The Bend City Council and the Deschutes County Board of Commissioners have both announced plans and timelines to clear large homeless encampments. The City of Bend said it’ll clear the encampments on Hunnell Road on July 17. City Manager Eric King said the decision to clear the camp stemmed from health and safety concerns identified in a public health assessment last fall, and the 1,527 calls for service in the area over the last year, which is double the calls to the area in 2017.
The City previously said it would remove campsites in March to make way for construction vehicles used by an Oregon Department of Transportation project in the area, but changed course after ODOT said it could access the construction site without using the road. The City then attempted to partner with the county to create a managed camp. The City said it wouldn’t clear Hunnel until that managed camp came to be, but that partnership didn’t last. On March 8 Deschutes County Commissioners decided not to proceed with a managed camp.
The City is re-engaging plans to clear Hunnell, saying it strains emergency service providers, is an unsafe impediment on the roadway and that it needs to uniformly enforce the camping codes it implemented in March. King also noted more shelter beds are available, saying there are now nearly 500 shelter beds available in Bend.
“The City’s taken the difficult task of implementing a camping code while also increasing shelter capacity. We need to keep applying the code across Bend and are not currently funded to be the primary actor or catalyst for more shelter capacity beyond the goals we’ve established,” King said in a prepared statement to the City Council. “City streets are not suitable for long-term or indefinite shelter for large groups of people and the City must act.”
On the same day the City decided to clear Hunnell, Deschutes County Commissioners voted 2-0 to remove code-defying structures and vehicles in the northern part of Juniper Ridge. County staff estimate there are between 150 to 200 campsites in the area, and said there are numerous code infractions relating to unsafe dumping of waste and fire hazards. The county’s five-step process starts with cleanup of waste and mitigating future impact by providing water and sanitation facilities. Next it will conduct community outreach and attempt to connect people with social services before removing abandoned property, then removing individuals who don’t move.
Commissioner Phil Chang abstained from the vote, saying he’s not against uniformly enforcing county codes, but wanted to move forward with other agenda items about the county’s safe parking to mitigate the impacts of moving people. He also clashed with other commissioners on the concept of camp closures, arguing it only moves the problem rather than solve it. The county estimates it’ll spend about $200,000 on removing the campsites but said certain facets of the plan and the cost could change as they move forward. Health Service Director Janice Garceau, whose department would be one party in the outreach process, said it may be difficult for her team to meet the needs of the closures.
“They will certainly be willing to participate with other service providers in doing assessments if they have capacity, but there are a number of camping closures occurring right now that are affecting well over 200 people in our community, so their bandwidth as a team of nine covering the whole county is what it is,” Janice Garceau, health service director of Deschutes County, told the commissioners.
Garceau interrupted a heated exchange between Chang and the other county commissioners, pleading everyone to center the stories of the people who will be impacted the most. That’ll be easier than usual, because Hunnell resident Nicholas Schindler organized a protest at a meeting of the Bend City Council. Schindler moved to Central Oregon about two years ago after crisscrossing the country doing what he calls street ministry, which includes both sermons and services for homeless people.
Schindler, several service providers and Hunnell Road residents at the City Council meeting said Hunnell is different today than it was in the past. They said they expelled the drug dealers in the community and are more diligent on keeping a clean space.
“The best possible scenario is that the city pumps the brakes, gives some grace, makes mandatory that service providers, that are getting paid, to do what we volunteers are doing while not getting paid and to do what they say they’ve committed to do,” Schindler said.
The protest attracted about 20 people from Hunnell and Clauson roads, local service providers and activists. Schindler opened the meeting by preaching, playing audio of the Constitution and allowing people to share their stories on the microphone. One speaker, Michelle Hester, said she’s one of 14 residents there who will lose their property because they can’t move their vehicles. With impending sweeps on Juniper Ridge just west of Hunnell, she doesn’t know what happens next.
“As far as I know, we still have nowhere to go. All the resources they gave us to call, I called every one of them and they can’t help us. There’s nothing they can do for us,” Hester said.
This article appears in Source Weekly June 29, 2023.
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It is unfortunate the County and the City of Bend cannot come up with a place for authorized managed camp for these folks. You just can’t keep moving them around that doesn’t help them nor the county or city. I would be curious how county arrived at the $200,000 to move campsites? County commissioners need to get their act together and HELP in solving this problem.
Here’s a way to help: stop incentivizing this behavior. Notice many other states don’t have this problem? This is a governance issue.
Here’s what most of us know but is somehow never reported: A majority of these people are on drugs and/or mentally ill. Many of those that aren’t have made horrendous life choices and have no intention of changing their lifestyle.
And, crucially — a huge percentage of them aren’t from Bend, and we now have the pleasure of paying for them as they flaunt the law and trash our city. It is well known that Oregon (and Bend in particular) is a great place to squat. Lots of services, lots of ‘tolerance’, and essentially no prohibitions on whatever destructive habit one could desire.
The ‘compassion’ everyone likes to very vocally proclaim is what is exacerbating this problem. There is zero accountability in our system.
Give people a short road out of this lifestyle–if they choose not to take that road, then enforce the law. Lots and lots of extra assistance for those with children, who clearly do not deserve this. But subsidizing all of these able-bodies young men just dumping their life away should not be something the rest of us have to pay for.
Please, Eric King, Bend City Council, and Deschutes County Commission: Stop this sweep and the sweeps to come; stop this assault on the lives of hundreds of our neighbors and, yes, fellow Americans.
I would just point Mr. Mudslide in the direction of the 2023 Point In Time count for the most accurate compilation of numbers we have.
Counthttps://cohomeless.org/agency-tools/point-in-time-count/
Among the things to be learned here is that 45% of the 1647 people counted (probably an undercount) experiencing homelessness in Central Oregon have lived here for more than 20 years and more than 80% have been homeless for a year or longer.
One can also find statistical verification for the assertion that “community members of color are more likely to experience homelessness than their white peers.”
At the last City Council meeting, a young woman and her son from Warm Springs testified against the announced July 17 forced removal of people from the Hunnell/Clausen Road community. This suddenly announced sweep would deprive them of the van and space they currently shelter in.
As per usual during these meetings a City Councilor dutifully read the Land Acknowledgement, a document recognizing the former presence on this land of the First Nations. According to the Point In Time Count, 14% of all the people in our region experiencing chronic homelessness are indigenous and Native American. Is it our intent to force them from their land a SECOND time?
Here’s more: 46% of all people living unsheltered and chronically homeless in the P.I.T. count were over the age of 50, conforming to national findings such as the following reported by the Council of Aging:
“Homelessness among older adults is increasing; among single homeless adults, approximately half are ages 50 and older. Of these, almost half first became homeless after age 50. Adults ages 50 and older who are homeless are experiencing health conditionsincluding cognitive and functional impairment20 years earlier than their housed counterparts. They often use costly acute healthcare services, and die prematurely. Ending homelessness among older adults will require increasing the supply of affordable housing, targeted prevention efforts, and expanding permanent supportive housing, adapted to older adult needs.”
Finally, and as Mr. Mudslide and others of his ideologic bent point to but do nothing about, the local Point In Time Count reports 46% of the homeless in Deschutes County have at least one disabling condition. 11% have serious disabling mental illness and 8% have disabling substance abuse. Not as much in this category as one might assume, yet where is the help coming from the current Congress, now controlled by individuals who believe in Jewish-controlled space lasers that start forest fires.
Bend City Council need not cave into the hate, misinformation, and persecution of the growing population of unhoused individuals here and everywhere else in red and blue states. Don’t emulate those whose only wish is to stir up hate and confusion in our civic life.