Hannah Wallace

How One Portland Neighborhood Partnered with a Homeless Encampment

I wrote this essay about my experience co-founding and running the Sunnyside Shower Project for Portland Monthly's fall 2023 issue. 

 

Faced with an influx of homeless neighbors, a Southeast Portland neighborhood association got creative.

On a chilly December day three years ago, I made the radical decision to get to know my houseless neighbors. This was at the height of the pandemic, when a homeless camp had formed around Sunnyside Environmental School, and members of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association decided to introduce ourselves.

We sought professional help: Raven Drake, a manager with Street Roots, joined us one morning to say hello by “knocking” on folks’ tents: you say “knock-knock!” and identify yourself, and announce what gifts you come bearing—in our case, cold-weather gear and clementines. A handful of campers joined us near the school’s play area, and we slowly formed a circle on the blacktop to ask what they needed most. 

Their answers? More than anything, they wanted showers, prepaid laundromat cards, and clean clothes.  

We decided then to provide access to basic hygiene services that the City of Portland wasn’t delivering in our community. One neighbor volunteered to be the “trash coordinator,” which required calling the city to demand regular trash service. I took on hygiene: the Groves Church offered us use of its showers twice weekly at the Sunnyside Community House (formerly the historic Sunnyside United Methodist Church), as long as we always had two volunteers on site and required masks. 

I shamelessly asked neighbors, friends, and work colleagues to volunteer. Our program attracted people like S., who brought his radio to the shower and sang at top volume along with Led Zeppelin. There was J., whose bar had shuttered during the pandemic, and who sent me texts saying, “I appreciate you and what you’re doing. Thank you.” And R., a young and aimless coffee connoisseur caring for a schizophrenic former girlfriend, who made us pour-over coffee with local beans he’d bought with food stamps. 

Before I knew it, I was coleading the Sunnyside Shower Project, which is now a 38-person volunteer program providing access to showers, bathrooms, and clothing three days a week, serving around 100 locals per year with 18 shower slots per week. To be sure, we had challenges, requiring us to develop incident protocols. Some houseless folks—not necessarily our regulars—broke church windows when told they couldn’t camp on the front steps. One regular wandered into other parts of the church and stole a wireless speaker from the basement, which we replaced. Another harassed several tenants and was banned from the building. 

But these were exceptions. My greatest joy has been befriending the regulars, like Mark McCarthy, a gregarious man in his early 60s and 17-year veteran of living on the streets. He successfully kicked a meth habit, and lived in doorways rather than camps as a way to stay away from drugs. A volunteer eventually connected him to a case manager at Northwest Pilot Project, and he has since gained housing and is starting to address long-ignored health issues. Another regular, Marshall L., also found housing via Northwest Pilot Project and helps others by connecting them to us for showers and additional services. 

In fact, many of these people I write about are now off the streets—in part because of the human connections they made with volunteers at the Shower Project. Should it be a great surprise that chatting with someone week in and week out might build trust, and that they might ask us to help them find stability?

What’s astonished me and other volunteers is how this simple act of helping our unhoused neighbors access basic hygiene services—which our city and county should have figured out how to offer by now—has forged community. At a time when many people post surveillance videos of houseless residents on Nextdoor, we are laughing with our neighbors’ jokes, commiserating with their bad news, and offering trail mix and tea. While other Portlanders may perceive them as scary, I actually feel safer in my neighborhood because I know most of our houseless neighbors on a first-name basis.

These relationships are two-way streets. A neighbor named Kris regularly brought us bouquets of wildflowers when she came to shower. One regular fixed my bike, and would not accept cash as payment, so I baked him chocolate chip cookies. Mark has brought me lovely “ground scores”—from cloisonné earrings to a muffin tin. 

We’ve expanded, figuring out policies and procedures, designing flyers, organizing Narcan trainings, and running needs assessments for our guests. We’ve paid one of our unhoused visitors a small stipend for his site manager work, thanks to a grant from Southeast Uplift. I tell you this not to brag but to demonstrate that neighborhood associations don’t need to be bastions of privilege and not-in-my-backyard policies. They can be places of activism and radical social change. Or at the very least, sources of practical solutions to the very real challenges of living outside. 

I used to walk past houseless people on the street, feeling incapable of helping, let alone engaging. Now, when I jog at Laurelhurst Park or pop into the Belmont library, I say hello to the people I know, sometimes even stopping for a chat. Our unhoused neighbors are just that: our neighbors.  

---

The opening of a luxury hotel in downtown Portland has divided the city

I wrote a story about the Ritz-Carlton, Portland for Fast Company a few weeks ago.

Hotel rooms at the new Ritz-Carlton will start at $473; residences cost up to $8.9 million. But on the surrounding blocks, Portlanders camp in tents and doorways.

A gleaming, sail-like 35-story tower has emerged on the corner of Southwest Washington and 10th Avenue in downtown Portland, Oregon, over the past few years. It’s home to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and Residences, a nearly $700 million development that broke ground in 2019 and is set to open in October.

The debut of a new Ritz-Carlton is usually a sign that a city has arrived, at least for luxury travelers, and this one hits all the marks. The 251-room hotel, where double rooms start at $473 a night, includes a 7,000-square-foot fitness center, an infinity pool, and food-cart-inspired eateries on the ground floor, a nod to the thriving food cart pod that the building displaced. There are also residential apartments—priced between $1.14 million and $8.9 million—with sweeping mountain views.

[Photo: Ruum Media/courtesy Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company]

But just outside the hotel’s front entrance, a different reality sets in. On the surrounding blocks, Portlanders camp in tents and doorways, among the roughly 6,000 people who are experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County, which encompasses Portland and its eastside suburbs. Just two blocks away from the hotel is the county’s new Behavioral Health Resource Center, which offers showers, lockers, laundry, and basic first aid to unsheltered Portlanders, and often has a line down the block.

The city is also wrestling with a devastating fentanyl crisis—complicated by a lack of detox services that Measure 110, the statewide drug decriminalization law that voters passed in November 2020, was supposed to fund. (That law, which treats small possession of hard drugs like heroin and methamphetamines as violations on par with a traffic ticket, passed with wide support, but now a majority of Oregonians support repealing it, according to a poll conducted by Emerson College Polling.) In March, there were 11 overdoses in downtown Portland during one 12-hour period; three of those people died.

The opening of a lavish new hotel has the city divided. Boosters say it will help attract locals and tourists alike to downtown after the ravages of COVID-19 and the unrest during the 2020 street protests. “This hotel will add immensely to the revitalization,” says Walter Bowen, CEO of BPM Real Estate Group, the developer of the Ritz-Carlton, citing the jobs and money that it will bring to the city’s core.

Critics call it tone deaf—or worse. “Right outside my window are 20 tents, and those are just the ones that I can see,” says Alison Miller, senior minister at the First Unitarian Church of Portland, which has a long history of providing day shelter to houseless families and will soon launch a shower program. The church is located nine blocks from the Ritz-Carlton. “And now [there are] these luxury apartments. These two extremes really force us to reckon with who is losing out and who is being supported in our city.”

---

The story of the Ritz-Carlton’s fraught relationship with the local community dates back to tax breaks folded into the Trump administration’s 2017 tax overhaul, creating the Opportunity Zone program. The idea behind Opportunity Zones was to encourage investors to build in impoverished or struggling areas by allowing them to defer and reduce taxes on capital gains that they reinvest into these developments. If they hold the new investment for a decade, they never have to pay taxes on those gains.

In May 2018, when Portland’s core was thriving, Oregon Governor Kate Brown’s administration designated the entire downtown to be an Opportunity Zone, raising more than a few eyebrows. That same month, BPM Real Estate Group signed a 75-year ground lease for the land in that zone. It broke ground for the Ritz-Carlton in July 2019, and began raising funds through the Opportunity Zone program.

Since then, BPM has raised at least $63 million from outside investors through a Qualified Opportunity Fund, short of the fund’s $120 million goal, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February 2023. A $50 million fund that BPM launched in 2020 had raised $200,000 at its last filing, in 2021. Though a luxury development in downtown Portland today seems like less of a slam dunk than it might have appeared back in 2018, BPM and the investors in these funds stand to receive significant tax benefits for the money they put into the Ritz-Carlton.

[Photo: courtesy Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company]

The Ritz-Carlton project, to some, exemplifies the fundamental flaws in the Opportunity Zone program. Too much untaxed capital, they say, has flowed into neighborhoods that were already doing relatively well (which downtown Portland was, pre-pandemic) and toward real estate developments that exacerbate affordable housing crises. And the only people really benefiting are already wealthy.

When Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden launched an investigation into Opportunity Zones in 2022, he called out the Ritz-Carlton project as an example of the program “helping subsidize luxury real estate development by wealthy developers” and allowing “these investors to realize the gains on their investments completely tax-free.”

In his book Only the Rich Can Play, David Wessel, journalist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also singles out the Ritz-Carlton as a misuse of tax benefit. “If you have a neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification and you want to accelerate that, [designating it as an Opportunity Zone] is not the wrong decision for a state to make,” he says today. “It just may not be the purpose of the program.”

Critics of Opportunity Zones say that they further the divide between rich and poor and deprive the government of much-needed revenue. “The taxes wealthy investors avoid through Opportunity Zones is money that could instead go to improve our schools, make college more affordable, expand affordable housing, or fund other ways of making Oregon more prosperous,” Juan Carlos Ordóñez, communications director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy, wrote in a recent op-ed in Oregon Capital Chronicle. 

Lauren Armony, systemic change program director at Portland’s Sisters of the Road, a social justice organization that aims to end poverty and homelessness, objects to the way city officials fast-track projects like the Ritz-Carlton while seemingly dragging their heels on affordable housing. Her organization also worries that the Ritz-Carlton, which is located in an enhanced services district that allows area business owners to pool funds and pay for private services, will usher in more security guards and lead to “the criminalization of homelessness,” she says.

Bowen, for his part, sees the hotel playing a key role in the city’s rebirth. “You have the hotel, which has a huge impact in terms of employment, [hiring] 250 to 350 employees. These people are going to work in downtown Portland. They’re gonna spend money in Portland.”

And then there are the executive teams and people who will be working in the tower’s 165,000 square feet of office space, including the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine and private equity firm Banneker Partners. There are street-level retail shops (Packouz Jewelers, Rolex, and the food hall Flock). Room taxes—11.5% total for Portland and Multnomah County—will inject even more dollars into the city.

“Between the impact of that, permits, and the cost of the hotel and real estate taxes on the residences and the land, offices, and so on—you’re looking at about $120 million over 10 years,” Bowen says of the money that the development will bring to Portland. He also says the residences start at a “very reasonable level,” noting that they cost “just $1 million [to] a million and a half for one bedrooms, and those are nice one bedrooms—1,300 square feet.”

What makes all of this even harder for critics to stomach is Bowen’s refusal to include affordable housing in the project. Portland has been in a formal housing state of emergency since 2015. In 2017, as a way to fix this, the City Council passed an “Inclusionary Housing” policy mandating that any new building of more than 20 units make one-fifth of all units affordable for people making 80% of the region’s median income (about $90,000 for a family of four) or make 10% of units affordable for people making 60% of the median income. Since 2017, the policy has created roughly 1,000 permanently affordable rental units. It also allows developers to pay a fee in lieu of building these units, due at the issuance of building permits—with the money going toward an affordable housing fund.

Bowen signed an agreement in March 2021 with the Portland Housing Bureau pledging to make 26 of the 132 luxury condos in the Ritz-Carlton affordable. But earlier this year, according to Martha Calhoon, public information manager at the Portland Housing Bureau, project representatives informed the bureau that they would pay $7.76 million rather than go through with the affordable units. (Since Bowen and his representatives had originally signaled to the city they intended to provide the affordable units, what they are paying is not a fee but rather a penalty, Calhoon says. The fee-in-lieu payment is normally due at permit issuance. “What the developer of the Ritz Carlton project plans to pay is in fact a penalty,” she says.) This money will go toward affordable housing in the city, though not necessarily in downtown.

“Ritz-Carlton residences are not really designed for inclusionary housing,” says Bowen of the decision to eschew affordable units. “We came to an agreement with the city that we would pay a fee so that we didn’t have people [in the building] who really couldn’t afford it.” Speaking with the Portland Business Journal last year, he was even more blunt. “I still think it’s outrageous that we have to pay anything,” he said, noting that the project is already investing in the city through its Opportunity Zone status.

Today he further justifies the move away from inclusionary housing by explaining that the Ritz-Carlton residences are not your typical condos: “I mean, these weren’t even rentals—they’re not housing. They are residences that are managed. There’s nothing like this in Portland.” The city’s Inclusionary Housing policy, however, applies to both rental and condo developments—even ones that come with five-star hotel amenities like access to a pool, spa, and fitness center, as well as a valet, 24/7 parking garage, and concierge service.

Bowen has said that he’ll pay the $7.76 million—calculated at $27 per square foot—as the last 26 units are sold. “The developer plans to pay a portion of the penalty at the sale of each of the otherwise planned IH units,” Calhoon confirms. Additionally, the city will charge an interest rate of .833% per month, which will begin to accrue if the penalty isn’t paid by the time all the residential units are sold—or December 31, 2025, whichever comes first.

“The project is still contributing toward meeting the city’s housing needs,” says Carmen Rubio, the city commissioner in charge of the housing bureau, via email. She notes that the BPM money will go toward other affordable housing programs, “such as gap financing for the development of new affordable rental housing.”

Terry Sprague, the CEO and founder of Luxe/Forbes Global Properties and listing broker for the Ritz, has so far sold 15% of the property’s 132 residential units. He is also bullish about the Ritz-Carlton’s positive impact. Sprague, who has been sober for 23 years, says he believes houseless advocates and business leaders are starting to coalesce around similar goals. “I think people on both sides are starting to agree. We all have the same mission: How do we help the homeless? How do we help people with drug addiction?”

He envisions the hotel changing the dynamics for downtown by infusing it with a “positive new energy” and new clientele. “When you get a neighborhood that comes alive, and people start living and actively moving into that city . . . unfortunately, homeless people and drug-addicted people don’t really want to be around other people. They’ve kind of had this city to their own,” he explains. “There is going to be a natural displacement, and we as a city need to figure out how we offer assistance and find healthy places to be displaced to.”

Where houseless Portlanders will be “displaced to” is anybody’s guess. Though the city has recently opened a seventh Safe Rest Village (tiny house villages for people experiencing homelessness) it’s already full and shelters just 400 people. Mayor Ted Wheeler’s plan of mass encampments, such as the new Clinton Triangle Temporary Alternative Shelter, which will house 140 people, is getting off to a slow start.

Miller at the First Unitarian Church has a challenge for the Ritz-Carlton and other businesses eyeing downtown Portland. “My hope is any corporation investing in the city for profit will also be investing in the well-being of the whole community,” she says. “It’s a problem when people who work in the hospitality industry can’t afford to live near enough to work. There’s an opportunity for [the Ritz-Carlton] to make a difference.”

The hotel’s developers, Miller adds, turned down the opportunity to create affordable housing. “So what are they saying yes to?”

Can Tiny House Villages Be a Homelessness Fix?

It’s well known that many people experiencing homelessness won’t go to “congregate” shelters—shelters that put everyone in one large room—because they don’t offer privacy or a secure place to store belongings, among other reasons. Tiny houses are more appealing because they offer each person their own space with a door that locks. (Most also allow pets and, in some cities, don’t ban alcohol or drugs.) Depending on the village, there is usually also some ability to have agency in the rule-making and government of the village.

                       Pods made by Stanley Tiny Homes at Menlo Park Safe Rest Village in Portland. 

But they’re meant to be temporary—and considering that, they have a high price tag. Some politicians and affordable housing nonprofits think tiny house villages are a waste of valuable public resources that could instead be used to create more investment in long-term affordable housing.  I reported on this debate for Bloomberg CityLab last week.  

 

 

 

When Tackling Homelessness, Prevention is Often the Best Medicine

By intervening early, often with small rent payments, a Portland shelter kept nearly 100 families out of homelessness last year, saving thousands of dollars in future rehousing costs.   

I wrote this for Reasons to be Cheerful on April 20, 2023. 

 

Like many nonprofits that help people experiencing homelessness in the US, Path Home in Portland, Oregon provides temporary shelter and meals to those in need. But five years ago, the organization launched a separate program with hopes of making such services unnecessary someday. The Homelessness Prevention Program helps families about to lose their homes by paying back rent and past due utilities in emergency situations.  

“It really only takes a few days of missed work to start a snowball effect,” says Samuel Freni-Rothschild, Path Home’s prevention specialist. 

The number one reason that Freni-Rothschild hears from clients who need help paying their rent is that an adult missed some work because someone in the family was sick and therefore they lost income.

Evictions have spiked in Oregon. In January alone, the state had 2,244 evictions, according to the Oregon Law Center Eviction Defense Project. Of these, 847 were in the county where Portland is located. At Path Home, which offers 17 emergency shelter units for families experiencing homelessness, there is a massive waitlist for housing with 800 families. 

Portland’s Path Home has a waitlist of 800 families for its emergency shelter units.
Credit: Path Home

But with the prevention program, Path was able to keep 93 families in their homes in 2022 — serving a total of 155 kids and 140 adults. 

The average spent per family? Just $3,180. 

Freni-Rothschild says he often uses the metaphor of preventative health care to explain his job. “The housing program and the shelter program are like acute medical care. It’s like going to the ER when your bone is broken and you need to fix it. What I’m doing is preventative medicine,” he says.

Stress and trauma prevention

Giving rent assistance to a family who is struggling financially and allowing them to remain housed prevents both the stress and trauma of homelessness, which can be challenging to recover from. The approach also costs a fraction of what we now spend to rehouse and shelter houseless individuals. 

According to Brandi Tuck, Path Home’s executive director, rehousing people who have been homeless can cost as much as $50,000 in rent assistance over the course of a few years. Tuck argues that prevention is not only more effective — it’s a better investment.

The prevention program focuses on people who have not been involved with the social services system yet. “We are trying to catch people at the very beginning of what could potentially be a much larger crisis,” explains Freni-Rothschild. Part of the reason for this is that the organization wants to be reasonably sure that a one-time intervention will be sufficient to get people on track to being self-sufficient. 

The application process is quick and straightforward. There must be a child in the household (as with all Path Home services), and once families qualify, Freni-Rothschild will contact their landlord. If the family is in arrears from the previous month, he’ll pay the bill or hammer out a payment plan that’s both agreeable to the landlord and reasonable for the family. Sometimes he will provide some light-touch case management: help with budgeting, connecting the family to other resources — like food pantries or childcare — that they don’t know how to look for. 

Path Home’s focus on homelessness prevention also accords with the brain science that Tuck has studied and cites extensively. 

“We are literally preventing the crisis and trauma of homelessness for people, so the children don’t have adverse childhood experiences, so the parents can stay in the logical/critical thinking part of their brain and not have to go through that trauma,” Tuck says. 

 

Most of the government resources that are dedicated to prevention, Tuck explains, are for families or individuals who have already experienced homelessness at least one. As a result of being houseless, these people may have complex trauma, acute mental health issues, and/or substance abuse issues. 

“They have been rehoused using rapid rehousing dollars, which are very short-term resources but the complications that have arisen in their life that led to the homelessness or the trauma that came from the episode of homelessness makes it so that one year is not enough time to get stable on their feet,” Tuck says.

‘Nimble and adaptive’

Path Home’s prevention program is currently funded via grants and individual donations. There are benefits to that. Government funding often comes with strings attached, and Freni-Rothschild said they have had independence to experiment and “be very nimble and adaptive.” 

That said, Path has reached a point where it could use a larger injection of funds, he says. Freni-Rothschild is the sole staffer focused on prevention, and he can only do so much. 

“Last month, I picked up 10 new families in the county where 800 were evicted,” Freni-Rothschild says, his voice trailing off. “The ratios I’m working with are a little daunting.”

Usually he has about 20 families at a time. Sometimes he works with clients for a few months. He says that he typically reaches capacity by the middle of each month. 

Meanwhile, Path Home continues addressing homelessness from many angles. They are currently running a basic guaranteed income pilot with six families receiving $575 a month for two years. The results of this trial, which is nearing its end, are telling, says Tuck. “People are going back to school, getting higher paying jobs. They are spending more time together as a family, they are participating in kids’ activities and cooking dinner and all those kinds of things,” she says. Path Home also provides life skills and parenting classes as well as budgeting support. And they’re creating more affordable housing with support services adjacent to their offices in southeast Portland. 

A Path Home shelter play room. Credit: Aaron Leitz

According to Housing Oregon, someone in the state making minimum wage needs to work 82 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment. Tuck notes that many of the single moms who end up in Path Home apartments have lost their housekeeping jobs when — during spring or summer break — the kids are out of school and the mom has no choice but to bring them to work with her. “She takes the kids to work until her manager finds out, and then she gets fired. And she can’t even look for another job until the kids go back to school,” Tuck says.  

This is one of the reasons that Path Home’s new capital campaign — which includes the construction of a new four-story building containing 25 affordable two- and three-bedroom apartments — will include on-site childcare as well as employment services and mental health counseling. Tuck expects to break ground in 2025. For now, the organization’s offices and nine of the emergency shelter units are located in a former Russian Orthodox church that’s been beautifully renovated by architect Jessica Helgerson using concepts of trauma-informed design. The high-ceilinged space — which has a library, a computer lab, and a shared living room with Netflix and VR games — contains lots of circles and curves, plants, and natural light, all of which combine to create a safe and calming atmosphere for families. 

Villages for Unhoused People Are Popping Up in More Cities. What’s It Like to Live in Them?

I wrote this story for Dwell's March/April 2023 issue.  

 

On a single night in January 2022, 582,462 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States. Sixty percent were staying in locations like emergency shelters or in accommodations provided by transitional housing programs, and 40 percent were living on the street or somewhere similar, according to an annual U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report. (The pandemic impacted the accuracy of homelessness data collection in 2021, however, and the number of people without a home is likely far higher.) Meanwhile, across the country, many housing advocates and government officials are embracing a practical short-term solution to the homelessness crisis: the rapid construction of tiny-home villages—some with upward of 50 units, others with just 10 tiny homes, or pods. The hope is that with access to a personal, lockable shelter and some essential services (laundry and showers, as well as housing and employment assistance programs), unsheltered people will be able to find permanent, affordable housing quicker than if they were still fending for themselves on the streets.

In Oregon, one of the states at the forefront of the country’s homelessness crisis, cities like Portland and Salem have already invested in tiny-home communities. The City of Portland alone has contracted with five different tiny-house makers to develop six new Safe Rest Villages using American Rescue Plan Act funds. Tiny-home villages, which have appeared in states from Oregon, Washington, and California to Texas, Michigan, and Massachusetts, have gotten a fair amount of press for their ability to be a part of the emergency response to the crisis. We spoke to three residents of micro-shelter communities in Oregon to get a sense of what the tiny homes are actually like to live in and how the alternative-housing villages function.

Here's a PDF of my article if you can't access the lnk above.  Download DWL030123_TINYHOMES_SHIP

 

How helping my houseless neighbors helped me

This op-ed appeared in Street Roots in April.

Me, cleaning the sink after someone has showered at the Sunnyside Methodist Church.  

 

If you had told me back in December that I’d soon know all the homeless people in my neighborhood on a first-name basis, I would have laughed. But not only is this true; I have a dozen of their names entered into my phone. I’ve delivered a home-cooked dinner to one guy after his eye surgery, I helped one fellow apply for a spot at Agape Village, and on Easter Sunday, I bought a cot for an elderly houseless guy who’d told me the day before, “I’m too old to sleep on the ground anymore.”

All because of the shower project that the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association launched at the Sunnyside Methodist Church in January.

Let me explain. Last December, I joined a Sunnyside Neighborhood Association Community Committee to do outreach to the unsheltered folks who had just relocated to Sunnyside Park. They’d moved there, in part, because the city had just “swept” Laurelhurst Park, and Sunnyside was the park nearest to Laurelhurst. Sunnyside Park also had two streets that did not face residences, which I later found most houseless folks are quite conscientious about. We invited Raven Drake from Street Roots’ new Ambassador Program to help us make contact with our unsheltered neighbors. John Mayer, executive director of Beacon PDX, was also there to facilitate introductions.

The first outreach was the most awkward. But after that initial round of “knocking” on folks’ tents and having conversations about the weather, it got easier. As a neighborhood association, we were trying to figure out how to best help these folks while they are living in a park so close to us. So we asked them, “What do you need?” A thin 30-something woman in a colorful scarf and puffy jacket said laundry would be nice, because she hadn’t washed her clothes in a long time. Someone else said he hated how messy the camp had become — but they had no way to dispose of trash once they’d collected it into trash bags.

We started with a volunteer-led trash pickup, with several residents taking truckloads of trash to the dump, paying the fees themselves. I took on the “hygiene coordinator” role and was responsible for calling the city’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program to get a porta-potty installed near the park as well as ensuring that someone was collecting and disposing of needles safely and properly.

One day, I got a call from Matt, a Sunnyside Neighborhood Association board member, saying that the Groves Church, the congregation now at the former Sunnyside Methodist Church, had said we could use their showers two days a week. Soon, my fellow committee member Ash and I were off to Ikea to buy white towels and bath mats.

In very short order, I became known as “the Shower Lady.” I wrote up a list of protocols for volunteers and for people using the showers.

I’d show up at 1 p.m. on Saturdays at the park, when Beacon PDX provided lunch, clipboard in hand, and ask folks when they wanted a shower. Another committee member, Jenna, who is an elementary school teacher, printed up adorable “Shower Reminder” tickets that I scribble a person’s appointment on so he or she would have a visible reminder. Someone at the church donated more towels; Jenna and her husband Daniel did a Costco run for shampoo, body wash and clean underwear; someone else donated a hair dryer. We were off and running.

I’ll be the first to admit that I had no idea what I was doing when we started this pilot. But with the help of a few great volunteers (many of whom are still volunteering on a weekly or every-other-week basis) and with the support of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association Community Committee, the “shower ministry,” as I call it, has become a reliable service for people experiencing homelessness in our neighborhood. In fact, the Groves recently gave us a third day: Saturday.

It’s humbling to be able to offer such a basic service as a warm shower and know that it’s making a difference in people’s lives. Each person who showers leaves the church with a lighter step. For most of them, this will be the only shower they have this week. Every single one of our houseless neighbors thanks us for being there and for the shower. (It’s not lost on them that most Neighborhood Associations are full of upset neighbors who just want them to go “somewhere else.”) I periodically get texts from some of my houseless friends saying, “I appreciate you and what you’re doing. Thank you.” Just today, one of our regulars, grateful that we didn’t leave early because he didn’t show up at the appointed time, texted me and my other volunteer, “I love you guys.”

Hannah Wallace gets a clean pair of pants for a person in need.

 

Getting to know my unhoused neighbors has enriched my life. I’ve learned to expect the questionable advice from one fellow who arrives by bike and always tells my co-volunteer and I that a daily shot of whiskey will keep COVID-19 at bay. Another regular arrives early just to chat with me about his day — or sometimes his past. A former meth addict, he’s been clean for a year and is living in a doorway, trying to stay safe and warm (and sober). He says he’s a loner, but he’s gregarious and clearly craves company. He’s been homeless for 17 years and has finally decided that he can’t live this way anymore. He wants a roof over his head. Then there’s the 40-something man who had never been homeless until 2020, when the bar he owned shuttered and his wife divorced him. He used to play bass in a rock band, and I bring him my back issues of Rolling Stone to read. I used to walk past houseless people on the street, feeling incapable of helping, let alone engaging. But getting to know these folks who come for showers makes me see them — really see them. Now, when I go running in the park, I say hello to the folks I know, sometimes even stopping for a chat.

Some people are punctual or even early for their shower appointments and don’t need reminders. Others are no-shows, not even texting to let me know they’re not going to make it. Others don’t have phones, so can’t tell me if something has come up to wreck their plans for their day. It’s OK — we volunteers have learned to roll with it. It’s not like we have to make an appointment to have our showers. We can have them whenever we like.

Some take short, military-style showers — in and out of the facility in 10 minutes. My favorite, though, is when people sing while they shower. One guy brings his radio, elevating his shower to a musical experience. We can hear his melodious voice drifting up the stairwell and it always makes me smile.

Finally, knowing more of my houseless neighbors has made me feel safer in my neighborhood. Perhaps that’s not surprising; we tend to fear the unknown.

When you don’t know individual houseless people, you are more likely to make assumptions about “houseless people” as a group. And, I think, you are more likely to lose touch with the humanity of each person. As I’ve gotten to know the individuals who come for showers, I realize how delightful, soulful, hilarious, creative and sweet they are. I can’t fix all of their problems or even get them housing, but I can help them get a warm shower. And for that I am grateful.

Learn more about the Sunnyside Shower Project or how to volunteer.

The Tiny-House Village That’s Changing Lives

I wrote this story about Agape Village in Portland, Oregon for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Agape Village is a place where people find community, structure, stability — and a path to permanent housing

Urban/Transportation

Photo courtesy Sarah Chapman

 

Brittany ran away from home when she was eight years old to escape an abusive situation and has lived without a permanent home in Portland, Oregon for much of the time since. During these years, she resided under bridges, in yurts in the forest, in a self-governed encampment for people experiencing homelessness and even in a treehouse before landing in a community called Agape Village.

After just four months of living at Agape, Brittany, now 36 years old, transitioned into her own two-bedroom apartment.

“Agape Village gave me a safe space to just be me,” she says. “It showed me that I needed to really get a hold of my life. I had been in the wind a long time.” 

Agape Village, located on the grounds of the city’s Central Nazarene Church, consists of 13 simple wooden huts. Sarah Chapman, outreach coordinator at Agape, calls them sleeping pods, but they are more like tiny homes — only without electricity or plumbing. “It’s rustic,” says Chapman. “A step up from camping, but definitely not like living indoors.” But to the people who live there, it is the community and the stability that are life-changing. 

Getting people into housing quickly requires sufficient affordable housing inventory, something Portland lacks. Smaller, cheaper shelters like Agape Village help fill the gap. Credit: Hannah Wallace

Chapman refers to Agape Village as a “transitional housing village” designed to bridge the gap between homelessness and permanent housing. Typically, transitional housing consists of a conventional house or apartment and is accompanied by intensive case management and other services for addiction and mental health issues. These days, though, the term has broadened to include low-cost, low-barrier-to-entry shelters such as sanctioned campgrounds or certain tiny-house villages. The people who live in them say having a roof over their heads has allowed them to address the challenges that have kept them chronically homeless in the past.  

Tiny homes, transformational community

Living on the streets or in unsanctioned campgrounds means risking having your belongings stolen or or confiscated by city officials who routinely sweep through to “clean up” such encampments. And though homeless shelters are warm and mostly safe from crime, they have their own downsides: a lack of privacy, risk of infection and strict limitations on belongings.    

Continue reading at Reasons to be Cheerful.