Eugene weekly., October 21, 2021, Page 8, Image 8

Photo by Todd Cooper
From Pizza To Protest
ERIC JACKSON CAME TO ADVOCATE FOR EUGENE’S UNHOUSED
ix years ago, Eric Jackson was a successful East
Coast businessman living in New Jersey. He had
a wife and two kids and had owned several pizza
shops throughout the ’90s and early 2000s.
This was before he decided to leave everything behind
in 2014 — from family and friends, to financial security —
to come and live in a tent on the streets of Eugene and
incur upward of $12,000 in fines in less than three years.
Jackson, 51, says he came to Eugene for one purpose:
to make a lasting difference in the homeless community,
by any means necessary.
After arriving, Jackson became one of Eugene’s most
active homeless advocates, leading public demonstrations
and protest camps around the city. His continued refusal
to move his camps in the face of exorbitant fines is meant
to bring attention to the absence of realistic alternative
housing in Lane County. The argument he makes is that
if the city can’t provide shelter for its homeless, then it
can’t fine the homeless for sleeping outside. His argu-
ment is not unlike the one made in Martin v. the City of
Boise, in which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled
that it’s unconstitutional to prevent people from sleep-
ing in public spaces without offering a viable alternative.
Jackson’s presence has made such a stir that in March
2020, Eugene police Chief Chris Skinner blamed the large
increase in prohibited camping tickets between 2018 and
2019 on Jackson and his camps alone.
His camps thrust forward a community-wide conver-
sation surrounding Eugene’s homeless and their lack of
adequate housing and resources. After five years living
in tents, tickets, lawsuits and even some time in jail, Jack-
son is still pushing for change and local governments are
slowly making changes.
S
The Entrepreneur
If you’ve lived in Eugene for any length of time since
2018, you’ve probably seen Jackson around, either on
the streets or in the news. He’s got understated dreads,
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constantly reeks of marijuana, if he can help it, and usually
travels by bike.
A simple “hello” can easily turn into a 20 minute conver-
sation. He talks quickly and with confidence, and he’s
always smoking, quick to offer a drag to anybody within
earshot. You might think you were being hustled if he
weren’t so charitable.
Jackson was born and raised in New Jersey, where in
1987 he opened Echo Pizza & Wings in Echelon. In 1994
he sold it for the first time.
“I sold it to an attorney,” Jackson says. “Because I had
my second kid on the way. I had 13 drivers on the road on
a Friday night. I was like, ‘If they bump into one little kid
in the neighborhood, I’m done.’ There’s no insurance that
could cover that.”
Jackson has two kids, Max Jackson and Jake Jackson.
They both spent most of their time growing up with their
mom in Florida, although they’d visit their father in New
Jersey when they could. Max even moved in with Eric
Jackson during his high school years.
“There's definitely pictures of me as a kid while I was
there throughout my whole childhood,” Max says. “As long
as I can remember, my dad has been an entrepreneur.”
In 2012, Max Jackson was just beginning a career as a
photographer. He had taken some photos during The Color
Run, a popular paint-themed 5k race, and soon discovered
that The Color Run was using one of his photos illegally.
Max, still a college student at the time, was originally
offered $5,000 to settle, which his stepdad had urged him
to take. Later, The Color Run sued him over the issue.
Having always wanted to be a lawyer, Max felt confident
he could fight his own case, with the help of his father, Eric.
“I made a GoFundMe and it went viral overnight and
then we settled,” Jackson says of the legal battle. “We
settled within 36 hours of it going viral.”
Max Jackson says that his decision to be a photogra-
pher was one of the biggest reasons his father decided
to leave New Jersey.
“Once I told him that I wasn't going to be a lawyer, he
By Donald Morrison
no longer needed to stay in New Jersey for me to maybe
go to Rutgers with in-state tuition; he decided he wanted
to go live somewhere where he couldn't go to jail for having
a joint in his pocket.”
Eric Jackson says that people who knew him as a pizza
shop owner in New Jersey are surprised with the direction
his life took in Eugene. He’s almost a completely different
person externally. He says people from his high school
reached out via Facebook after somebody stumbled
upon his face in an article about homelessness in Eugene.
“I told them that I looked at the 1,500 homeless in
Eugene and said, ‘That’s the size of our graduating high
school class,’” Jackson says. “How could they not house
these people? It’s fucking ridiculous.”
There were 1,642 unhoused people in Lane County in
2018, around the time Jackson got to Eugene, according to
data from that year’s Point In Time survey. In October 2021
there were 3,450 unhoused people in the county, as per the
homeless-by-name list, which uses data already tracked
from the Homeless Management Information System.
The King of Stoner Hill
Before Jackson began his protest camps in Eugene,
he had spent some time in Denver, Colorado, some of it
at Commons Park — at the time nicknamed “Stoner Hill.”
The park had become popular among smokers, grift-
ers, hippies and the homeless after recreational marijuana
was legalized in 2014. People came from all over to inhale
America's first legal pot; one of those people was Jackson,
who had recently been arrested in his home state of New
Jersey for smoking a joint.
“I'm not getting handcuffed to a fucking bench again
by a 26-year-old punk that thinks it's cool because I have
a joint in my pocket,” Jackson says. “I mean he had no
business going in my pocket to begin with.”
Jackson felt a sense of community at Stoner Hill and
began advocating for the rights of his fellow campers
when police would get called. It was his first taste of the
E U G E N E W E E K LY . C O M