PORTLAND, Ore. — Boiling water fresh off a campfire burned Toni Hunter’s hands as she washed dishes outside her tent Monday morning. She’s one of the residents living in a large, often ignored homeless encampment in Old Town known as “the pit.”
Under the Steel bridge, nestled between train tracks and behind city and county transportation headquarters, the homeless camp acts as a refuge for people like Hunter, who’s escaping domestic violence.
“Honestly right here is peaceful, there’s not too much drama down here,” she said of her tent site on the corner of Northwest Glisan Street and 1st Avenue.
Outreach workers from Transition Projects have targeted this camp for the past two weeks, aiming to help people like Hunter as part of a county-led program called Housing Multnomah Now.
Housing Multnomah Now
Multnomah County chair Jessica Vega Pederson announced the project in February 2023, with the goal of housing 300 people in 12 months.
“It's steep, but I do think it is achievable,” said project manager William Kasting.
Kasting was at the pit Monday, helping homeless people submit housing applications and connecting them with other resources such as working cell phones.
“The meat and potatoes of this process is developing that relationship identifying their barriers to housing and then working through those barriers,” he explained.
“It’s actually amazing,” said Hunter, who’s counting down the days until her housing application hopefully gets approved. “[My case manager] told me she’d come out tomorrow to talk to me to let me know.”
“All it takes is a few good people to help lift you up,” added a man who’s known on the streets as Nine. He just got into housing last week through the program after living in the pit for years.
“I love Portland because they love me … If they didn’t really like want to help you or if it was a thing only for people from Portland then I would have never been saved,” he said.
Daytime camping ban
The ramped-up outreach work comes at a time when the city of Portland is cracking down on rules around homeless camping. A ban on daytime camping starts to go into effect next week, and some of the people living in the pit see the outreach as their saving grace.
“It’s perfect. It’s right on time,” said Nine.
But impending start of the camping ban has outreach workers at Transition Projects worried and bracing for the approaching impact.
“Our concern with the daytime camping ban is that we will lose track of a lot of the individuals we’ve worked so hard to find,” said Kasting.
They’ve reached out to 140 homeless people in the pit so far, but they’re only submitting housing applications for 14 of them.
“It’s so few because it takes a lot of people to actually house and work with individuals,” said Kasting.
When asked if they realistically have enough staff to house 300 people in 12 months, Kasting reiterated that the program is currently a pilot project.
But growing pains aside, it’s a project that’s changing the morale at the encampment by giving people hope one tent at a time.
“If you uplift each other all the time, then I feel like we can bring back Portland the way it used to be,” said Nine.
Outreach will continue in Old Town until June 30. Transition Projects is still figuring out what part of Portland they’ll target next.