Street Roots • April 6-12, 2018
Editorial
Page 3
Deja vu on Wapato shelter. It’s still a bad idea.
t’s hard to fault politicians for trying to solve two
problems with one plan, especially when the
problems have been decades in the making, have
confounded a generation of office holders, and carry
grave financial and humanitarian consequences.
Unless, of course, the plan is a homeless shelter in
Wapato.
Wapato, for new readers, is the now legendary
boondoggle that happens when big plans to lock more
people up collide with financial
limits and changing times.
A little history: In 1996,
voters approved a bond to build
the Wapato Detention Facility,
which was completed in 2004.
By then, property tax limits had been put into effect
and the county had no money to operate the jail. Used
occasionally as a film set, and perhaps more frequently
as the butt of a joke, Wapato has never opened as a
jail.
And yet again, it is being proposed as a possible
homeless shelter by at least two candidates for City
Council, Loretta Smith and Stuart Emmons, and more
recently a Portland developer. Smith and Emmons
each reference Wapato as part of a larger platform of
services and amenities to help people in need of
housing, health care and stability.
. .
§3 W Wïs «
1 «säy *1 w W i
a
■
...
"T-
1
The sign outside
the Wapato
Detention Facility,
located in North
Portland on the
northwest rim o f
Bybee Lake.
Indeed, the unused building, with space for
hundreds of people, including beds, kitchen facilities
and bathrooms, is a tempting landing site for the
hundreds of people without beds, kitchen facilities or
bathrooms on Portland’s streets.
Solutions to homelessness involve addressing the
root causes of trauma and detachment. Success relies
on restoring a sense of belonging and participation, of
feeling trust and being trusted - feeling safe. It is
difficult to imagine a place less suited to those needs -
one further away from core services and located in a
more desolate plot of land - than the Wapato jail.
Fenced off with “no public access” signs and wedged
among industrial warehouses and trucks, Wapato is
located far from a frequent bus route, far from grocery
or convenience stores, basic services, coffee shops,
parks and any sense of community. The working
homeless - yes, there are many people in our city with
jobs but not enough income for housing - need to
easily get to work.
The shelter model is a temporary way to stabilize
people’s lives as they transition into housing. But is
this where families will be forced to go when they’re
evicted from their apartments? Is this where
traumatized veterans and people struggling with
mental illness are supposed to spend their days or
return to every evening - a jail? It’s hard to imagine
how this is a good location for people trying to plug
back into society as they manage their wait lists for
housing and recovery services, and find a job or stay
employed.
Several of the area’s leading homeless and housing
service providers have come out against using Wapato
as a homeless shelter, including the heads of the some
of region’s biggest service providers, Human Solutions,
JO IN and Transition Projects.
The latest news is that Portland developer Homer
Williams, through his nonprofit Harbor of Hope, wants
to buy the property for $7 million. For years, Williams
has been proposing grand-scale endeavors for
addressing the city’s homeless and housing crisis.
Underlying those proposals is the perspective of
Williams and Harbor of Hope that government and the
private sector have to work together to make a
difference.
It’s true. There is a great deal of promise in
Williams’ and Harbor of Hope’s goals and intentions,
and we applaud this commitment to big, creative
solutions. But to make Wapato work, how much heaven
and earth needs to be moved, and who will be doing
the moving? If this is something Harbor of Hope is
willing to shoulder with privately raised funds, we’ll
stay tuned.
But in this peculiar location, could Harbor of Hope
solve the issues of transportation, food, access to jobs
and the isolated location? Since travel to jobs would be
arduous, would investors create new employment
opportunities nearby? Harbor of Hope has also
explored creating housing. Rather than converting a
c a r c e r a l s p a c e in to a m a s s s h e lt e r , c o u ld H a r b o r o f
Hope respond to the local community, creating housing
for families trying to keep their kids at Roosevelt and
other neighborhood schools?
Because here’s the rub: A jail located on industrial
land seems suspiciously like a way to hide homeless
people from sight. While some advocates of Wapato
surely have good intentions, it skews toward NIM BY
inclinations: move homeless neighbors out-of-sight and
they are no longer neighbors - or neighbors only to
the ducks of Bybee lake and the industrial warehouses.
We fear that should our community provide sub-par
beds in a site that proves more hardship than remedy,
those who refuse it might be put into a more difficult
situation. A dangerous outcome could be that those
who opt out face draconian responses, because they
did not choose to disappear behind the walls of
Wapato.
That’s not to say that there aren’t possibilities, or
that given extraordinary measures, something good
could come out of this. But is this the place to put
those efforts? Why can’t we work harder to keep
people closer to services, networks and jobs?
Even the people who are considering Wapato as a
mass-shelter site acknowledge its shortcomings, but
love it or hate it, Wapato does seem to be a trigger for
getting people talking about what could be.
Rather than segregate a portion of our city’s
residents to the edge of town, the city, county,
businesses and nonprofits are better off continuing
their efforts with a network of localized shelters that
help people remain in their community. Because
having a support network is key to people feeling
stable, secure, trusted and capable.
We all have to keep our eye on the prize, which
includes opening up our housing market for all income
levels. Wapato is a mess, and it would take a Herculean
effort to turn it into something with promise. Anything
less sets people up for failure.
that yotiVe
Executive Director Kara Sand
kaia@streetroots.org
Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl
joanne@streetroots.org
Vendor Program Director Cole Merkel
cole@streetroots.org
Development Director Andrew Hogan
a h cire w @ stre e tr6 6 fs o rg
Senior S taff Reporter Emily Green
Operations Director Sarah B e e c ro it
Program Assistant Caefin Miltko, Jesuit
Volunteer
Vendor Assistant Scott Jackson, Alex
Gillow-Wiles
Development Assistant Rosemary Wilson
Editorial Producer Monica Kwasnik
Reporters Sarah Hansell, Leonora Ko, Emilly
Prado, Jared Paben, Amanda Waldroupe,
Thacher Schmid, DeVon Pouncey, Helen Hill
Photographers Diego Diaz, Arkady Brown,
Celeste Noche
Canvasser Desmond Hardison
Board of Directors
Chair Brad Taylor
Vice-Chair Rachel Langford
Treasurer Heather Stadick
Secretary Dan Jones
Directors Michael Anderson, Sandra Hahn,
John Brown, Nels Johnson and Alison Hallett
Volunteers
Jan Bayer, John Barker, Stacey Heath, Anjali Rathore,
Dennis Hogan, Lucas Hawthorne, Thomas Buell Jr.,
Jason Cohen, Doug Spangle, Susannah Kamala, Jon
Raymond, Diana Richardson, Paul and Madeline
Gefroh, Mary Anne Joyce, Brooke Anderson, Gillian
Floren, Mark Oldani, Bianca Butler, Camber Hansen-
Karr, Miranda Woods, Henry Brannan, Helen Hill,
Mary Emerson, Brooke Anderson, Kathleen McFall,
Robb Hengerer, Maile Yeats-Rowe, Erin Parsons, Faye
Powell, Jon Raymond, Danny Moran and Megan
Pickerel-Winer. If you're interested in volunteering
w ith Street Roots, please submit a volunteer
application at streetroots.org/volunteer. Or you can
call for more information at 503-228-5657.