Homelessness is Portland's great test of private and public will: Editorial Agenda 2016

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In this file photo from May, Steve Kimes, left, a pastor of the Anawim Christian Community, and Johnny Poston, a homeless man living at Camp Serinity/No Tolerance in Southeast Portland, walk while discussing plans to run a campsite meeting. At the camp, homeless people have a code of conduct to ensure safety and trash cleanup. Hundreds live along the Springwater Corridor, stretching from downtown Portland through portions of Milwaukie and Gresham before ending in Boring, in Clackamas County.

(Tony Hernandez/Staff)

The greatest risk Portland faces in its accommodation of the homeless is in getting used to the homeless, as if bereft unwashed people sleeping in parks and on sidewalks were some kind of background. It's not the case along the Springwater Corridor, however, a 21-mile bikeway from Portland through Gresham and featuring an estimated 500 homeless folks. Some have camped there for years and some of late have been known to scare riders, attack each other and pose threats to adjacent residential neighborhoods. Starting Aug. 1, they'll be kicked out.

Editorial Agenda 2016

Problem? No place to go. Several will be aimed to shelters or other places by nonprofit and county outreach personnel who know and regret the reality: If homeless folks sully a bucolic area celebrated for recreational value and colonize it in such numbers that they pose risks to humans as well as wildlife, they must go. But the outreach people, not to mention elected officials grappling with the homeless crisis, also know the cruel math: The Springwater Corridor homeless comprise less than a third of the metro region's 1,800 people who sleep out at night, and they all sleep out at night because there aren't enough shelter beds to go around.

Significantly, just as the Springwater Corridor homeless are shooed to destinations unknown, the Portland City Council will consider a temporary version of a radical plan floated earlier this year by developer Homer Williams to accommodate up to 600 homeless people at Terminal 1 on the Willamette River. Problem? Terminal 1, situated just north of downtown, is owned by the city's ratepayers, under the Bureau of Environmental Services, and its sale is championed by Commissioner Nick Fish, who oversees the bureau and last week told The Oregonian/OregonLive editorial board: "If (Williams) can come to us with a bank-certified check for $14 million or $15 million, then perhaps we can move ahead. I have never seen a bigger mismatch between a vision and a piece of dirt."

Fish views Terminal 1 as among the last of the city's prime industrial development sites and wishes to apply proceeds from the sale toward ratepayer relief. He also sees the property as the site of an industry that would generate family-wage jobs, the engine of any economy, particularly at a time when Portland starves for middle class opportunity amid rising housing prices.

But Williams is undeterred. And the homeless keep on coming with nowhere to go.

Fish's colleague Commissioner Dan Saltzman oversees the Portland Housing Bureau. In contrast to Fish, he told the editorial board last week that he fully supports Williams, well-known for his role in developing the South Waterfront and the Pearl District and perhaps equally known for his aw-shucks tenacity.

Inspired by several visits to the massive and successful Haven for Hope community in San Antonio, Texas, Williams has for months been talking privately with business and community leaders about a private-public partnership that would support a similar riverside compound providing meals, medical and mental health services, overnight accommodations, showers, even a kennel for dogs. When he first proposed the idea for Portland, it topped $100 million.

In an interview with the editorial board on Thursday, however, he'd revised the estimate downward to $60 million -- but even that level of investment would come later, after a far less expensive 18-month temporary version of the facility could go up within 60 days. The idea is to be operational in a bare bones way before the rainy season returns -- and also to snag the Terminal 1 property before it's optioned by a potential buyer and removed from play. In all scenarios, Williams insists, the business community would put up more than half of the money to create and run what he's dubbed the Oregon Trail of Hope.

Problem? The site's industrial zoning. But Saltzman told the editorial board he'd soon ask the Council, within terms of the city's homelessness emergency declaration of 2015, to temporarily shift responsibility for Terminal 1 from Fish's environmental services bureau to his Portland Housing Bureau, which would lease Terminal 1 for 18 months as a temporary use requiring no major retrofitting.

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"We spend all of our time talking about the private sector stepping up, and here it is," Saltzman told the editorial board on Thursday. "A mass shelter would be an allowable use." But Saltzman was not without wariness, either: "We'd look at it as an 18-month trial," he said. "Can Homer really deliver?"

Portland should and must find out. Unsurprisingly, Mayor Charlie Hales is among those ready to throw in his support, his spokesperson, Sara Hottman, told the editorial board.

City Hall developments likely won't mean much to folks along the Springwater Corridor, many of them soon to be scrambling for cover. But an embrace by the business community, the city and Multnomah County of Williams' plan, directed by Don Mazziotti, the former head of Portland's urban renewal agency, will be necessary if Portland is to make a serious dent in the number of folks who sleep outside at night. Among other things, a Terminal 1 project would be ample proof the homeless among us are anything but background.