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Portlanders have contacted city officials through the city’s online complaint portal at least 78 times this year about homeless camps and trash at encampments within a 1,000-foot radius of the Southeast Portland location of Burgerville that abruptly closed last week and cited crime and squalor as the reasons.
The city doesn’t know without sifting through each of the online complaints if Burgerville submitted any of the 78.
But the Portland Office of Management and Finance, which oversees the city’s sweeps team, says it received no direct communications from the Vancouver, Wash.-based fast food chain before it announced Aug. 3 that it was closing the location due to increased crime and vandalism in the Lents neighborhood.
The restaurant’s towering sign now reads “Temporarily closed” and all the lights are off. A fence surrounds the building.
A spokesperson for Burgerville, who declined to give their name, told WW by email last week: “The environment around the restaurant has deteriorated seriously. Police are now being called daily. Burgerville employees have found weapons, drug paraphernalia, and human waste on the property.”
The restaurant’s closure marks the second time this year that private interests have declared that unhoused campers made an area of the city too dangerous to continue operating. In June, a women’s professional golf tournament departed a Northeast Portland country club for West Linn, with tournament organizers saying nearby homeless camps had made the club unsafe. (The Oregonian later reported that city officials had swept camps around Columbia Edgewater Country Club before the tournament fled town.)
A homeless camp consisting of about 15 tents sits adjacent to Burgerville’s parking lot at the intersection of Southeast Powell Boulevard and 92nd Avenue. Residents of that camp tell WW they fear Burgerville closed the restaurant in order to motivate the city to sweep their tents.
The camp is separated from the Burgerville parking lot by a 7-foot fence that residents of the camp say was installed only a few months ago. Its grassy lot sits beside the restaurant, a walking and biking path, and an overpass of Interstate 205.
Jade Williams has been a resident of the camp for the past three months. He moved here after he was swept from 79th and Powell, he says.
“Other than how this camp looks, we’re not at all disruptive,” says Williams, who concedes there’s drug use at the camp—but that users have attempted to be respectful about it and not do it out in the open. “I’ve been here for three months, and I haven’t seen a thing.”
Williams fears Burgerville closed in order to put pressure on the city to sweep the camp.
“When you’re homeless, everyone is kind of lumped into one as a group that needs to be feared,” Williams says. “We’re just trying to survive.”
Burgerville officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
Williams says Burgerville employees showed up for their shifts that morning, bewildered to find the restaurant had closed.
The Burgerville Workers Union also says it was “completely blindsided” by the company’s decision to close the restaurant. When asked if employees had received prior notice that the location was closing, the company told WW it had given employees notice: “Burgerville always alerts employees of company news before releasing information to the press. Today was no different.”
Williams and another homeless man who lives a few blocks away, John Hood, says security guards hired by Burgerville would stare at campers through the fence, and that the manager at Kingpins, a nearby bowling alley, would often come take pictures of the campers.
Jesse Richardson, an employee at the Portland Open Bible Community Pantry, a food pantry that’s run out of a church that sits across Powell Boulevard, tells WW that the camp has been growing over the past few months, but that the pantry hasn’t had any issues with increased crime or vandalism.
He says Portland Open Bible Church was repeatedly burglarized before it opened the food pantry because people were breaking in to steal food.
“So we thought, ‘Let’s start a food pantry,’” Richardson says. “I’m not sure what went into Burgerville’s decision, but I thought to myself, the area is experiencing something difficult, but there is a way to deal with it. Instead of closing the church, we opened a food pantry.”
A manager at Kingpins, an arcade and bowling center adjacent to the camp, declined to comment, and said he was waiting “to see what the state is going to do.”
As WW visited the camp and spoke with residents, a security guard walked along one side of the camp. When asked who he was with, he said Kingpins.
The Portland Police Bureau has not responded to WW’s request for a list of calls from that address in the past year. But OMF, the city office that runs homeless camp sweeps, says it received 78 reports since Jan. 1 about camps within 1,000 feet of the Burgerville property.
A spokesperson for the office tells WW that campsites on this corner are on the city’s radar for removal or cleanup. “This area is currently on our list of high-priority sites,” the spokesperson says.
The spokesperson added that “areas near Southeast 92nd and Powell were among the first sites we posted when we began posting notices for camp removals earlier this year” and that Rapid Response Bioclean, the city’s contractor that performs trash cleanups and sweeps, last removed garbage from the site on July 2.