Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury and homeless service providers on Wednesday took aim at Trump administration plans to forcefully intervene in cities with large homeless populations by cracking down on camping and converting government buildings into shelters.

Speaking to reporters in the offices of Street Roots, the weekly newspaper sold by vendors who are homeless or living in poverty, Kafoury said the plans amount to “warehousing” the poor.

Speakers also obliquely tied the federal efforts to a local push to repurpose the vacant Wapato Jail, located in a remote part of North Portland, into a homeless shelter with hundreds of beds.

“These out-of-sight, out-of-mind, tactics are cruel, they’re immoral and ultimately, they don’t work,” Kafoury said.

The White House has set its sights on addressing homelessness in California’s largest cities by sweeping camps and repurposing government-owned facilities as shelters, The Washington Post reported this month citing administration officials.

The Post reported that President Trump, who has repeatedly criticized the city’s Democratic leaders over homelessness, personally ordered the initiative.

Trump also said the Environmental Protection Agency would issue a violation to the city of San Francisco over homelessness-related issues, citing waste and syringes swept into the ocean through storm drains. City officials there say such problems don’t exist, and that any debris is removed at wastewater treatment plants.

The Wapato Jail plan, seemingly stalled for a year, recently reasserted itself with the apparent backing of local developers, Portland’s rank-and-file police union and the nonprofit Volunteers of America Oregon.

Kafoury, not directly referencing Wapato, said funds have been put to better use. For example, she said, local housing funds subsidize permanent housing placements for 12,000 people who might otherwise be homeless.

“There’s not a warehouse or jail nearby who can house that many people, let alone house them successfully,” she said. “I’m not willing to kick thousands of people out of their homes so that we can round up and whisk away a few hundred people from downtown for the sake of satisfying the rich and the powerful.”

Developer Jordan Schnitzer, who owns the Wapato building, said he was traveling when reached Wednesday and declined to comment.

Street Roots Executive Director Kaia Sand said private sector overtures that offer facilities but require ongoing funding could divert money from other solutions, including supportive services intended to help formerly homeless people from returning to the streets.

“This is about disappearing homelessness, not solving it,” she said.

Sand also criticized law enforcement crackdowns on homelessness. Street Roots has promoted a Portland Street Response program that would offer an alternative to police for responding to low-level 911 calls involving homelessness issues.

“We know unhoused people are arrested too much and that drives people further into poverty with fines and fees,” she said. “Policing people who are unhoused is exactly the wrong direction.”

An analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive last year found that more than half of all arrests made by the Portland Police Bureau in 2017 were of a homeless person, a figure that’s dramatically disproportionate to Portland's homeless population, which is estimated to make up no more than 3% of the population.

The vast majority of the arrests, 86 percent, were for non-violent crimes, the analysis found. And more than 1,200 arrests were solely for offenses that are typically procedural -- missing court or violating probation or parole.

George McCarthy, a Street Roots vendor, also responded to the call to turn Wapato Jail into a shelter, saying it reinforces stereotypes and that a jail wouldn’t feel like a home.

“Honestly, I’m tired being associated with jail,” he said. “You don’t need the public perception to constantly stick you in a jail.”

-- Elliot Njus

enjus@oregonian.com; 503-294-5034; @enjus

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.