Few homeless people have coronavirus. Portland still plans to resume clearing camps.

Friday morning was warm, and campers along the Pacific Crossing Trail visited with neighbors, dug into sack lunches delivered by volunteers and generally lived life as if they weren’t in the midst of a pandemic.

None were wearing masks, but why would they? Only eight homeless people have tested positive for COVID-19 in Multnomah County, even after homeless campers formed large tent encampments in Old Town, along Interstate 205 and on the North Portland Peninsula pedestrian path.

Steven Lee sat in a camp chair sharing a snack with friends whose tents are scattered throughout the mile-long stretch of trail north of Lombard Street that contains dozens of tents and tarps packed together.

Lee felt like he moved constantly before Gov. Kate Brown issued her stay-home order in mid-March. That was when the city of Portland stopped deploying workers to dislodge people from camping spots and paused its camp cleanup program.

The last time he moved, he was cleared from his new spot within two days. Then, he set up his tent at a spot just off Peninsula Crossing Trail and has settled in. He has enjoyed the relief that’s come with not having to worry about whether he’d lose his belongings and look for a new place to rest.

“They come there and do a sweep and you get exhausted,” Lee said.

But, like other West Coast cities, Portland is now reconsidering its stance.

When the city stopped dispersing campsites, officials cited federal public health guidelines that warned moving people from one informal camp to another could spread the coronavirus like wildfire.

But left alone to camp in one spot, few campers are socially distancing, and neighbors and business owners are complaining about the growing camps. Police claim that scofflaws are terrorizing people in and out of camps.

A city spokeswoman said this week the camps have grown so dangerously large that it’s now time for the city to disband some of them for safety reasons.

City officials declined to explain in-depth the factors they are weighing as they plan to resume camp disbursement. But so far, Portland is occupying the middle ground between how cities to the north and south are handling people living outside during the pandemic.

‘A PLACE FOR US TO GO’

As Portland looks to resume its usual practice of evaluating camps for trash, hygiene problems, syringes and criminal activity, and then clearing the worst of them, several Seattle officials want to go the opposite direction.

Thursday afternoon, Seattle City Council members debated whether to enshrine in city ordinance that homeless camps cannot be swept while the city is in a state of emergency.

While Seattle’s mayor and police chief oppose narrowing the criteria under which camps can be broken up, many city council members see the practice as inhumane during the pandemic.

When briefing the council last week on her planned legislation, Councilmember Tammy Morales said she had long-held skepticism about how Seattle deals with homeless encampments.

In her district, she said, there are two large camps that house about 80 people between them.

“We know there are at least 80 people that need somewhere to go if they are going to be disbursed to the street,” Morales said.

Tonda Eisenburg wondered the same thing when she heard that she might be moved from her spot along Peninsula Crossing Trail.

She held her dog, Bella, on her lap and dipped apple crisps into a gooey passionfruit chocolate bar that had melted in the sun.

“I hope they have a place for us to go to,” Eisenburg said. “We’re trying to live like everybody else.”

She moved into the camp just as coronavirus shutdowns started and has found some security there. Not everyone is friendly, but she has made friends. And the proximity to the Fred Meyer on Lombard, the meal deliveries from volunteers and the ability to share resources with fellow campers make the spot better than being on her own, she said.

She suffers from hypoglycemic spells that cause her to pass out, so being around others can be useful -- except when her colored pencils were stolen during one of the spells.

“Some of us are like family,” Eisenburg said. “We have each other’s backs.”

Dr. William Toeppler, medical director for the street outreach volunteer group Portland Street Medicine, said that he has not seen medical problems become more common or more severe due to the larger camps.

His team treats mostly rashes and other skin infections. They can write prescriptions but can’t hand out medications, which he is worried will pose a bigger problem as pill bottles empty and it remains difficult to access pharmacies.

He is at the camps several days a week and doesn’t see much of an increase in dangerous behavior or health hazards. He acknowledges that city and county officials have several factors to balance, but says the camps are a function of necessity.

“It’s a survival game for so many of these folks,” Toeppler said. “There’s less places to get food, so there are less options of where to be. You gotta be around the food.”

SALEM CRACKS DOWN

Katie O’Brien, the executive director of Rose Haven, a homeless social service agency near Old Town Chinatown, dreads the resumption of city camp clearing.

She is already bracing for the onslaught of women who will come to ask for help finding a place to go, only to be told that shelters are largely full and few service providers are operating at normal capacity.

“We get why people are saying this needs to be done, but we can’t in good conscience do that -- these sweeps -- without providing alternatives,” O’Brien said.

She has seen news reports and heard from neighbors and business owners who characterize the homeless campers in the central city as all criminals or junkies. But that is not the case, she said, and moving people is certainly not going to mitigate any bad behavior that may be going on.

Even with three city-sanctioned outdoor campsites and a plan to relocate nearly 400 people from shelters into motels, that leaves hundreds more without anywhere to go and fewer resources than ever, she said.

“It seems like we are taking a problem and just shifting the problem somewhere else instead of taking the problem and addressing it and trying to find some solutions for it,” O’Brien said.

In Salem, that combination could lead to a lawsuit from Disability Rights Oregon, the state’s advocacy and protection organization for vulnerable people.

The organization sent a letter to Salem city officials saying that a new city ordinance is using the coronavirus as a cover to consistently sharpen anti-camping and loitering rules.

The city added restrictions on whether homeless people can sit and lie on sidewalks and public spaces tied to its coronavirus emergency declaration. This is on top of a previously passed rule that prohibits camping on public property.

The city planned not to enforce that rule until there are enough shelter beds for every homeless person in the city who wants one. However, those beds have not materialized.

The city is sweeping people from sidewalks and visible public spaces. People sleeping outside have been allowed to camp only in the undeveloped sections of two city parks, away from the bathroom facilities and water fountains.

“What the City of Salem is really targeting is basic activities of daily living that are the unavoidable consequence of being homeless,” said Disability Rights Oregon attorney Matt Seres. “And their decision to heighten the targeting of those individuals right now during the pandemic and thrusting them into an even more unstable living circumstances really is probably of great detriment to their health and safety.”

Jimmy Jones, head of homeless service provider Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency, said the issue is complicated. Salem officials have put a good faith effort for the last three years into housing people who have historically struggled to stay inside.

But they also want to clear sidewalks and appease downtown businesses that have seen the homeless population grow there over the past few years.

“I think we need to have a sophisticated, layered response,” Jones said. “We need to approach that in a really smart way that’s not criminalizing homelessness, trying to respect private property.

“But you have to be able to answer the question of: Where can people go?”

THE LEAST BAD APPROACH

Portland officials seem more focused on the mechanics of how to resume camp dispersal.

Laura Oppenheimer, a spokesperson for the city’s office of management and finance, said that officials were happy to heed U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance for the first two months of the pandemic.

The CDC said that moving campers could cause infected people to spread the virus as they travel between campsites.

“Since then, though, we've seen something different,” Oppenheimer said. “People have started concentrating in larger and larger groups, which isn't safe. Our challenge now is to manage that while staying within public health guidance.”

The Office of Management and Finance oversees the city’s One Point of Contact system, which gathers complaints and ranks which campsites should be prioritized for cleanups. Officials there have largely said they will rely on the Multnomah County Public Health Department to say how cleanups should resume.

But Public Health Officer Jennifer Vines said earlier this week she hasn’t seen the specific camp-related issues the city is unhappy with.

Certainly there is a problem if the county reopens in June, as leaders plan, and people can’t walk down sidewalks maintaining six feet of distance because they are too crowded with tents, Vines said. And it’s not safe or pleasant for business owners or employees to have to navigate tent cities to open their stores.

But if just looking through a public health lens, there currently doesn’t seem to be much risk from the large encampments, she said. The rate of transmission among the homeless population, even after months of increasingly large congregations of people, remains low.

Vines said that, typically, her office finds that housed people pose more of a risk in introducing infections to homeless communities than the other way around.

“If it gets introduced to people camping or in shelters, it can spread quickly because of the lack of … access to hygiene,” Vines said.

Breaking up camps could also become a problem if homeless people do start contracting COVID-19 at higher rates and county contact tracers are unable to find them. The county is trying to beef up that program in its bid to reopen.

Vines said that COVID-19 has spotlighted many of the failings of where homeless service, public health and safety systems intersect.

“We’re trying to deal with the least bad approaches to the housing crisis,” Vines said.

-- Molly Harbarger

mharbarger@oregonian.com | 503-294-5923 | @MollyHarbarger

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