborhoods.

This is a tent in Laurelhurst Park.  It has been there for weeks and weeks even though camping is prohibited in the parks.  The tent is very near their maintenance building.

I reported the illegal camping.  That tent is still there and now it has a neighbor.

It's pretty hard to get to the Hollywood neighborhood on foot without going down these stairs.  This guy called me Babe and asked for money.  When I refused, he was angry and called me names.

The construction  gets worse and worse.  The city does not respond in a timely manner to construction complaints.  It takes days for them to respond.   By the time they get there, that particular subcontractor has moved on to another project.  The construction people know they have the upper hand and are ignoring the laws.  This construction site has had the sidewalk blocked for about ten days although the law says they can't do that for longer than 2 hours.

Portland is changing and the changes are not good.  Portland has the slogan "the city that works".  I think we need a new slogan.  Maybe we can just put a Not in front as in "Not the city that works".

Still want to move to Portland?

Homeless in Seattle

This quote is from a piece by Peter Wieben who visits his homeless sister in Seattle.    I found it pretty interesting and thought provoking.

"The city was full of do-gooders. I walked around Seattle for a long time. Every so often, I was bothered by someone asking for money to help the bees, or to guarantee that people could get abortions. One girl in a bright red hat stopped me, and said she was working with Doctors Without Borders. She said she had worked with them in Rwanda. The fields were so green there, she said. The dirt was so red. She asked me what I knew about Doctors Without Borders. I told her. She asked what I was doing in Seattle, and I told her I was learning about homelessness.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a big problem. But still,” she said. “We have to keep in mind that we in America have it good. We don’t have the problems that a lot of other countries have.”
I stood there, listening. Mentally ill people wandered beneath skyscrapers next to people collecting money for bees. That was a particular bit of insanity you didn’t find even in the third world. She saw the look on my face.
“I guess it’s still hard, though,” she said. “Living on the street.”
A woman walked past then, just at that second, a crazy lady, with wild hair. She shouted at us, getting close. “YEAH!” she shouted. “IT FUCKING IS.”"

Portland homeless

This is a video I ran across in the Portland Mercury about the Hazelnut Grove homeless camp.  The beginning shows homeless on the streets of Portland.  Notice how young most of them are.  That is the age group I mostly see on the street.  The people in the camp are older.  These days I see mostly young homeless people when I am out and about, like they show in the beginning of the film.


Hazelnut Grove from Kevin Neidorf on Vimeo.

Don't move to Portland

Portland is going through phenomenal growth and that has raised housing prices causing many people to lose their homes, especially renters.  In addition, much of the city land that homeless used to camp on has been or is being developed, says the mayor.   So, help the homeless and the poor who are losing their homes to development.  Don't move to Portland.  

We've always had homeless people in Portland and people are pretty tolerant of the homeless.   But the problem has become too large to handle.  In addition, we have a relatively new homeless element in Portland that is pretty scary and very destructive.  Not all of the homeless, but some of them.  The scary ones are mostly young and they are not interested in another lifestyle.  They want to live on the street.  They say they like the freedom.

They are camping all over our city.  And they do not clean up after themselves.  Our police and parks departments are having to clean up deplorable messes.... needles, human feces, huge piles of garbage.   The parks people empty shit buckets for the homeless.  That sounds bad to me but they say having to do that is preferable to cleaning up the other places they poop.

I am seriously concerned about Portland, which is a place I love.  The growth is killing us.

This is the most insightful article I have read on our homeless situation.

And this is the kind of mess I mean....

source

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And besides the homeless, we have horrible construction site messes everywhere, making it difficult to walk.  It's even hard in the day time let alone at night.

Homeless in the park

These are the homeless sleeping and hanging out in the park nearby today....

Not so pretty stuff

This is a homeless person sleeping in the bus stop on the way to  the farmer's market.... still there when we walked back as well.   I don't think I can go for a walk without seeing homeless people (they are that prevalent).  The mayor claims they are all local but I've been asking them and hardly anyone I talk to is from Portland. The city also claims that many homeless in Portland are families.  Those are not the ones I see.  I see mostly young people in their 20's and 30's. 

Note the portable toilet in the background.  I think that is one of the toilets they have placed around Portland in hopes the homeless will stop pooping and peeing all over the place.   

So if you are from out of town and are thinking of visiting lovely Portland, expect this kind of thing and much worse.

source

The city government has a 30 year plan.  I hate the plan.  I can't believe they think they can plan for the future when they can't take care of the present.

One of the ugliest and most dangerous areas of Portland is the Springwater Corridor, which is a path they built for walking and bicycling and is now heavily used by homeless campers.   They can't even fix that.  The trail is not safe.  There is lots of violence.  It's very trashy and ugly.  The people who live near the trail are also having many issues with the homeless.  I  read that the city is getting 300-400 complaints per day about the Springwater.  And now there are two lawsuits against the city about their mismanagement of the trail.

This map is from an Oregonian news item (says Google).  The map is now missing from the story, which is about this incident some time ago.  

source- Google photos, back source gone

Bike Portland has a lot to say about the state of the Springwater Corridor.    Here are some other links.

Springwater corridor safety

Dangers on Springwater prompt summer camp to cancel

And it is not just the Springwater corridor.... it is everywhere except in the very wealthiest neighborhoods.  Somehow they are protected.  For example, the mayor lives across the street from a place that never sees any homeless problem.  Looks like a great place to camp to me.  I think it is a golf course.  We could buy it and give it to the homeless.  They can use Charlie's bathroom.

Tent city near Hawthorne Bridge cleared.... needles and garbage left behind.

79 homeless camp fires in last two months

Google image search on Portland homeless

I could go on and on.....

So, if you are thinking of visiting or moving, expect this ugliness.  And soon the Travelers will be arriving in large numbers.  Those are the young homeless by choice people who travel up and down the west coast and like to summer in Portland.  Some are very aggressive and scary, much like feral animals.   The city is making some attempt to hide them from tourists, which means pushing them into neighborhoods.

Outdoor store worker assaulted

Travelers

Why young homeless unwelcome in tourist areas

Still want to come?

Waterfront Park cherry trees

Yesterday we  walked to see the waterfront cherry trees blooming.  We went last year as well; since we are having an earlier spring this year, they are earlier this year.  We park on "our side" of the river near the Lucky Lab Pub and walk across the Hawthorne bridge.





It was such a beautiful day and the sky had great looking clouds.  We get those clouds in the spring and I always look forward to them.  Here we are on the approach to the bridge.

Views into the Eastside industrial district from the bridge approach.  I love the old buildings and the diversity of businesses in the district, but like much else in Portland, it is under attack from developers building ugly condos.

We had lots of company on the bridge.

The Willamette River

We haven't crossed the bridge on foot in several months and I was shocked by the number of homeless camps we saw.

Cherry trees blooming in Waterfront Park

 More homeless camps