Jennifer Young drove around her neighborhood one recent morning, taking inventory of the scenes she watches daily.

Tucked into pockets of Lents in Southeast Portland, even around landmarks like Marshall High School, homeless people sleep outside, some in tents or beneath tarps or on top of mattresses and blankets. Still others take shelter in RVs or cars.

When Young stepped out of her car, she spoke to almost everyone she met. She pointed out hypodermic needles in a small pile atop a bucket, and bottles filled with urine.

"I don't want anyone," she said, "to continue to live in these third-world conditions."

More than any other neighborhood, Lents has felt the impact of the few hundred people camping this year along the Springwater Corridor, which spans Multnomah and Clackamas counties. Two of the trail's 20-plus miles pass through the area. And as officials and social-service providers prepare to sweep the trail Sept. 1, and with scant options available for campers to relocate, neighbors worry that burden will only grow.

Even before Mayor Charlie Hales experimented with looser rules on public camping this year, neighbors had already seen an influx of people moving in -- in city parks, in vehicles lining streets, in tents on sidewalks, and on empty lots and slivers of land near homes, schools and businesses.

Some of those camps are far larger than the small sites the city says it will tolerate even after Sept. 1. Many appear to be ungoverned, unlike the kind of sanctioned, camper-organized sites city and county officials have talked of creating.

Lents' example -- with neighbors struggling to reconcile empathy with fallout from unregulated camping -- could play out across Portland. Young, who's lived in the neighborhood for two decades, said she's spent months trying to get city officials' attention.

"Nobody's doing anything," she said, "because it's Lents."

***

Lents, south of Southeast Powell Boulevard and slung between Southeast 82nd and 112th avenues, was once among Portland's early streetcar suburbs. It's been known for decades since as a hardscrabble place where crime, strip clubs and graffiti bloomed in the absence of city investment.

When big government money did come to Lents, in the 1970s, it was for Interstate 205 -- a wall that split the neighborhood. Planners had moved the project east after wealthier neighborhoods closer to downtown balked.

Recent efforts to change that history, by Portland City Hall and the city's urban renewal agency, have taken shape slowly. That shift comes as the city's housing crisis pushes homebuyers' hunt for affordable homes farther and farther east. Lents now has more than 20,000 residents, according to U.S. Census data from 2010.

Lents has long had higher crime than in other neighborhoods, city statistics show. But Robert Schultz, the public safety chair of the Lents Neighborhood Association, contends crime has increased over the past eight months. He said he's spent hours on the phone listening to neighbors' fears and complaints.

Some elderly neighbors are too afraid to come outside, he said, and children aren't safe to roam and play.

A toddler this summer stepped on a needle in Lents Park, he said.

As conditions along the trail grew more perilous this year, some of the campers themselves moved deeper into the neighborhood to take refuge.

Several people living in makeshift camps along streets in Lents this week said they had left the trail in search of safer, more visible places to sleep.

"A woman alone is just not safe," a 61-year-old woman, Jana, said on a recent morning as she curled up on a mattress in a vacant lot near Southeast Powell Boulevard. She said she wouldn't return to the trail.

"Don't want to be robbed," she said. "Don't want to be raped."

But even though most homeless residents say they're merely seeking safer places to exist, neighbors say they have been unfairly burdened by issues that have flared around certain campsites.

"There's not a single person I know who's not affected by crime," Young said.

The city has failed Lents at every turn, Schultz said: Failed to talk with neighbors, address their concerns and hear their suggestions. Failed to find solutions for homeless people with no place to go.

Schultz said neighbors are not insensitive to the plight of the homeless. But they feel Lents has been ignored more than wealthier neighborhoods. And many people in Lents live paycheck-to-paycheck.

"When you put the homeless on us, we don't have the ability to bounce back from that easily," he said.

The result, he said, is increased anxiety in a neighborhood where residents are already struggling to get by.

"The most disadvantaged -- the homeless -- are pitted against the next most disadvantaged," he said.

***

At a neighborhood meeting Tuesday night, more than 100 residents lined up for seats. Outside the community room where they gather, they pulled out their cellphones and scrolled through pictures of drug paraphernalia, knives and heaps of garbage.

Inside, a staffer for Hales stood before the crowd during a sometimes-tense discussion that stretched on for three hours.

Homeowners and homeless people alike shared their frustrations with each other, the police, the city, the lack of solutions.

Again and again, neighbors asked about equity. Why wasn't the city showing Lents the same urgency that it showed Laurelhurst, where police swept homeless campers from a park on Tuesday? Residents in Laurelhurst say they'd counted more campers in the park since the Springwater sweep was announced, spurring more complaints about garbage and disorder.

What has happened in Lents, they contended, wouldn't happen in wealthier neighborhoods. Even with plans a city-sanctioned site near the Beggars Tick Wildlife Refuge lagging, some Lents neighbors said they were ready to protest the effort.

"When are we going to be treated equally?" Erik Benson shouted at the staffer from the back of the room. "I want your answer."

Chad Stover, from the mayor's office, said equity should be a part of every public policy conversation. His office, he said, has been working daily and experimenting broadly to find fixes to problems.

His answers at times drew incredulous laughs from the crowd, or loud outbursts of disagreement. Over and over, he told neighbors he heard them.

"It's very real," he said. "And I'm dealing with it everyday. It's not a joke to me."

Before the meeting, Schultz considered what the coming weeks might bring -- after the Springwater is cleared.

"I fear very deeply that you're going to see more acts of violence," he said. "That's what I see in the horizon, if we don't have any thing in the works here."

Jana, the woman staying on a mattress in a lot near Southeast Powell Boulevard, also predicted more campers would make their way into the neighborhood.

"They're going to flock here," she said.

Stover, the mayor's staffer, hearing the fatigue and impatience in neighbors' voices Tuesday night, interjected at one point. Solutions, he acknowledged, weren't happening fast enough.

"This is a crisis, folks," he said. "An emergency."

This story has been updated with a clarification: Specific plans for a sanctioned campsite near the Beggars Tick Wildlife Refuge have yet to take shape, but the city has not officially said the project won't happen.

-- Emily E. Smith

503-294-4032; @emilyesmith