Salem City Council allows homeless to camp on public property. But where?

At last night's City Council meeting a big change was made to the homeless ordinance that passed at the previous meeting, and required a "second reading" to become law.

Instead of banning camping on public property entirely, the council decided to allow homeless people to camp on approved city-owned property. Here's some excerpts from a Salem Reporter story by Troy Brynelson, "Salem bans open camping and now seeks a place to host it."

(Kudos to Brynelson for using "eighty-sixing" in his story. I haven't seen this term used in a long time, and I'm old.)

Tents and other dwellings will soon have to disappear from sidewalks and boulevards after the Salem City Council on Monday night banned camping on public property.

But city officials aren’t eighty-sixing campers altogether. The city is taking two weeks to designate a spot for them to camp.

Councilors Tom Andersen and Vanessa Nordyke orchestrated the idea, separately pitching that city staff needed to find public property for campers to move when the ban goes into effect on Monday, Dec. 16.

As a result, city employees are expected to report to the council next Monday and what city-owned property could be used as an impromptu campground. Andersen said without such a space, it’s unclear where the camping populace would go.

Well, it's also unclear where homeless campers are going to end up under the new policy. Maybe the City of Salem owns vacant property that would make a fine place for an organized homeless camp. I'm just clueless as to where that property might be.

Parks seemingly would be ruled out. So would right of ways adjacent to busy streets. A downtown homeless camp would be too controversial. But a camp far distant from social services wouldn't make sense either.

Nordyke and Andersen, along with the rest of the City Council, did seem to make a wise decision. A Statesman Journal story by Jonathan Bach, "Salem council may set aside city property as designated camping sites for the homeless," says:

People experiencing homelessness have a shrinking list of places to go as cold weather sets in. They have been barred from camping in city parks, spurned from private land and rousted from beneath public bridges.

City officials have attempted to connect the homeless with social services, but that doesn't change the fact that area shelters do not have the capacity to give everyone a place to rest at night. Advocates estimate the homeless population to be approximately 1,800 people strong at a given time within the urban growth boundary, while the area only has about 300 emergency shelter beds. Warming shelters opened recently to bolster that number temporarily.

It's one thing if a homeless person chooses to camp out because they prefer this to being in a shelter. However, it's another thing if there aren't enough shelter beds available for every person who wants one -- which appears to be the case currently.

Last Sunday's Sixty Minutes program had an interesting segment on Seattle's homeless population. You can watch it via the Sixty Minutes web site. It featured an interview with a homeless family who has been living in a tent in a camp on public property, very much like what Salem is planning.

A transcript says:

In the shadow of Interstate 5 in Seattle, on a vacant strip of public land, this is Tent City 3. There are about 50 people living here, without heat or running water.

Ethan Wood is celebrating his third birthday. He's lived in a tent for the past year and a half. 

His parents, Tricia and Josiah, told us Ethan has an enlarged heart and suffers from bouts of asthma and croup so severe, they've had to take him to the emergency room several times. Last winter, one of Seattle's coldest in recent memory, Ethan was sleeping in a tent, covered with blankets, sandwiched between his parents for warmth.

Anderson Cooper: Did you ever think, "Well, this is not the place, we should have our child"?

Josiah Wood: We don't want our son here. We don't want to be here. But as of right now, this is the safest place for us.

Tricia Wood: Absolutely. 

Josiah Wood: Because we know the people, we know the rules, and--

Tricia Wood: Our family gets to stay together.

Josiah Wood: And our family stays together.

This was an eye-opener for me. I hadn't realized that many homeless people have full-time jobs that pay considerably more than minimum wage.

Tricia Wood: I used to be one of those people that thought that if anyone was homeless they just needed to go get a job. That would solve their homeless problems.

Anderson Cooper: How would you answer that question now? Why can't they just get a job?

Tricia Wood: Oh my goodness. Maybe they have a job. 

Josiah Wood has a full-time job. He gets up before dawn and takes mass transit to work as a maintenance supervisor at the Hard Rock Café downtown. Though he makes $19.50 an hour, the rent for an average one-bedroom apartment in Seattle would eat up half his salary. He and Tricia say they've been saving up money so they can afford a security deposit and monthly rent.

Now, rents in Seattle must be a lot higher than rents in Salem. But there must be quite a few homeless people in Salem who also are working, yet can't afford a market-rate apartment.

It'd be great if our local journalists could do what Sixty Minutes did: interview homeless people who don't fit the stereotype of mentally ill, drug abuser, unable to work. Several others featured in the Sixty Minutes segment had full-time jobs, including a postal worker woman who lives in an old RV, and a man who worked at DEQ, I recall.

The more we can recognize the diversity of homeless people and appreciate that they are just like the rest of us, apart from not having a home, the easier it will be for those worried about having a homeless camp near them to accept the camp as a temporary solution.

The Sixty Minutes piece did note that there's a time limit in Seattle on how long a camp can be in one place. Salem probably needs to have the same policy, to make the camp on public property more acceptable to near-by businesses and residences.

This is one of several makeshift encampments in Seattle that are allowed by the city. Decisions are made by camp residents, who are also required to do chores and take turns guarding the tents. But about every three months, all the residents in Tent City Three agree to pack up and move to a new location. It's an arrangement they make with the landowners who let them pitch their tents. No one wants a camp of homeless people in their neighborhood for very long.

When we visited Ethan and his parents in September, they had just packed up their tent near the highway and were setting up in a church pastor's backyard. It was the eighth time they've had to move in the past year and a half.

Comments

[Norm Baxter]

One solution (and there are many available) would be to allow camping in undeveloped city parks. If you check the city's web site and go to a map of the parks, you will find several undeveloped and vacant parks where the homeless could camp. The numbers at each site should be limited to prevent problems, and porta potties could provide sanitation needs. Don't allow camping on sidewalks and require campers to go to an assigned park to camp. It would take some time and effort to set up and manage this solution, but it would be cheaper and quicker than building apartments. Long term we are going to have to address mental health needs and our extreme wealth and income inequality which is crushing the working poor and the middle class, but this is a viable stop gap solution.

[Kurt]

Mayhaps the City should have allowed campers to remain in Wallace Marine Park, Marion Park, and the area near Mission and Hawthorne. The symptoms of the fundamental problems that are not even being acknowledged could have festered for a longer time before action became necessary. Out of sight, out of mind. It is not coincidental that the 2 attorneys on Council pushed for these camps. The Boise decision made it clear that arresting the homeless when there were no available shelter beds was illegal. Even under the best of circumstances, this problem will get worse. Increasing available beds and subsidized housing units, as well as providing camps can only be expected to lessen the impact of a portion of the steadily worsening problem.
As long as the trend toward unaffordability continues, more people will not be able to keep a roof over their heads, as we have seen in so many other West Coast cities. As long as prisoners continue to be branded as felons after release and are essentially excluded from decent housing and jobs, they will be homeless and continue to tax law enforcement resources. As long as government remains committed to the theory that, as long as development is encouraged, sufficient operating funds will be available to provide needed services, there will be decisions made that overlook the fact that benefits of development inevitably reach a point of diminishing returns.
Things could be much worse. As Vonnegut said: "If this isn't nice, what is?"
If the current regime holds power, benefits will be cut in ways that will result in a social environment unlike anything America has seen since the Depression.

[Skyline]

I'm going to call the city first thing in the morning and make them aware of the wide open spaces just off the end of Liberty Rd S.
I hear that some of the residents there have multiple cars, scooters, skateboards and other means of transportation they "probably" won't mind loaning out.
I just know that the home owners there are just BURNING to make Bernie proud!!!

[Kurt]

Hey skyline, this is not an issue that welcomes your nonsense. Please limit your comments to support for the wannabee dictator. Love you.

[tucson]

"It's one thing if a homeless person chooses to camp out because they prefer this to being in a shelter. However, it's another thing if there aren't enough shelter beds available for every person who wants one."

How many is enough ?

"The more we can recognize the diversity of homeless people and appreciate that they are just like the rest of us, apart from not having a home.."

-- Most homeless people aren't like "us" precisely because they don't have a home. There are reasons like mental illness or drug issues, even criminality.

A smaller percentage of homeless are just down on their luck or actually prefer to be homeless for reasons other than mental illness or drugs.. I got to talking with a senior guy sitting in a park. His old truck with a camper shell was parked a short distance away. Turned out he was homeless except for the truck.. We hit it off pretty well and I offered him some money. He declined saying he had enough money and that he was living this way temporarily by choice until he decided what to do next. These types of homeless people do not sleep in tents on sidewalks or in doorways or crap on the street and leave their syringes around. That type is harder to help even if you build a ten story tenement to house them all.

Maybe the city could fund a simple heated warehouse with cots or sleeping pads and a bathroom for those who want to get out of the weather. Perhaps a vat of soup could be kept warm in a corner somewhere.

[Kurt]

Well said, tucson. There are those who wish to live as nomads. These individuals place a (perhaps excessive) value on personal freedom. Along with others who resist attacks on their sense of dignity and consider unwanted evangelicalism to be rude and insulting, there will be those who will not fit in to the kind of help that cities like Salem offer.

Salem admirably enabled efforts to expand the amount and quality of warming shelters. This will alleviate a significant portion of the needless suffering that was created when campers were chased out of areas where they caused little harm and had been using for generations.

We should not delude ourselves into thinking that this problem will not get much worse or that current efforts will even keep up with the increasing numbers. Many people are struggling to keep a roof over their heads as living costs increase and living wage jobs remain unavailable to many. A recent closing at Norpac, in Salem, resulted in the loss of 1400 jobs. Food stamps will soon be taken away from many due to the recent federal action.

Many people will simply die as an indirect result of poverty and the widening of the gulf between the wealthy and the desperate. People will increasing look for ways to live in camps or in cars because animals try really hard to stay alive. Of course, more people will act in self destructive ways, but, for the most part, humans persevere.

I suspect that this country will continue on a path toward becoming third worldish. Areas of extreme poverty will increase. Homeless camps may simply be the precursor to what we see in countries where neighborhoods are made up of thrown together shacks. We may continue to be able to maintain water supplies, sanitary services, and disease control systems that are absent in many South American countries and other places like India, but the direction we are moving seems clear and the rate of that movement may be about to increase in a major way.

Salem will do what it can to prevent open displays of poverty. The government will continue to try to control anything that may harm real estate values or besmirch the tourist attracting image. That is all well and good, but I think that the city will be best served if they take a more realistic view of the problem and begin to establish organized communities suited to those who will not be able to keep up. This is not a pleasant solution, but it will probably be better than pretending that the problem will just go away or can be practically dealt with by law enforcement.