Street roots., December 21, 2012, Page 8, Image 8

street roots
Dec. 21, 2012
24 hours
on the streets
of Portland
Street Roots conducted a 24-hour Twitter project
reporting around the clock on homelessness in our
town. Here are the stories we heard.
This report is drawn
from the Twitter feeds
o f A lex Z ie lin sk i, Ja ke
Thom as, Joa n n e
Z u h l, Robert Britt,
E r in Fenner, Sue
Zalokar, Sarah
Beecroft, Cole M erkel
a n d Israel Bayer.
S T A F F R E P O R TS
f you traded one day of your life for
homelessness, what would it look like?
That’s what Street Roots did on Dec. 13.
For all of the 14 years we’ve been covering
the streets, we’ve never broadcast for a solid
24 hours.
But through Twitter, over the course of
more than 1,700 tweets, we gave a
panoramic view of Portland’s streets, from
the shelter exodus, throughout a dark wet
night, and into the dawning hours when the
cycle started all over again, as it does 365
days a year, here, and across the country.
We talked with people from all walks of
life, sharing the tragic circumstances that
I
office early - wide awake at 7 a.m.: “It’s cold as
#$@%o out there. ”
At 7 a.m. it was only 39 degrees in Old
Town/Chinatown, and the streets were
waking up. The early vendors at Street
Roots are making coffee, arranging their
packs, buying papers for the day.
7:30 a.m: The Street Roots office begins to
come to life.
“Someone stole my bike seat off my bike last
night... One of the worst things is that you
can’t hold on to anything out there. ”
“A bike trailer the BTA gave me was stolen
last week. It was really nice - 1 used it to store
my sleeping pack. ”
“I f you have to hold onto your sleeping pack
when you walk into a store, the first they say to
you is, ‘There’s no public restrooms.’”
BAYER
We meet Steve, 33, a husband looking for
cook work. Like most people, he never
thought this would happen, that he and his
family would become homeless. But, he
says, he “lost focus.” The most difficult
thing, he says, is “not stressing out.”
“That’s our plan. Find a place and get
stability. ”
For them, stability is not having to move 10
times a year.
Kids keep saying, “When are we going to go
home?”
Steve is a trained chef. Posts three resumes a
day either in person on online. “I ’ll get a job
that way. ”
The Clackamas Service Center just off
82nd Avenue reveals another aspect to the
_ “In the last week, I ’ve lost three sleeping_____ streets, the families and the imm igrants
who are struggling with each meal and the
bags, ” SR vendor. “They get stolen. I t’s
ridiculous. Would you climb into someone’s
sleeping bag if you didn’t know who slept in
it?”
Another reporter went out early with Liz
Weber, an outreach worker with the
homeless housing organization JOIN. She
has been doing outreach for seven years and
has stayed in contact with many of her
clients the entire time,
“Sometimes bad things happen to them,”
she says. One couple lost a baby to SIDS.
“There’s no way to not take that home
with you,” she says.
Under the cacophony of the Interstate 5
overpass on the east side of the river they
encountered numerous camps, “I had no
idea they were here,” the reporter notes.
P H O T O B Y JAKE
THOM AS
Lisa, Bill and
Little M N under
1-5. They’ve been
surviving under the
bridge for a week.
placed them under a bridge at 2 a.m., or in
line for a meal with 200 others, or simply
trying to find boots to fit a broken foot. We
visited with many agencies and
organizations working with people
experiencing homelessness, including
shelter providers and housing assistance
workers who have seen the cycle for years,
and know just what it takes to break it.
What follows are some of the streams
from the 24-hour project, beginning at 6
a.m. in Old Town, as the shelters prepared
to close up for the day, sending their
occupants out into the predawn hours.
The warming shelters for men and women
are emptying out to the streets, still more than
an hour before the sun comes up.
Only people on streets are asleep, only
bicyclists are bike cops.
Vendors are rolling into the StreetRoots
“We definitely find people who are working”
says Weber.
People are sometimes recently evicted or
can’t afford move-in fees she says.
I met Lisa, 54, and Bill, 52, and their dog
“Little MN.” They were camped out
underneath 1-5 near the Rose Quarter.
Bill gets SSL Lisa says they want to get off
the streets, but are having a hard time.
They are burning a couple old pallets for a
fire. They are making coffee.
“It’s cold out here, ” says Lisa. “Real cold. ”
They’ve been here under the bridge for about
a week.
Jacob came to Portland looking for work,
after losing his job in Florida. But it didn’t
work out as planned. He now sleeps in a
doorway with an agreement from the
business owners. “I keep it clean, quiet.”
Been here for “about a month.”
“It’s hard out here. Feel like I gotta watch
my back, not without reason. I ’ve been jumped,
mugged several times. ”
Do you feel safe here sleeping in this
doorway? Jacob: “From the street people, yes.
But not from the drunks. It can get scary. ”
What happens w/drunks? Jacob: they kick
my tarp, jump on top of me. One guy kicked a
book out of my hands because I read. One
threatened to kill me. ”
most basic of services. Like Ed, 55, who has
been homeless off and on. Most recently he
ran out of unemployment, was evicted, and
is now homeless. Surveys by Portland and
Multnomah County show that the
unsheltered population is no longer
concentrated downtown, but distributed
throughout the county.
Was camping out off of 92nd and police
kicked him out. Police were real cordial, he
says.
Every morning he tells himself sun is
shining, birds singing, but he doesn’t see them.
Julius Brown is formerly homeless and
now a long-time volunteer with Potluck in
the Park, which serves meals to the 500 or
so community members every Sunday. And
he’s an occasional guide through the
McLoughlin Caves, the camps under the
Ross Island Bridge east bank, where he
used to live. It’s a dangerous area, he says,
but it was dry and it stayed warm there in
winter.
“I used to judge people who were homeless. I
used to look down on them, ” Brown says. “And
then I became homeless. ”
“Working with Potluck in the Park was my
W of giving back. They treated me like I was
human, like I was normal. ”
As the day went on, it soon became dark
again. The sun sets around 4:30 in
December. For youths on the streets, it’s a
vulnerable time, and in winter that
vulnerability grows even stronger with the
threat of sickness always in the air.
Janus Youth is part of a local youth
continuum that serves homeless youths
across the region. Janus Youth runs the
Street Light/Porch Light shelter, that has
capacity of 60 youth for shelter. The shelter
is full on this night.
Watching so many young teens pour out of
youth shelter who have no home.
Is it choosing to be homeless if you are
choosing to leave an abusive home?
Misconception on the streets.
See 24 HOURS, page 9
A lone camper
sleeps in a well-
lighted area
beneath a
Christmas wreath.
Every two years,
Portland and
Multnomah County
compile a point in
time count ot
people
experiencing
homelessness.
The 2011 report
counted nearly
4,700 people
either, on the
streets, in a shelter
or in transitional
housing.
The number of
unsheltered
homeless families
with children has
increased by 35%
since 2009.
48 people died on
the streets of
Multnomah County
in 2011