Portland’s antihouseless attitudes are destroying public spaces
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Jason Washington’s memorial is entering the final stages of the planning process, as the Jason Washington Art Memorial Committee sends out requests for proposals this month to local artists to commission the project. For the Washington family, this means being a step closer to a concrete memorialization of a father and husband.
Portland State President Stephen Percy formed the memorial committee in Jan. 2021, nearly three years after PSU officers shot Jason Washington 17 times, of which nine gunshots resulted in his death. The delay in the creation of the committee was in part due to waiting for the finalization of legal processes between the Washington family and the university, combined with a shuffling of university presidents.
Kayla Washington, daughter and representative for the Washington family on the memorial committee, said that she anticipates seeing the final product.
“They really care about the family,” Kayla Washington said. “I was shocked and speechless— it gets to have my dad’s name on it.”
During this time, the activist coalition Disarm PSU pushed for more information regarding exactly what reparations were being made for Jason Washington’s family. The coalition consists of students and staff members who joined together in 2014 as a response to PSU arming the Campus Public Safety Office (CPSO). Katie Cagle, a behavioral health project assistant at PSU and member of Disarm PSU, said that concern rose around what little was shared with the public during this time.
“As staff members, we feel a sense of responsibility for someone who wasn’t even a student,” Cagle said. “Even with the university time curve, it’s really disrespectful. I’m really grateful to Percy for his commitment to racial justice—but also, it’s the bare minimum.”
Disarm PSU staff members pushed heavily for a reversal of the 2014 decision to arm campus police officers after Jason Washington’s death. In August 2020, the campus safety office announced that campus police patrols would no longer be armed—however, because of unmet requirements which would allow unarmed patrols, implementation was delayed. Today, while the CPSO website states that “all our officers are unarmed on patrols,” Cagle said students have still reported seeing armed officers walking around campus.
“Currently, safety for students isn’t consistent,” Cagle said. “Requiring a certain number of unarmed officers on shift for a policy to work is not a policy. Right now, it’s just day-to-day.”
The art memorial committee consists of a variety of members, including a student representative; PSU faculty and staff; Kayla Washington, the oldest daughter in the Washington family; and her attorney Deena Sarjitharan.
Dominique Chen, vice president of ASPSU, represented the student body as a member of the committee. She noted that through the process she learned a lot from the committee.
“Really the only thing that everybody on this committee wants is that everyone is memorialized in the rightest way,” Chen said. “It’s such a privilege to work with people who have put so much time and effort and thought into this. The most you could ask for from a committee that has a specific purpose, not only to make an impactful public art on campus, but also something that deals with such a sensitive impactful issue.”
Sajitharan said that the work by the committee and PSU has been incredible to be a part of. “Everyone’s busy and has a full time job,” she said. “It just means that much more that people are doing this outside of working hours. Doing it right and doing it right by the Washington family.”
“I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO IT BEING THE FINISHED PROJECT”
The project consists of two memorials. The first one is a copper plaque with the details of Jason Washington’s shooting written on it. It will be on SW College Street at the scene of the shooting, where Washington family members created and are maintaining a colorful, personal memorial on a nearby tree.
“It’s very to the point of what happened,” Kayla Washington said. “It’ll be interesting to see how many people stop and read it. I like that it’s just blunt and to the point, and then we’ll have another piece that is more a celebration of his life.”
The second memorial will be located on campus, for which artist proposals are going out this month to commission the project. The committee is hoping to
have the copper plaque up by April, and have chosen an artist for the second memorial by September.
“I’m very thankful that we have this opportunity,” Kayla Washington said. “The whole family is very happy and excited. I’m looking forward to it being the finished project, and getting together with students so that they know what all is happening.”
On Feb. 21, ASPSU is holding an open house event in celebration of the life and legacy of Jason Washington. It will run from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., starting in the Smith Memorial Union room 296/7, also known as Parkway North, and ending with a march across campus. Pizza, Jason Washington’s favorite food, will be provided, and any and all students and community members are encouraged to join.
This week’s Green Space feature presents more than just a space, but an entire six-mile loop around downtown Portland. This highly collaborative project is the city of Portland’s 2035 plan to address an expanding city with increasing congestion and development.
Portland State Vanguard spoke to Keith Jones, the executive director of the Friends of Green Loop, a community-based organization that promotes, advocates and helps to advance the development of the Green Loop. “My organization is a community based non-profit that advocates for it and makes sure that work continues on to develop this,” Jones said.
“As imagined, the city describes it as a six-mile linear park around the city… it sort of is like a beltway around the city to help you get around the central city. A lot of people think it’s just going to be a bike lane that goes all the way around, but there’ll be infrastructure that’s like that that accommodates pedestrians and cyclists and people on scooters… but the real Green Loop is all the stuff around it. So creating green spaces where there are none, everything would be more neighborhoodspecific… as much as it’s important to travel on the Loop, it’s also just as important to get off of the Green Loop and go into the neighborhoods.”
Being as complex a project as it is, the Green Loop has multiple groups involved, from the Portland City Bureaus to local communities. “It sits right now between the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability where it was sort of conceptualized, where the idea came from and PBOT,” Jones said. “There’s other bureaus that could come into play like the Parks Bureau, or Bureau of Environmental Services—so really it’s a whole city project. A lot of the people my organization works with are community based. We’ve worked a lot with community partners wherever we can.”
Instead of planning and implementing the entire project at once, the city hopes to develop it organically. “The way the city is approaching it is to consider different projects that could help build it out,” Jones said. “And so it’s not one big project, it’s several. And some of them are private sector and some of them are public sector… a piece I consider to be a segment of the Green Loop to be out there right now is the food cart pod that we created down in Burnside and SW Park.”
The food carts were originally where Ritz Carlton, a condominium complex on SW Washington St., now stands. Before that the space hosted the largest food cart pod in the city—about 55 small businesses, primarily immigrant-owned, that had been utilizing the parking lot space for a long time. The parking lot was sold to a developer that built a project that was part of a section of the Green Loop. “When I went down there and saw the food carts, I thought we needed to come up with a plan to not displace those businesses, and maybe the best thing to do was to create a permanent place for them that didn’t have any risk of development, and maybe that place is on the Green Loop,” Jones said. “So that took two years to work with the city, and we eventually got this park that they didn’t use anymore that was right there on Burnside… we were able to get food carts around the park… there’s some economic development opportunities in here, there’s community building that could also come into place, so we’re interested in finding those things and building them out—perhaps before the city gets around to building out the infrastructure.”
Jones said that the idea for the Green Loop has been in the works for years. “It began a long time ago actually, and it was through a series of conversations that the city of Portland had,” he said. “People got together and talked about, ‘What if there was a people-centric space in the downtown core? What would that look like?’ And then this idea of a loop sort of started forming… and it should be on both sides of the river… not just the downtown core.”
The Friends of Green Loop have been advocating and championing for the progression of the project for a couple of years now. “There’s a lot of talk and concepts have flown around about the Green Loop but actual work is not yet really being done,” Jones said. “There are some pieces that are in place… but it is not even a formal project within the city of Portland yet. A lot of it is complicated to move it forward, but it is a concept that a lot of people really want to see happen, and I do think that we’re gonna start seeing a lot more of it in at least the next two or three years.”
“I think that the challenge is really how to formalize it… getting the city to allocate the proper resources to get it done and the design and things like that,” Jones continued. “We have a very good community base when they’re ready.”
According to Jones, the proposed Green Loop in Portland is causing other cities to take notice. “I just got a call from Salt Lake City, Utah and they found out about the Portland Green loop [and they were] really impressed by it—they would like to build one… I just started talking to them six months ago about this,” Jones said. “They are already putting out a request for a quote to build it in Salt Lake City.”
While Jones’ statement reveals the project’s appeal, it does raise questions about the project’s speed of implementation compared to metropolitan areas like Salt Lake City. “That’s a problem,” Jones said. “Portland is a good city that plans, we are known for our planning, but also we need to remember that we also need to build what we plan. There is such a thing as planning too much. I think planning is a very comfortable place to be—sometimes. Because we want to get as many ideas down in the ground as we can before we start, but sometimes that also means that you lose some of the magic of creating something quicker and something else might come up as you’re going through this process that you didn’t think about before.”
“I like the planning aspect, but I also like the doing aspect more… there’s tons of great ideas, and ideas are fantastic, but also you need to act on those ideas otherwise nothing ever gets realized,” Jones said. “You’ll see probably in the summer some more Green Loop type things pop up—it won’t be the full Green Loop, but we’ll get there.”
This week at 5th Avenue Cinema—Portland’s only student-ran theater—students can catch a free showing of Eve’s Bayou in 35mm. Eve’s Bayou is a 1997 drama film written and directed by Kasi Lemmons. Even though the film was Lemmons’ first feature, its cast has several well-known actors, including Samuel L. Jackson, Lynn Whitfield and Meagan Good.
The film takes place in the Louisiana Bayou and follows the life of a 10-year-old girl named Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett) during the summer of 1962. The story revolves around the struggles of the Batiste family and the secrets they keep, leading to a series of events that profoundly impact Eve’s life. The film is considered a classic of Black cinema and has received critical acclaim for its writing, direction and performances.
The film was chosen for screening by one of the two projectionists at 5th Avenue Cinema, Cadie Godula. She has been with the theater for nearly two years and will leave when she graduates from Portland State next term.
The theater is known for its eclectic selection of films. “We have our genre ‘scale’ here at 5th Ave,” Godula said. “We program a lot of sad stuff, it seems—not necessarily this term— but we have in the past.”
When searching for a film, she said she was looking for something more dramatic than sad, even though there is a fine line between the two. “It’s directed by Kasi Lemmons, this was her first feature film, and it’s very dramatic—one might say too dramatic,” Godula said. “But it fits the bill and definitely has the vibes of a late ‘90s drama.”
At the time, very few movies would be noticed—let alone created—by women of color. “It’s like one of the few feature films of the ‘90s to be directed by a Black woman,” Godula said. “There weren’t a lot of Black women getting a lot of attention, and their films would go by the wayside as ‘independent’ films. But to my knowledge, this film did pretty okay.”
Lemmons was able to gain credibility through previous film work, leading her to be able to work with such talent in this film. “There were a lot of movies directed by people of color, and they just weren’t getting as much praise, so I think this one is important because it kind of was able to crack through that a
little bit and got some recognition at the time,” Godula said. Eve’s Bayou is now considered a notable film of the time. Godula emphasized the distinctness of ‘90s dramas.
“Everything feels very over the top just because it was the feel of the whole genre of drama,” she said. “There’s a lot of musical interludes throughout that just accents it.” She thought this film has more going on than contemporary dramas, calling the editing interesting and fun. “I feel like these days, dramas are just a little more subdued, but this one is definitely not subdued,” she said.
If you do not like drama, maybe this film is not for you. Godula had a whole list of people that may not like this film: “People who don’t like drama. People who don’t like movies that are set in Louisiana. People who don’t like swamps. People who don’t like voodoo, and people who don’t like men cheating on their wives—that too.”
Godula really enjoyed the performance of the young girl that played Eve, Jurnee Smollett. She reflected on a scene in the movie where the girl was frightened running through the market. “She gets scared, and it’s just very good,” Godula said. “I was like, ‘wow, this little girl can act!’ She makes a lot of very expressive expressions if that makes sense... and it just makes the film feel even more dramatic than it already is.” As an adult actress, Smollett is known for her more recent work, but Eve’s Bayou remains one of her most notable performances.
Originally, Godula had thought of programming a film called Drylongso by Cauleen Smith. “It’s similar—’90s film directed by a Black woman that just looked fucking awesome,” Godula said. “But you could not find it anywhere.” So, when the theater cannot find a distributor for a film, they have to hunt for other great films. Luckily, they found Eve’s Bayou in 35mm.
5th Avenue Cinema is one of the very few cinemas in the city that screens films on 35mm. “It’s cool,” Godula said. “It’s cool as hell. We try to play it a lot because, you know, it’s 35—it used to be everywhere, man.”
She talked about how analog film began to die as digital film came around. “The art of projecting film is still slowly dying, but also kind of not at the same time,” Godula said. There are whole communities of people that adore film and make sure that it
does not die. “We appreciate it over here, and there’s something about viewing a print of a film, even if it’s, like, a dog shit print, scratched up and terrible, it’s still fun to watch,” Godula said. “It’s a physical thing that you’re watching, light is being shined through this piece of plastic—it’s moving. It’s just fun.”
Godula has a very different job weekly depending on whether they’re screening digital or analog format. With digital, she presses play and turns down the lights. If they are screening an analog film, like this week’s Eve’s Bayou, she says it can be a little nerve-wracking. “There’s so many things that could go wrong,” Godula said. “There are a lot of very small things that need to be right, or else it won’t work.”
She said that things can go awry with any kind of technology, but it’s especially difficult with analog technology. Projectionists need to make sure to thread the film through the projector properly to make it work, requiring their attention during the entire film.
“The projectionist is kind of a ghost job,” Godula said. “If everything goes well and people watch the movie, and they don’t think somebody was over there making this work, then it was a success.”
During the screening, the projectionist has to make sure that the film stays appropriately focused and that the many changeovers during the film are as clean as possible—without breaking any of the delicate equipment. “You don’t want people to think about you when you’re projecting movies,” Godula said. “There’s just a lot of juggling and paying attention to what’s going on in the environment and paying attention to details of the film, and it’s just nerve-wracking sometimes—but it’s fun!”
Inside of 5th Avenue Cinema, you may have noticed a large table with lots of dials and disks sitting to the side. “That’s a flatbed,” Godula explained. “It’s an editing table for 35.” They received the piece from a local film organization that did not want it anymore. “It doesn’t work, but we just wanted to make a little bit of an educational space,” she said.
Students can go to the 5th Avenue Cinema this weekend to attend a free showing of Eve’s Bayou. The film can be seen this Friday or Saturday at 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., or Sunday at 3 p.m.
Have you ever wanted to be a fly on the wall or a mouse in the corner for a theatrical conversation? Well, now you can be in Experience Theater Project’s new, uniquely designed murder mystery where you become an invisible part of the action as the clues unfold around you.
Clue is recognizable to most as a board game— it is also a book, movie and theater production. While each incorporates concepts from the other, they each have their unique twists. “I finally saw the movie, and I actually liked the play better than the movie,” said Meghan Daaboul, who plays Scarlet. “I thought the movie was a little silly. Not that the show isn’t silly, but just, especially how Scarlet, who I play, is portrayed better in the play than in the movie. She’s not really much of anything in the movie. And I love how she just has this take-charge, commanding presence.”
Scarlet was by far one of my favorite characters across all iterations of Clue, and Daaboul played her with the appropriate class and ease. It may be easy to see Scarlet as a slutty character, but in reality, she is strong and knows exactly who she is. Furthermore, she is not ashamed of who she is or what she does.
Scarlet’s portrayal differed from what Daaboul had in mind regarding aesthetics. Still, she slid into the assertive, shameless role with ease and apparent talent. “The way they dress, frankly, I feel more turn of the century than the 1950s,” Daaboul said. “So I just had to tell myself, okay, I’ll just bring out that other part of her, the alluring part of her. Hopefully, I do it just through my way of being and how I act as opposed to, in this case, how I look because it’s just a different Scarlet than I think I had envisioned. But I usually play the
sexy, the smart, the calculated, those types of roles. As opposed to the girl next door. So Scarlet, as far as prep and stuff, was not too difficult for me to pull off.”
While Daaboul was very talented, each of her co-stars met her talent with their own. Laurence Cox, who plays the even-keeled Wadsworth the butler and another important character, will leave you guessing until the end.
“It’s been really fun actually being able to play two very different characters because, not to spoil things too much, but I’m not necessarily playing who I’m saying I’m playing,” he said. Cox played both of his roles flawlessly.
Moreover, Ms. Peacock, played by Amber Green; Mrs. White, played by Caselle LaTourette; Colonel Mustard, played by Jeff Brisy; Professor Plum, played by Michael Bieker; Mr. Green, played by Darrell McGee; Yvette the maid, played by Annie Leonard; and all the supporting cast each brought their unique talent to their characters. Each of their performances was flawless and no one’s talent outshined the others, with each adapted to the immersive stage with apparent ease.
Very few performances require this level of adaptation from the actors when adjusting to a set. Most actors have ample distance between them and the audience. In this performance, the audience is on the set and an active participant in the action. “I think the hardest thing was getting out of the proscenium stage mindset, of always planting yourself in a certain position and sending what you are doing out into certain directions, and having to remember that there are people all around you that you’re playing to sometimes less than a foot away from you while you’re doing it,” Cox said. “Keeping that in mind
the whole time while you are also working on getting all the lines down and remembering which room you’re supposed to go into, that was certainly a challenge at the beginning, but I think we’ve all risen to that pretty well.”
The interactive element increases the potential for a murder comedy show to become overdone, even though most murder comedy shows intend to be a bit cheesy. “My fear with the interactive piece was we were going to be doing just stupid stuff with the audience,” Daaboul said. “[However] it’s been nice to have those balances... It’s fun to play with the audience that way and have those interactive moments, but I appreciate that Alisa has made it to where we aren’t supposed to go super crazy.”
Changing this performance to include the audience on the set was a choice that seemed like a natural transition for this story. “The way they’ve written, the way they had to write the stage directions to make it work in a traditional stage environment, is so complicated,” Cox said. “It honestly just seems like it would be easier overall to run it the way that the experience is.”
Despite the interactive element simplifying the show, some difficulties and adaptations still needed to be made. Most notable was the line of sight issues that came up when the actors moved from room to room. “I think originally, the concept of having the half walls and making the rooms out, we were like yeah, that’s cool,” Daaboul said. “Then the doors popped up, and we’re like, oh, now we have these sight line issues… We hoped the audience embraces standing up or shifting around or whatnot.”
One could argue that the line of sight issues added to the experience. Being on the set feels like you’re invading a sacred place—in this
show, that is precisely what they want you to do. Getting up and moving around allows one to feel greater ownership of the space. Additionally, sneaking around and trying to see and hear it all adds to the mystery. “Typically, it’s taboo to touch the set or be on the set or do anything other than look at the set,” Daaboul said. “So for some people, it’s adding that bit of, look at me, I’m special, I’m getting to do this taboo thing, and the murder mystery with the searching is perfect.”
Easter eggs were also hidden all over the set. This enabled the audience to not only move freely around the set, but also encouraged interaction with props to find clues and win prizes. “I think particularly when you do give the audience the opportunity to move about in the performance space, the idea of there being little clues hidden here and there and bits of story that you can uncover that really is engaging,” Cox said.
It is so crucial in making art that we find new, nontraditional ways of telling. The act of experiencing art should encourage childlike wonder and community in new, fun and unique ways—ways that cater to audiences that might not be able to enjoy traditional theater in the same way. Clue: Onstage, told in this interactive manner, encourages disruption and creates something that can both be enjoyed by nontraditional audiences and learned from by traditional audiences.
“I hope they come away having had a really good, interesting and unusual time, that it makes them think differently about what theater can be,” Cox said. “That’s my main hope. It’s a very fun show being done a little unusually, and I think it’s all the better for it for sure.”
Portland is a city of cruel hypocrisies. The white liberals who run the city urge City Council to police the houseless with a brutal efficiency that will remove them from their sight, all in order to restore some false ideal of what Portland should look like—one common tool that anti-development Portlanders, or NIMBYs (short for “not in my back yard”) like to use is hostile architecture. Examples of this include private citizens illegally installing planter boxes or bike racks to block sidewalks against campers, and seating that is either too uncomfortable to use or entirely removed. Targeting the houseless like this is not only inhumane, it also attacks Portlanders of all kinds and strips away any sense of communal space.
Bigoted urban planners have utilized hostile architecture for centuries to exclude people of color from public spaces and degrade their quality of life. One infamous example comes from Robert Moses, the man who is arguably responsible for how New York City is designed today, according to an article in the Yale Law Journal titled “Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment.”
Moses purposefully made bridges that ran over Southern State Parkway—a thoroughfare that ran to his newest beachside park— too short for buses to pass under, at a time when public transit was the main transportation method for Black New Yorkers.
Today, these same slimy, two-faced methods are used against Portland’s houseless population. The aforementioned planter boxes placed along the sidewalk to block tents, and dozens of useless bike racks installed for the same purpose, are two examples of housed Portlanders targeting houseless Portlanders. These acts send a strong message to our houseless neighbors that their comfort and their lives do not matter—that they aren’t seen as fully human.
While this attitude is often driven by anti-homeless classism, many housed Portlanders are affected as well. People who are elderly, pregnant, use wheelchairs or otherwise have mobility challenges are actively pushed off sidewalks and other public spaces when they are blocked by these obstacles. Removing seating or making seating more uncomfortable reduces the accessibility of public spaces for everyone.
Michael Mehaffy, a local urban planner with decades of experience working in public space, summed up the issue while speaking with OPB. “I think it’s part of a broader problem of the erosion of public space, the privatization of public space,” Mehaffy said. “People who are essentially excluding other people from public space, and ultimately that means it’s not public space if some members of the public can’t use it.”
Speaking on the far-reaching consequences of this trend, Mehaffy said, “This is part of a broader problem that we have really nationally and internationally, is the way public space is being eroded and privatized and a lot of it is just because of the
way we use cars so much rather than getting out and walking…” In other words, privatizing public space damages the community at large and hinders what makes a city great.
“As a researcher in public space,” Mehaffy continued, “I think that’s more serious than we recognize, because the public space is really the engine of the creativity of cities. It’s the way we sort of interact with people that we don’t know, and ultimately it is the creativity of cities that occurs within the public spaces and within the nearby private spaces. And if we lose that, we’re losing something profoundly important.”
Public space is extremely important to a society. It should be enough to stop hostile architecture and anti-houseless programs simply because it’s the right thing to do. However, if you don’t sympathize with our houseless neighbors, perhaps your grandma that uses a walker or your pregnant friend is enough to reconsider how these policies affect a community.
So, if hostile architecture is so bad, then what should we do?
We could put people in homes. It’s the straightforward, obvious answer to the issue. Instead of doing that, however, on Nov. 30, Portland City Council allotted $27 million for the purpose of setting
up strictly regulated camps for houseless Portlanders, complete with private security patrols. Clustering people that society views as undesirable into camps has, historically, never been a good idea. Instead of burning $27 million to get homeless people out of white liberals’ faces, the city could take that money and put it towards putting people in homes. Just look at Houston, a city that has reduced its houseless population by 63%—a total of 25 thousand people—since 2011. Their strategy? Put people in affordable housing. Their program cost $100 million, but their city is far larger and has far more houseless. $27 million could be the start towards a similar program—but instead, it’s used to get the houseless out of view of the rich.
Hostile architecture is the tip of the iceberg of anti-houseless measures enacted in Portland. It not only harms the houseless, but all those who have mobility difficulties. Destruction of public space leads to the destruction of any sense of community left in the city. There are solutions, but City Hall doesn’t care about them. Mayor Wheeler, the City Council and the Business Alliance seem satisfied to show the city that property values and neighborhood aesthetics matter more to them than human lives.
PORTLAND CITY OFFICIALS SHOULD FOCUS ON AFFORDABLE HOUSING INSTEAD OF PUNISHING THE HOUSELESS
Walking down virtually any street in the Portland metro area, one is likely to pass by several campsites belonging to members of the houseless community. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, houselessness in Portland has reached a boiling point, forcing community members and legislators alike to desperately scramble for solutions.
However, those solutions have done much more harm than good. Despite the ever-growing housing crisis, legislators have elected to push for anti-camping laws which not only fail to address the city’s lack of affordable housing, but further the damaging rhetoric surrounding houselessness.
Instead of using much-needed funds to perform harmful campsite sweeps which only force houseless people out of sight and out of mind, Portland officials should acknowledge how there is only one logical solution to this crisis—to utilize government resources to find affordable, secure housing for people in need.
In early Nov. 2022, The Oregonian reported that the Portland City Council voted almost unanimously to outlaw street camping by 2024. This plan, developed by Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioner Dan Ryan, will purportedly allow the city to begin establishing several large-scale campsites to house between 150 to 250 people, with the hopes of creating 20,000 affordable housing units over the next 10 years.
This resolution sounds good in theory, but it fails to address the actual concerns of houseless individuals and relies on a city-wide camping ban which will be phased into effect by May 2023. This ban allows the city to sweep campsites, which essentially means they have the ability to confiscate the only belongings a houseless individual may have, thus forcing individuals even further into crisis.
Jo Ann Hardesty, the only commissioner who objected to the ban, was quoted in The Oregonian explaining how officials should have taken more time to engage with the houseless community and those who work closely with them in order to identify their needs.
Members of organizations including the Oregon American Civil Liberties Union, Sisters of the Road and Central City Concern spoke out against the camping ban, explaining how both the ban and the city-wide campsites may only worsen the quality of life for houseless people with disabilities, mental illness or other health concerns.
The Oregonian reported that Mercedes Elizalde, public policy director for the housing and services organization Central City Concern, urged city officials to “take more time to consult people experiencing homelessness… Criminalizing is not a recipe for success and instead it punishes people for failures in our system.”
By initiating this camping ban, city officials are merely feeding the fire of an already blazing public health crisis. By punishing those who are already deep in crisis-mode, the city of Portland will only alienate them further.
Cameron Rodriguez, volunteer coordinator and build captain for the grassroots organization People’s Housing Project, works directly with Portland’s houseless community and helps create secure shelters for those in desperate need of a safe place to sleep.
Rodriguez spoke to Portland State Vanguard and explained how their organization and the people they serve have been directly impacted by this anti-camping legislature, as well as the regular sweeps of campsites. According to Rodriguez, these sweeps only greaten the level of hostility to those who are just trying to survive another day.
“Pressure from the city, from your government, isn’t to help you… it is to remove you,” Rodriguez said. “It is to treat you as if you are garbage and as if you just need to be removed to clean the city. That does a lot to people mentally. To have all of [your possessions] thrown away as if it’s nothing more than garbage signifies that you are also viewed as that.”
These sweeps put an immense amount of stress on a houseless individual, and Rodriguez explained how constant levels of extreme stress can manifest as mental illness. Oftentimes, houseless people did not have mental health issues before they became houseless. Instead, Rodriguez explained how the conditions of being houseless are what causes someone’s mental health to deteriorate.
When considering the experiences of people such as Rodriguez who work directly with the houseless population, it becomes abundantly clear that any sort of camping ban would have an incredibly detrimental effect on this vulnerable population.
These campsite sweeps cost thousands of government dollars—money which can and should be used to create affordable housing. Even the concept of the proposed city-wide campsites fails to acknowledge the humanity of this situation, blatantly ignoring how grouping a bunch of houseless people together with varying degrees of mental illness or other issues will likely make these issues worse.
These inhumane laws will only dehumanize and alienate the houseless population even further. However, by focusing instead on a housing-first initiative, legislators have the power to provide these individuals with the basic human needs they need to rebuild their lives.
WED 2/8
MILO LOZA
CLOUD OVER THE WETLANDS BREEZE & BRANCH
6 P.M.
$45
LEARN HOW TO BLEND COLORS AND COMPLEX METHODS TO CREATE DEPTH IN LANDSCAPES AND CLOUDS
THURS 2/9 FRI 2/10
CHARMING SUNSET BOTTLE & BOTTEGA
6 P.M.
$40
MINGLE AND LEARN TO PAINT A SUNSET WITH ARTIST INSTRUCTION
ELECTRIC MOONLIGHT
BOTTLE & BOTTEGA
6:30 P.M.
$40
MINGLE AND LEARN TO PAINT STUNNING MOONLIGHT WITH ARTIST INSTRUCTION
THIS IS THE FUTURE PORTLAND ART MUSEUM
2 P.M.
$25
2/11
ARTIST HITO STEYERL COMBINES VISUAL ARTS TO ENVISION A POTENTIAL FUTURE EVOLVING THROUGH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
A NEW BEGINNING BOTTLE & BOTTEGA
11 A.M.
$42
LEARN TO PAINT A SUNRISE WITH INSTRUCTION FROM AN ARTIST
MESSY ART SELLWOOD COMMUNITY HOUSE
10:15 A.M.
$15
A PARENT-CHILD CLASS TO TEACH SELFEXPRESSION THROUGH EXPERIENCE
LOVE TATTOO - PARTNER PAINTING
BOTTLE & BOTTEGA
6:30 P.M.
$42
JOIN YOUR PARTNER IN PAINTING A LOVE TATTOO, WITH INSTRUCTION FROM AN ARTIST
UNWOUND REVOLUTION HALL
8 P.M.
$12+
POST-HARDCORE BAND FORMED IN 1988
DOUGH MISSISSIPPI PIZZA
8 P.M.
$5
AWFULTUNE DOUG FIR
8 P.M. $15
LAYLA EDEN IS A SONGWRITER AND STORYTELLER CREATING INDIE BEDROOM-POP
BLACK BELT EAGLE SCOUT ALADDIN THEATER
8 P.M.
$20
PORTLAND-BASED QUEER AND INDIGENOUS MUSICIAN USING ALT-ROCK AND NATIVE AMERICAN TRADITIONS
BEATS ANTIQUE THE NORTH WAREHOUSE
8 P.M.
$35
EXPERIMENTAL WORLD FUSION AND ELECTRONIC MUSIC GROUP FORMED IN 2007
REX MISSISSIPPI STUDIOS
9 P.M.
$15
INDIE ROCK BAND CONSIDERED ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT AND INFLUENTIAL SLOWCORE BANDS
VALENTINE
ALBERTA ROSE THEATER
7:30 P.M.
$35+
A NIGHT OF CIRCUS, MUSIC AND LOVE
A SHOWCASE OF LOCAL AND VISITING COMEDIANS, HOSTED BY LANCE EDWARDS AND THOMAS LUNDY
WELCOME TO ARROYO’S IMAGO THEATRE
7:30 P.M.
$35
A PLAY ABOUT HIP-HOP, WRITTEN BY KRISTOFFER DIAZ AND DIRECTED BY BOBBY BERMEA
OKINUM THE HAMPTON OPERA CENTER
7 P.M.
$35
A PLAY ABOUT BREAKING DOWN INTERIOR BARRIERS AND TRUSTING IN THE POWER OF INTUITION, WITH LIVE MUSIC
AIN’T TOO PROUD KELLER AUDITORIUM
7:30 P.M.
$89
ELECTRIFYING NEW MUSICAL THAT FOLLOWS THE TEMPTATIONS’ EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY TO ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME
EVE’S BAYOU
5TH AVENUE CINEMA
3 P.M.
STUDENTS: FREE
GENERAL: $6
FILM ABOUT A 10-YEAR-OLD BLACK GIRL WATCHING HER FAMILY DRAMA UNFOLD
COMEDY OPEN MIC THE CHEERFUL TORTOISE
9 P.M. FREE WATCH LOCAL COMEDIANS PRACTICE ON PSU CAMPUS, OR SIGN YOURSELF UP FOR A FIVE-MINUTE SET
FICTION TECHNIQUE IN MEMOIR LITERARY ARTS
6 P.M.
$285
LEARN TECHNIQUES FOR DEVELOPING STRONGER CHARACTERS, STORY ARCS AND SCENES THAT WILL CREATE AN IMPACT
DRUM CIRCLE SELLWOOD COMMUNITY HOUSE
6:30 P.M.
FREE
JOIN KIM ALDER FOR AN EVENING OF SHARED EXPERIENCE AND DRUMMING
COMMUNITY CLINIC THE HERB SHOPPE
5 P.M.
$15
OFFERING REGULAR SLIDING SCALE HELP FOR THOSE LOOKING TO BECOME HEALTHIER WITH HERBS
PORTLAND STATE FARMERS MARKET PARK BLOCKS
9 A.M.
FREE
LISTEN TO MUSIC AND SHOP FOR PRODUCE FROM LOCAL BUSINESSES ON CAMPUS
IMPROVISATION FOR BEGINNERS
PORTLAND CENTER STAGE
1:30 P.M.
$25
UNLOCK YOUR INNER CREATIVE GENIUS THROUGH FUN GAMES, ACTING LESSONS AND SPONTANEOUS CHARACTER CREATION
RISOGRAPH BASICS OUTLET PDX
2 P.M.
$100
A PRINTING, COLLAGE, EXPERIMENTATION AND MARK MAKING EXTRAVAGANZA
THE BUILDERS AND THE BUTCHERS MISSISSIPPI STUDIOS
9 P.M.
$17
PORTLAND-BASED FOLK ROCK BAND FORMED IN 2005
MONTAVILLA OPEN MIC COMEDY MONTAVILLA STATION
7 P.M. FREE COMEDIANS PRACTICING COMEDY WITH THREE-MINUTE SETS, HOSTED BY LUCAS COPP
GENTLE YOGA
BODY WORKS @ PPMC
11 A.M.
FREE
A FOCUS ON BREATH AND THE NERVOUS SYSTEM TO ALLOW YOU TO DISENGAGE FROM LIFE’S DEMANDS
