4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2018
Homeless: ‘It’s heartbreaking. We weren’t bothering anybody’
Continued from Page 1A
At the end of Franklin Ave-
nue on the east end of Astoria,
the sound of heavy machines,
people talking and items being
hauled through the underbrush
resounded through the woods
while Linda Taylor watched
her dog, a Labrador pit bull
mix, worry a stick. Taylor
hadn’t been sleeping well for
the last few nights, knowing
this day was coming, and she
didn’t know where she would
be staying that night.
Now, as friends helped her
take apart the campsite that
had been her home for more
than a year, she went back and
forth about whether to call in
to work and say she couldn’t
make it for her shift that eve-
ning. She has been trying to
save up to move indoors.
People — a city leader, a
social service representative,
police officers — would trek
up a path slick with wet, fallen
leaves and mud and stand with
her while her dog sniffed at
them suspiciously and barked.
Each time, they would ask,
“Where do you think you’re
going to go?”
“I don’t know,” she told
people again and again.
“It’s heartbreaking,” she
said as city employees moved
stuff out of camps downhill
from her. “We weren’t bother-
ing anybody,”
She and her partner had
been living in the woods for
around three years, keeping to
themselves. Now, they felt sin-
gled out because of other peo-
ple’s bad behavior — a feeling
echoed by other campers who
declined to be quoted by name.
“We’re here to help you,”
Viviana Matthews, deputy
director with Clatsop Commu-
nity Action, told Taylor.
Matthews and City Coun-
cilor Cindy Price were pres-
ent on Friday to talk with the
remaining campers and see if
they needed help contacting
social services. Price, a mem-
ber of Mayor Arline LaMear’s
homelessness solutions task
force, volunteered to be a
point of contact for homeless
campers.
Matthews asked if Taylor
could come by the agency that
afternoon to talk about housing
and what services she might
be eligible to receive.
Taylor shook her head,
thinking again about whether
or not she could afford to skip
work later. The people Mat-
thews talked to Friday were not
ready to seek out services for
a variety of reasons, but Mat-
Sultan:
‘My plan
is to stay
local’
Continued from Page 1A
Parks and Recreation Depart-
ment, but has launched him-
self full time into building his
snack company.
“It’s tough to go from a reg-
ular paycheck to, ‘I don’t know
what’s coming next,’” he said.
Sultan is working with
Clatsop Community Col-
lege’s Small Business Devel-
opment Center and the Ore-
gon Entrepreneurs Network,
taking trainings and reading up
on entrepreneurship. The key
to making it is slow, steady
growth, while establishing his
product with consumers and
vendors, Sultan said.
“My plan is to stay local,
in the Pacific Northwest to
begin with, and to expand very
slowly,” he said.
Selling fewer than 500
snacks a month, Sultan is
far from many of the federal
requirements, such as post-
ing the nutritional informa-
tion about his bars, but said
he plans to do so on his web-
site to help build trust with
consumers.
For production space, Sul-
tan rents the kitchen at 3 Cups
Coffee House. He hopes to one
day open a commercial produc-
tion kitchen other micropro-
ducers can also use, and to one
day attract investors, similar
to when cereal giant Kellogg
acquired protein bar-maker
RXBAR for $600 million.
Photos by Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
ABOVE: Trash and other debris is removed from a home-
less camp in Astoria. RIGHT: Vernon Hall helps remove
trash from a camp.
thews hoped to at least provide
information about how Clat-
sop Community Action could
help them. She encountered,
and tried to correct, several
misconceptions about what the
agency is able to offer.
“I’m just a face,” she said.
“A friendly face, hopefully.”
Conflicted
Vernon Hall, an advocate
for the homeless who until
just recently had been home-
less himself and living in the
woods, helped city workers
haul out trash and abandoned
items.
He felt conflicted as he
worked; he could see the issue
from all sides. While he sym-
pathized with people like Tay-
lor who have not caused any
problems for the neighbor-
ing homes, he also understood
the city’s standpoint. Neigh-
bors worry about people com-
ing and going constantly and
about possible illegal activ-
ity — police have found sto-
len items at some abandoned
camps — while the fire and
police departments say it
would be difficult to respond
to any kind of emergency in
the woods.
Still, Hall couldn’t say
exactly why he decided to
come help the city.
“I don’t know,” he said. “To
make sure everybody’s treated
right — with respect.”
And they were as far as he
could see.
“They’ve been given plenty
of warnings, plenty of lee-
way,” he said of the campers.
But he remains critical of
the city’s approach and won-
dered how they are deciding
what is trash, which will be
thrown away, and what is a
personal belonging to be held
at the police department for
people to claim.
“We threw away what was
obviously garbage and what
the remaining campers told us
was garbage of theirs or left by
others,” said Kenny Hansen,
the police department’s home-
less liaison officer.
Cleanup crews left one
camp alone until they could
get in touch with the man
who they knew had been liv-
ing there. They are still work-
ing on disposing of buckets of
human waste left by campers,
Hansen said.
While Friday’s effort
removed trash from the woods
and broke up camps, it hasn’t
stopped people from camp-
ing. Many people have simply
moved deeper into the woods.
“Right now, it’s a cat and
mouse game,” Hall said.
It was City Councilor
Price’s first time seeing the
camps. She walked with Han-
sen and Matthews from site to
site.
“Everyone’s just working
hard to get it together,” she
said, including both the home-
less and the workers cleaning
up the camps.
Some of the homeless cou-
ples Price talked to had the
added difficulty of getting their
partners to agree it was time to
abandon their camps, she said.
Franklin Avenue neighbor-
hood for about a year, walked
down a city access road Fri-
day morning and watched
the cleanup crews work for a
while. He used to walk his dog
and run on trails in the woods.
But he worried about encoun-
tering off-leash dogs belong-
ing to campers, and the camps
themselves made him uneasy.
The cleanup is a positive
step for the city to take, he
said, concerned about envi-
ronmental impacts and health
issues associated with unmon-
itored and unofficial camps.
“You can’t just let peo-
ple camp anywhere that they
want,” he said.
Spalding has said police do
not plan to go out and clean
up any camps besides the
ones they identified in August.
They will, however, respond to
reports or complaints of new
camps.
Several new camps have
been reported in a grassy area
not far from the Franklin Ave-
nue camps, off Lief Erikson
Drive. They are uphill from a
muddy trail, hidden behind a
screen of trees. They are likely
the next camps the city will
address.
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