Aaron Burbank had wanted to get out of rain and dropping temperatures for weeks. But his partner was reluctant.

While Tiffany Heick’s walker makes getting around muddy campsites more difficult, she also doesn’t like being confined in a shelter.

Ieiasha Bolian, who leads the new city-county Navigation Team, had been talking with them for two weeks and knew their story. So when Heick agreed to leave their tent complex along the bike path at Southeast 92nd Avenue and Flavel Street, Bolian recognized it was a big moment.

“It’s just hard out here to live out here,” Burbank said.

Bolian has been doing outreach work for years, but has only recently started seeing this kind of change of heart happen more frequently. It’s why she believes in a new approach to homeless camp clean-ups: Spending time to create relationships, trust and finding out what people really need.

Far from city services downtown, that stretch of Southeast Portland has one of the largest groups of homeless campers in the city. As such, it also attracts attention from people who live in houses nearby and complain of trash, needles and the regular parade of people looking for a place to stay.

Crews clean the area, but often campers are back within days and crews must return to post warnings for follow-up cleanings. The churn has done little to assuage the concerns of neighbors who regularly file complaints to the city’s One Point of Contact system. The process has also done little to discourage people from camping under the bridges, in the gulleys and along the bike-pedestrian paths that make up this pocket of land where Johnson Creek, Springwater Corridor, MAX and bus lines all intersect.

This spring, a new team launched with the task of making a dent in these high-traffic, high-risk areas. The team of community health workers from Central City Concern and outreach and housing specialists from Transition Projects comb the campsites along the most entrenched corridors to talk to every person who lives there and offer water, a warm place to sleep for the night or -- at best -- a permanent home.

The team is supposed to be the best of all solutions – a concerted effort to connect people with services before crews come along and disrupt their lives and belongings. Once the team finishes and an area has been cleared out, the city installs fencing to keep people from camping there in the future. It’s a combination of the carrot and a stick to relieve what officials say is a drain on resources.

It will likely take time to see whether people who request and receive services through the team return to the street, but officials say they’ve found success so far with dozens of people sent to shelters and more than 100 signed up for housing waitlists. Even more have been provided with identification cards, and were signed up for insurance or other immediate needs.

Officials attribute the gains to consistency. Heick said she was last in housing about three years ago and had been interested in getting on the waitlists she’d been hearing about. She’d occasionally been approached by outreach workers while she camped, but rarely. And when she did, she said she’d never heard from them again.

So when the navigation team said they could call a cab for a ride to the shelter and could help the couple fill out the waitlist form, Heick was happy to take the 15 minutes while rain pelted the top of her tent.

“I haven’t known who to talk to about that,” Heick said.

The hardest camps to clean

The navigation team has worked at more than six sites since it began at the beginning of the year.

Some are long hauls like the 92nd and Flavel area, where the team was able to visit five days a week for several weeks and provide a range of services before the area was cleared. Other sites are more short-term: They had to bring in additional workers to help clear an Oregon Department of Transportation property in only two weeks.

All mitigation of camping in the city is controversial, with many advocates saying that while outreach for services is fine, the goal to clear areas at the end is the problem. The new approach runs into some of the same problems: Navigation team members found some people who were displaced from the transportation department’s property farther south down Interstate 205 when they started work on that site.

Each week, the team gathers around a conference table at the Joint Office of Homeless Services to look at maps of where they’re working. They discuss how many interactions they had and how they went. They talk about campers by name, especially when they have been at one site for a few weeks.

And they discuss how long it might take to accomplish their goal. For 92nd and Flavel, they were skeptical at the beginning of October the area would be able to be cordoned off any time soon: Too many people were there and they were camped out in hard-to-find spots.

Clean-up locations are based on a rubric of need determined by the city’s One Point of Contact complaint system. Whenever someone files a complaint about a tent or RV, the Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program sends out a crew to evaluate.

Crews score sites based on whether there are signs of needles used for drugs on the ground, if trash or tarps take up several yards worth of ground and other factors. Some complaints are dismissed if the campsite is orderly and low-key.

But some rank so high on the scale – and so often -- that they’re nearly always in the process of being cleaned or prepared for cleaning.

Two years ago, the mayor’s office allocated money for a team that would work those areas to make it possible to close them off. So far, the employees and services offered have cost about $415,000.

Instead of evicting campers and then erecting fencing to keep people out -- as many private landowners do -- the navigation team would help move campers elsewhere, ideally somewhere with less impact. Then they’d put up barriers so they can’t return.

“I believe in using a ‘whatever it takes’ approach to help people, and this program builds on our work bringing services directly to people in need, instead of making them come to us,” said Mayor Ted Wheeler. “By focusing this team on high-impact campsites where they can engage on a near-daily basis, we can help break the cycle of homelessness for people who are camping as well as end the cycle of cleanups that come with that camping.”

A strategy that works

The navigation team is similar to a strategy used in Seattle and San Francisco.

There, the teams work more closely with law enforcement, or police do the work themselves. People camping in those cities are directed to shelters or a center that provides a bed and services.

In Portland, the team is independent of police, though its members work closely with the Portland Police Bureau.

The bureau’s neighborhood response teams and city park rangers point the outreach workers to where campers are located and give background about past interactions. From there, the five-member team canvasses the area for a week, introducing themselves and getting to know where people camp and who they are.

They can deploy a mobile hygiene unit – a trailer with two toilets, eight lockers and a box for used syringes. At 92nd and Flavel, it’s well used, but the navigation team members try to make sure it doesn’t attract people to camp beside it.

As they build rapport, they do vulnerability assessments -- a log of what someone’s needs and barriers are. They use the information to place people on housing waitlists. The team can also help people obtain birth certificates, identification cards or employment assistance.

The community health workers can also sign anyone up for the Oregon Health Plan and greatly reduce the time it takes for someone to go from the street to a local detox center -- from a couple weeks to sometimes the next day.

The amount of time it takes between when someone says they want help to when they get it matters, said Dave O’Neil, a team member from Central City Concern. Especially when they could pack up and move to another campsite in that period.

When he started with the team, he expected it would take a lot of time to cajole people into a recovery program. But after at least 11 people agreed to go to the Hooper Detox Stabilization Center in North Portland from two different camp sites, he’s glad he can eliminate that lag time when they are ready to go that day.

Establishing trust

The bulk of what the team can offer, though, is a way out of the rain that night.

Huddled under an umbrella to use her phone, Transition Projects’ outreach program manager Daphne Nesbitt said that as weather has worsened, more people accept a shelter spot. However, she said, they might not have opted for that if they didn’t recognize and trust the navigation team crew.

“A lot of the folks who are chronically homeless and out here have been let down in the past,” Nesbitt said.

That emphasis on proving themselves to campers, rather than the other way around, has earned institutional support.

“When you’ve lost your home and are forced to survive outside, it can take a lot to trust someone again,” said Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury. “Our outreach teams go out day after day to bridge that gap by treating people with dignity and connecting them to healthcare and safety.”

Transition Projects is the largest shelter operator in the city and can find beds for people who are working with the navigation team more quickly than if they went on their own.

Most people go to the new River District Navigation Center, which opened near the Broadway Bridge in August. The 100-bed shelter, which was built to be a temporary stop for people who also need more than a place to sleep that night, accepts three people a day from the navigation team.

So on this October day, Burbank and Heick were the only ones who got a spot for that night.

Another man approached the navigation team along the Interstate 205 multi-use path. He was told there was a backlog and he’d have to wait until morning for a spot. But he filled out the intake forms anyway.

He was cold. He was wet. He told them he was ready for shelter. But he also knew he wouldn’t make it downtown on his own, even if they gave him a bus pass. So Casey Culley, one of the team members, made plans to meet him near his campsite the next day to take public transportation to the center.

“That’s all he needed was a little push, and that’s the way to do it,” Culley said. “To me, it’s about our connecting and consistency. People can feel that.”

‘That’s why we’re here’

Larry Finley was evicted from his apartment that he shared with a roommate about six months ago.

He is 63 and doesn’t want to spend winter outside, but he can’t afford a place with his disability payments alone. He also doesn’t want to keep getting moved by city crews or police from his campsite, which he said takes all day for him to set up and then half of another to recover.

When he heard Culley’s voice as he talked through the wall of a neighboring tent, Finley stuck his head out and asked if there was an update on a shelter or permanent housing for him.

Finley has a small black and grey poodle-chihuahua mix named Buddy that makes it a little harder to find housing. But even though Culley tells him “no,” Finley believes Culley when he says he will keep checking back. “It’s going to be at the top of my radar,” Culley said.

“I don’t know if people tell you this, but we appreciate you being out here,” Finley said, standing in the doorway of his tent with Buddy at his feet.

Findley thinks a lot of money is spent on homeless services in the city without much payoff for people on the street. But, he says, he’s been touched that the navigation team shows up every day.

“That’s why we’re out here,” Culley said.

-- Molly Harbarger

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

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