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As Portland Mayor Keith Wilson approaches his goal of opening 1,500 new overnight shelter beds by Dec. 1 and as the city is set to resume enforcement of its camping ban on Saturday, Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson is offering candid thoughts about the city’s rapid expansion of beds, roughly half of which have lain empty in recent weeks.
Vega Pederson tells WW that she “admires Mayor Wilson’s ambition,” but that “we may not need to bring on all of what he envisioned by December if it’s not safely and effectively serving people.”
The chair said she wants to work with Wilson to “troubleshoot how to fill these vacant beds before opening more overnight shelters—actions we should take when there are signs that something isn’t working right.”
The county has historically been responsible for providing shelter beds, but Wilson in his first year as mayor has raced to open 1,500 new city beds by Dec. 1—a strategy leaving many officials wondering what Wilson’s next step will be once he meets that number, which some observers have said appears to be an arbitrary one.
Wilson tells WW that nightly occupancy at his new shelters (which have added about 810 additional beds this year to the shelter system) jumped this week to 73% as the weather turned chillier, and defended his rapid push to open beds. In a biting response, Wilson took aim at Vega Pederson’s statement provided to WW.
“Our homelessness response system must not maintain full shelters for some while allowing others to die unsheltered,” Wilson said. “I recognize that Multnomah County faces difficult funding choices, as does the city of Portland and I would urge the county to not let individuals suffer and die unsheltered in Portland.”
On Saturday, the city will resume enforcement of its ban on public camping, Wilson said in a Thursday press release. Since the inception of his mayoral campaign, Wilson has always made it clear that enforcement is a later-stage pillar of his plan to end unsheltered homelessness. But by his own telling, he needed an adequate number of shelter beds in order to cite someone for camping without running afoul of Oregon law, which requires that reasonable shelter be available before someone can be criminalized for camping.
Despite resumed enforcement, Wilson says, Portlanders should “not expect a sharp increase in the number of citations over the weekend or in the coming weeks” because “with the city continuing to add shelter capacity and resources, outreach teams and enforcement staff can now offer shelter and supportive services before issuing citations.”
This logic, though, assumes that people will agree to accept a shelter bed in lieu of a camping citation. As has been extensively documented, some people living on the streets are reluctant to move into shelter—and, in particular, congregate shelters, which constitute nearly all of Wilson’s new shelter beds.
