A North Portland Park Is Now Clogged With Logs

The city of Portland has made some drastic changes in the past month to a neighborhood park.

Crews drove in a backhoe, tearing up the soil underneath a wooded hillside. And they laid a blanket of logs across an open space visible from highly trafficked Greeley Avenue, just south of the Adidas campus in North Portland.

Reif Larsen, a certified landscape architect who lives up the street, was outraged. He says the city’s apparent effort to kick out unhoused campers is killing Madrona Park’s namesake trees.

“I’ve never seen such a brazen demolition of an urban forest with no plan for reconstruction or restoration,” Larsen says. “Whatever the solution to the camping issues may be, I do not know, but this cannot be the standard, or else we will have no urban forest left.”

In a statement, a city spokesman offered a vastly different assessment of the changes’ impacts, saying Portland Parks & Recreation was trying “to restore the site’s ecology.”

“The logs have been placed as an ecological measure to help return the site to a natural state. Some soil in the areas that were previously compacted has been scarified using equipment,” Mark Alejos wrote.

The logs were moved to the site from elsewhere in the city to stop vehicles from entering the woods, he explained. And they’re not going away. “The hope is that this coming winter we can plant native vegetation and over time the logs will decompose, adding valuable nutrients to the now compacted soil,” he said.

What isn’t in that statement, though it’s implied, is an explicit mention of the campsites the logs replaced. Campers were cleared out of the park March 24. A spokesman for City Commissioner Mingus Mapps offered a constituent a different justification.

“The logs appear, in this case, to be a low cost/impact alternative to placing boulders or jersey barriers, and the bureau stands by that as a temporary measure to deter camping in this area,” Jackson Pahl wrote in an email forwarded to WW by environmental activist Joe Rowe.

Larsen remains unconvinced. He notes that the city has previously used far less invasive techniques to address the impacts of camping. The city has long partnered with Adidas to pick up litter and remove invasive plants.

In 2020, a city employee, David Grandfield, told the Overlook Neighborhood Association the parks bureau planned to plant 500 oak saplings in areas impacted by campers. “It’s a long-term vision stretching over decades,” Grandfield said at the time.