The new site, known as Sunderland Yard, is only temporary, and the campers may well not find it so appealing in few weeks, when the city's leaf collection resumes. Officially, the residents of the tent village will be allowed to stay for 60 days, while the city explores other locations for a more permanent site.

In some cities, the very idea of negotiating with the homeless and accommodating their settlements would seem counterproductive. Public sympathy for homeless people might have been scant. And as officials elsewhere have sometimes learned, the more welcoming a city is, particularly if it is a desirable place to live, the more homeless people migrate there.

In Portland, the tent city has attracted a fair amount of support, and with few officials wishing to appear unsympathetic or unwilling to compromise, there has been reluctance to shut the tent city entirely.

Last week, the City Council voted 4 to 1 to negotiate with the homeless on a one-year project that would allow the tent city to continue at a still undetermined site as long as the encampment demonstrated that it could ''meet the needs of homeless people and help them move to more appropriate housing.''

That move, while not directly sanctioning a permanent homeless campground, could pave the way for a resident-run tent city to remain in place. While other cities have informally tolerated encampments of the homeless and have even sanctioned temporary tent cities, Portland could be setting the stage for sanctioning a permanent arrangement.

''We begin something very different in Portland today,'' the mayor, Vera Katz, said. ''It's a risk that all of us are taking.''

Dignity Village consists mainly of homeless single men, though a few women and couples live in the tents. Most speak of being down on their luck or unable to find or keep a job, and some are ''trying to move away from crime or drugs or prostitution,'' said Mr. Mubarak, 45, who has emerged as a spokesman for the group, often conducting business from a used office chair outside his tent. Mr. Mubarak said he had been homeless for 11 years, living here and in Chicago; Gary, Ind.; Nashville; Atlanta; Billings, Mont.; Iowa; and Oklahoma.