No space anywhere

Other cities managed to add permanent housing and emergency shelter since 2004, but Portland lost hundreds of emergency beds

To outsiders, the Portland Rescue Mission might seem a grim, worn and unwelcoming place.

Thousands of footsteps have scuffed and stained the wood floors of the entryway and faded the pale green paint on the steps down to the men’s shelter.

Check-in for the 58-bed basement space is 7:30 p.m. this time of year, meaning anyone hoping to sleep indoors must be ready to shut down for the day just as downtown nightlife is heating up. The metal-framed, barracks-style bunk beds are wedged so close that a man sleeping on one mattress can touch his neighbor without straining. If your nearest bunkmate hasn’t used one of the communal showers, you know it.

The rules are simple and firm: No drugs, no alcohol. Anyone who steps outside after lights out loses his bed. And there’s no sleeping in. The first wake-up call, a tug on the bottom of a blanket, comes around 6 a.m., and every man must be up and moving by 6:30 a.m. Breakfast is served at 7.

“I spent one night at the Rescue Mission. That was enough,” said Sean Sheffield, 39, who sells the alternative newspaper Street Roots in downtown Portland but camps most nights in Gresham. “Too many people, too many rules, too much God.”

Yet every day, no matter how temperate the weather, more men than the shelter can hold enter the lottery to decide who gets in. It’s the same story at the other shelters in town: Every spot is taken, every night, and there’s always a waiting list. The last time anti-poverty advocates counted, almost 3,000 people were without shelter in Multnomah, Clackamas, Clark and Washington counties — and experts say the actual number of people with nowhere to sleep in the Portland region is likely three to four times that.

“If you opened another shelter, it would be full. If you opened one after that, it would be full, too,” said Alexa Mason, spokeswoman for the Rescue Mission. “There’s just no space anywhere.”

Each evening, more men than will fit enter the lottery for about 40 emergency shelter beds at downtown’s Portland Rescue Mission. The lucky winners line up after dinner.

One example: A statistical analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive shows that Portland’s inventory of housing for the poorest of the poor was less than 10 percent, the smallest of almost any major U.S. city.

At the start of Portland’s 10-year plan — and before the start of the Great Recession — Multnomah County had 720 year-round emergency shelter beds. In 2014, there were just 478 in Multnomah County, and another 140 in Washington and Clackamas combined. (Some churches run shelters outside the view and regulations of government, so the actual number of emergency beds may be slightly higher.)

The number of emergency beds nationwide rose nationally over the past decade, since the federal government pushed communities to adopt 10-year plans to end chronic homelessness. Other West Coast cities, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle and San Francisco, added emergency shelter beds while also adding permanent housing, the federal government’s mandate. So did Chicago, New York City, Miami, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and a majority of other U.S. urban centers.

But not Portland.

That lack of space — a place to go tonight — is a big reason Portland’s homelessness problem feels so pressing. Thousands of people sleep outside because there are not nearly enough beds to meet the need.

That gap was by choice.

More permanent housing, fewer emergency beds

In 1986, Mayor Bud Clark responded to a spike in downtown vagrancy — and pressure from the business community to clean up what city leaders still referred to as “skid row” — with a 12-point plan to combat homelessness. Clark’s blueprint blamed the collapse of the timber industry and downtown redevelopment for creating more homeless people and wiping out the supply of cheap rooms for them to rent. So it focused on expanding the supply of emergency and transitional housing.

City leaders quickly claimed victory: “The emergency shelter system has capacity to handle those who need it,” according to the 1988 report. “Anyone who wants emergency housing can now get it. No one is forced to sleep in the streets.”

The success didn’t last.

Portland and Multnomah County’s 10-year plan to end homelessness was a response to the earlier effort. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a philosophical shift occurred within the community of anti-poverty advocates. The new approach — “housing first” — focused on creating new permanent housing for long-term homeless men and women. The thinking, based on scientific study, was that addressing homeless people’s lack of long-term shelter first would make it easier for them to overcome other barriers to self-sufficiency; men and women who know where they’re going to sleep are more likely to kick a drug habit or get control of a mental illness.

As part of that shift, advocates in and outside of government de-emphasized emergency spaces — shelters, single-room occupancy apartments and dirt-cheap motel rooms.

“The 10-year plan sort of took it for granted that we had shelter beds, that we didn’t need to work on that side of the system,” said Marc Jolin, who left his post as executive director of the nonprofit JOIN recently to run the regional effort to “reset” Portland’s 10-year plan.

That decision is understandable. Overnight shelters and motels can be unpleasant places. They’re crowded, noisy and run on shoestring budgets that leave little extra cash for amenities or sprucing up. Housing officials and elected officials — among the politicians who led the 10-year plan effort were Portland Commissioner Erik Sten and Multnomah County Commissioner Serena Cruz — had a finite pot of money. They had to make hard choices about how to spend it.

Then the recession created a new class of homeless people, overwhelming an already strained system.

“In the 10-year plan, there was an assumption that, with a healthy dose of housing assistance, people would go through shelters quicker so we wouldn’t need more shelters. But we didn’t build enough housing to house everyone, and the shelters are full, with enormous waiting lists,’” said Tony Bernal, director of funding and public policy, for Transition Projects Inc., a downtown nonprofit that helps men and women recover from homelessness.

Transition Projects runs three programs, the Clark Center, Jean’s Place and Doreen’s Place, that the federal government counts as “emergency” space, though guests can stay at each for several months. All have waiting lists.

“The unfortunate result is that we don’t have an emergency shelter system in Portland, not really,” Bernal said. “That’s different than many other cities.”

Indeed: Nationwide, emergency beds made up 33 percent of the housing inventory for homeless men and women in 2014 — and more than half in major cities, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In Multnomah County, emergency spots represented less than 10 percent. The numbers are similar in Clackamas and Washington counties.

The result: More homeless people sleeping outside, in illegal campsites, abandoned buildings or cars. A more visible and urgent problem.

“When you do not have enough homeless shelters, even on the coldest nights, you are accepting that people are going to die,” said Steve Kimes, a minister whose Anawim Christian Community runs a day shelter near the Gresham-Portland line and offers overnight stays on the coldest evenings. “We have accepted that as a community.”

With few options, ‘it’s just easier to camp’

The lack of shelter beds is just one part of the problem.

Many homeless men and women say they prefer camping to being indoors under the current shelter system. It’s not necessarily a wise choice. Nor, in many cases, is it one made by people with enough mental clarity to make the soundest long-term decisions about their lives. But it’s based on the limitations of shelter life:

Most shelters are single gender, meaning couples must split up. Few allow dogs or other pets. Guests usually can’t carry more than a backpack inside, and they certainly can’t drink alcohol or use drugs. Anyone who has a problem with authority, crowds or noise will be uncomfortable.

Sean Sheffield, an unemployed cook who also has done call-center work, camps with his girlfriend in the woods of Gresham’s Rockwood neighborhood. The MAX ride downtown to buy and sell their papers can take two hours, depending on how often they have to jump off to avoid fare inspectors.

Still, they prefer that hassle to fighting for a shelter spot.

“It’s just easier to camp,” Sheffield said. “You don’t get messed with, you don’t have any of the drama, you don’t have to worry about your stuff. You just do your thing.”

Elias French, a 60-year-old who camped with his girlfriend near the Springwater Corridor in outer east Portland, needed two hands to tick off all the reasons he didn’t use the shelter system. Among them: He doesn’t like crowds. His girlfriend likes to drink. He didn’t want to risk going downtown and not winning a bed for the night.

Elias French preferred to camp near the Springwater Corridor, away from the crowds and risks of downtown. He died near the Clackamas Town Center in a bus accident.

“I used to go downtown to get a meal or clothes, but it’s like a nuthouse,” said French, who still had the beard and long hair of his motorcycle days and homemade tattoos from a stint in prison. “You go up to Burnside at night, and people are sleeping all up and down the sidewalk. You blink, and they’ve stolen your backpack, made off with all your stuff.”

Plus, he wanted to stay with his girlfriend: “I protect her,” he said. “A woman out here alone? That’s a nightmare. And if I’m not getting a space, I sure as hell know she’s not.”

French’s instinct was correct. Although a few shelters keep spots reserved for domestic violence victims, slots for women are even scarcer than beds for men.

There are other nightmares on the streets, even outside downtown: French approached a TriMet bus late last year near Clackamas Town Center as it was pulling away from a stop. He slipped beneath its back wheels, was run over and died.

Shelter comes with dose of religion

Portland is considered one of the most “un-churched” cities in the country, but its emergency shelter system is almost completely a product of faith-based institutions. City and county leaders help pay for extra beds — or, to be more accurate, extra space for sleeping, often on the floor — during cold weather. Most of the bigger year-round shelters are run by religious groups.

The Rescue Mission, which has been helping down-on-their-luck Portlanders since 1949, holds a lottery for its beds every night after a cafeteria-style dinner. On average, about 200 men seek shelter. Most nights, about 40 beds are up for grabs, with the rest reserved for men starting the mission’s addiction-recovery program or just released from area hospitals.

The shelter door opens for the winners after evening chapel, usually a quick church service performed by volunteers from a metro-area congregation. Chapel isn’t mandatory for overnight guests.

“We are a faith-based organization, and we don’t pressure people,” said Mason, the mission spokeswoman and co-chair of a volunteer committee leading the regional effort to “reset” the 10-year plan.

Mike Caperton explains the rules to new guests at the Portland Rescue Mission shelter. Men check in at 7:30 p.m.

Volunteers from other Rescue Mission programs, which include residential addiction recovery, serve as greeters for the men’s shelter. On one recent night, Mike Caperton, sober for 10 months, staffed the computer used to run the bed lottery and sign guys in for the evening. He looked like a biker, burly and bearded with a few missing teeth, but he slipped easily into the role of host as he checked each guest’s lottery ticket and tuberculosis card. Almost every indoor shelter requires guests to prove they don’t have TB; several nonprofits offer free testing.

Caperton smiled at every guest and peppered them with jokes: “Nope, no bottoms left. Just top bunks. But you’re closer to heaven that way, right?”

The three dozen men who lined up along the back chapel wall represented a far more diverse crowd than most Portland scenes. Another crowd lingered outside the mission’s front door, beneath its big neon sign, just in case some lucky lottery winner decided not to take his bed.

For those who haven’t won a night indoors, mission staff and volunteers pass out blankets. They give out 50 to 150 each evening.

There’s that much demand, and that little space.

“It ain’t the Hilton,” Caperton said, ushering another guest downstairs for the night. “But it’s a lot better than the alternative.”

Trena Sutton prepares a snack for clients at the Clackamas Service Center. It opened as a warming shelter, Nov. 13, 2014, because of cold weather. About 40 people used the shelter for a meal and a place to sleep indoors.

Three years, so many dead

Trena Sutton, who stopped being a nurse to start caring for the homeless, is trying to open a rest area

Trena Sutton keeps a list of names in her head.

The former nurse gave up her career three years ago to help the homeless full time. The list records those she’s lost.

“Oh gosh, there’s been so many,” she said. “I haven’t been doing this all that long, and there are already so many.”

Sutton, 59, spends her days working at one of two shelters: The Right 2 Dream Too rest area in downtown Portland on Burnside Street and the Clackamas Service Center, a nonprofit day center off 82nd Avenue that opens at night in severe weather.

Her recounting of the dead takes her to other, more remote places — to camps hidden in the woods and blackberry brambles off the Springwater Corridor, to communities created in the mud and rocks that line Johnson Creek, to the places where homeless men and women hide, eager just to be left alone.

Alvin Smith became homeless after his wife died and he was hurt on the job. He died of exposure after he lost his belongings in a cleanup crew sweep.

“The first I remember clearly was Alvin, Alvin Smith,” Sutton said. “Alvin was an older gentlemen with this tiny dog, a Pomeranian maybe. He was so sweet. He drank too much, like a lot of people, but he never caused trouble for anybody but himself.”

Smith ended up homeless a few years ago after his wife died and a workplace injury made it impossible to keep a job and, in turn, an apartment. In the early fall of 2013, he lived with around four dozen other people at a camp near Southeast 92nd Avenue and Flavel Street.

The camp, situated on Oregon Department of Transportation land, was controversial. Generally, police in the Portland region will allow individual campers or even small groups as long as no one complains. But the community where Smith lived had grown to around 50 people over several years.

On Sept. 30, 2013, ODOT officials posted signs warning that they were going to clear the camp. Some people left. Most, including Smith, did not. Three days later, after a heavy rain that forced many campers to spread their belongings in the sun to dry, crews from ODOT and the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office showed up to sweep the camp. They brought along inmate work crews and a bulldozer.

Smith was among those caught in the cleanup.

“We were all begging them to leave his tent and sleeping bag, to let Alvin take those. But they were packing up everything. They said, ‘He can come pick up his stuff like everybody else,’” Sutton said. “In the pandemonium, we lost track of him.”

Four days later, other homeless people found Smith unconscious by Johnson Creek. He died from exposure.

“Somebody took his little dog, so the dog lived,” Sutton said. “I guess that’s a tiny piece of good news.”

Next on Sutton’s list: Kym Soto.

Kym Soto talked about getting into rehab, but “she just wasn’t ready,” Sutton said. She died of a drug overdose last summer.

“Kym was six feet tall, with these big eyes. She was like a model, except she had this louse of a boyfriend,” Sutton said.

Sutton doesn’t know precisely how or when Soto ended up on the streets. She knows why she stayed, though.

“With domestic violence victims, it’s so often the devil you know versus the devil you don’t,” she said. “They stay with their abusers because at least that’s some protection. They use drugs because that’s the only way not to feel everything. That was Kym.”

Soto’s face was marked with sores caused by her meth use, Sutton said. She’d gone from rail-skinny to overweight in her years outside, another sign of drug abuse and a diet heavy on cheap, easy-to-scrounge junk food.

Soto was trying to get help through A Place of Worship, an East Portland ministry for the homeless. Sutton said she and other advocates had spent perhaps six months working to persuade Soto to enter rehab, and to find her an available bed in a treatment center. A few weeks before her death, she asked to be baptized.

“She talked about wanting to straighten her life out,” Sutton said. “She just wasn’t ready. She was too afraid of being alone.”

Soto died of a drug overdose last summer. After her death, Sutton received a letter Soto wrote but never mailed to her old boyfriend. Soto’s family asked Sutton to open and read it.

“She was begging him for help. She said, ‘I’m so scared of being out here. I’ve been raped, I’ve been beaten, I’ve had everything stolen,’” Sutton said. “The drugs were her escape. Then they killed her.”

The list continues. “Lady” Katherine, who earned her nickname because she hated to hear profanity used in her presence. “She literally froze to death,” Sutton said. Brian Shipley, a former bush pilot and friend of Soto’s. “Such a smart guy. A tech whiz,” she said.

A recent addition: Nick Davis, a 23-year-old suffering from severe mental illness who took to the woods of east Portland to escape the world.

“He used to sit in front of me at church every Sunday. He never talked. He carried everything he owned,” Sutton said. “Finally one day he came up to me and said, ‘I hear you can be trusted. ... I need housing so bad. I can’t take this anymore.’”

Nick Davis was killed by police officers after he attacked them with a crowbar.

Davis told Sutton he was tired of being “bum beaten” as he slept near the Springwater Corridor. She and other advocates hooked Davis up with Transition Projects Inc. and helped him get an interview for a housing program. He didn’t live long enough to attend it.

Early on June 12, 2014, Davis and another homeless man got into a disagreement. The police showed up. Davis attacked officers with a crowbar. One shot and killed him.

“They didn’t have a choice. The police came, and Nick went off the deep end,” Sutton said. “He’d been beaten up so many times, he just reacted. It was like PTSD.”

The people on Sutton’s list have one thing in common: All were camping rather than trying to find a spot in the region’s limited emergency shelter system. Smith didn’t want to be separated from his dog. Soto wasn’t done using drugs. Davis couldn’t stand crowds. Even if shelter beds had been available, none of her friends would have qualified.

Sutton is trying to start a transitional rest area, similar to Right 2 Dream Too, on the eastern edge of Portland: “We need more options for people who aren’t quite ready to be indoors but want to start to put their lives back together,” she said. “This is a place where they can feel safe enough to get an education, get a job, take care of their drug and alcohol addiction. It’s a place to take the next step from.”

Finding the money and a location has, of course, proven tough.

“I think maybe the biggest challenge we have as a community is the way most people feel about the houseless,” she said. “They look at them, and they see derelicts, drunks, wastes of skin. But these are people. They laugh, they fall in love, they get scared, they live. Too often, they die.”

Wesley Haudenshild, 54, comes to the Outside In mobile clinic at the Clackamas Service Center for medical care. Dave Killen / The Oregonian/OregonLive

‘What we’ve got out here is true love.’

Pat and Wesley Haudenshild know the life span of people on the streets, and they're trying to beat it

When it comes to marital bliss, Pat and Wesley Haudenshild have beaten the odds. The average U.S. marriage ends in divorce after 13.6 years. They’ve been together 17.

They’re trying to beat the odds in another way: The average life span of a homeless person in this country is 64.

He’s in his 50s. She’s in her 60s. The clock is ticking.

“People die out here all the time,” Wesley said. “But we’re smart. We take care of each other. We’ll be OK, I think.”

The way they see it, there’s nowhere to go. They’re committed to staying together, and most emergency shelters in the Portland region are single-sex for adults traveling without children. Both say they feel safer “at home” — in this case, a spot behind a former Albertsons on 82nd Avenue in outer East Portland — than they would mixing with the crowds that frequent downtown shelters and motels.

“The shelters are wall-to-wall people,” Pat said. “You don’t want to be in one of those places alone.”

“We’re safer out here,” Wesley said. “We know the people, we’ve got our routine. Downtown is scary.”

Pat, petite with silver hair shaved close to her scalp, likes to check out romance novels from the Hazelwood branch of the county library and gets free bread and bottles of Fanta from the Clackamas Service Center, a day shelter. She ended up on the street years ago because of “bad choices.”

“I broke one of my mama’s rules. She said no drugs, no friends in her house, let her know where I’m going to be at night, don’t stay out all night. Then she went to Arizona for a week, and I had a guy over,” Pat said. “So she kicked me out.”

Wesley came to camping after an on-the-job injury — he has the gnarled fingers and sore back of a longtime construction worker — left him incapable of work. He’s tiny, with a beard and mustache gone mostly gray. He showed up at the Clackamas Service Center on one recent morning wearing black jeans, a black ski cap and a black T-shirt with “Gangnam Style” emblazoned across the front — someone else’s hand-me-downs, but a style statement nonetheless.

Pat’s mother, 83, has a house near their campsite. When the weather turns especially cold, they move in with her. But they don’t like to overstay their welcome.

“It’s her house,” Wesley said. “I want to respect that.”

“My mom loves me,” Pat said. “But she don’t really like me.”

Besides, at her mother’s house, there’s no room for Pat and Wesley’s belongings. He has three grocery carts overflowing with stuff. She has one. They’ve downsized through the years.

“At one time we had 13 carts,” she said, shaking her head and giggling at past foolishness. “It was like a circus train.”

Her mother has offered to set them up in an apartment if they can find one for less than $500. The only units that cheap these days are subsidized. And those usually require residents to stay sober.

Pat and Wesley met through a drug connection. They still use sometimes — “a little weed, sometimes some meth,” she says. — even though they know it’s one more obstacle to getting inside.

“Don’t hold it against me,” Pat said. “You would, too, if you lived like this.”

Still, they’re both optimistic that they’ll get inside someday — when they finally get sober, when his application for federal disability benefits finally goes through. He’s been rejected three times, she says, because getting all the requisite paperwork together is so challenging.

Until something changes, they’re resigned to life outside, as rough and wet as it might be. They’ve been beaten up and robbed, harassed by other homeless people and neighboring business owners.

“I don’t like being around people who do heroin. I’m a square. I grew up in Estacada. Heroin is too much for me,” Pat said. “Those people, you see them, they’re out of their mind: ‘Got any black? Got any black? Know anybody who has any black?’”

The people who are often the nicest, they say, are police officers. One or two bring them food, check on them during severe weather. Officers sometimes make them move — “When someone calls to complain,” Pat said — but turn a conveniently blind eye when they move back a day or two later.

Theirs is a common story among Portland’s homeless population, men and women banding together for companionship and protection. That decision all but forces them outside, but they don’t care.

“He’s my man,” Pat said.

“She’s always there for me. She’s always watching my back,” said Wesley. “Sometimes one of us gets mad, we’ll walk away for a while, but we always come back. I did a lot of things in my life I’m not so proud of, a lot of drugs, other stuff. She doesn’t care.

“What we’ve got out here is true love.”

Coming next

Spend a night on the streets with Lio Alaalatoa, a veteran outreach worker who spends his nights trying to help homeless men and women get indoors — and stay alive.