Portland, Oregon shares with the U.S. west coast the brunt of America’s homelessness.
Other west coast cities have run through cycles of ignoring homeless tent encampments, harassing them, and sweeping them out of existence only to have them pop up again elsewhere.
There have also been a growing number of experiments with everything from sanctioned tent encampments equipped with extra health and safety features, through ‘tiny home’ villages providing a more civilized, and more expensive, form of ‘transitional’ housing.
‘Transitional’ in this case means that the clock is ticking on occupancy. The ‘transition’ might be an occupant moving to a permanent home. It might be eviction back to homelessness. And in reality, many ‘transitional’ homes these days exist in a kind of quasi-permanent limbo: the temporary residence is extended when no permanent home becomes available.
Portland poked its head above the homelessness parapet in 2022 with a proposal for a comprehensive solution for the city’s homelessness population1. The plan as evolved has six sanctioned mega tent encampments that would theoretically receive all occupants of the unofficial/unsanctioned tent camps and free the city to clear its parks, sidewalks, etc.
Time, however, has caught up Portland’s mega-encampment concept. A steady drip of fire, flood and other tent camp crises has backed authorities away from flimsy, inexpensive, and potentially deadly tents. Official tents will not get Portland the essential funding support it needs if it sticks with its cheapest concept — let them live in tents!
What now? Pods.
Which means? On the surface, that’s not quite as obvious as it might seem. The idea of sleeping pods has been around for several years and generally applies (from a Google search) to smallish units that can accommodate little more than a warm body. They’ve been built and tried out in several countries. However, it would seem from hints and press interpretations, that Portland has decided to christen shed-like ‘tiny homes’ with the term ‘pods.’
As Portland thinks through the merits of different housing types for its mega camps, other communities that are planning encampments may want to take note.
Read more about Portland’s struggles at Fox News: Portland mulls costly plan to build shed-like sleep ‘pods’ at homeless camps
Footnotes
- Try: Homelessness: Après Moi, Le Déluge . . . Or Is It ‘Le Gulag?’
