PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland is preparing to debut its first Safe Rest Village specifically serving homeless people who live in RVs and trailers. City and Multnomah County officials held a pre-opening tour of the site on Monday afternoon.
The Sunderland RV Safe Park is part of the Safe Rest Village program, but while the other five planned villages will provide residents with tiny homes to serve as transitional housing, the Sunderland site aims to be an outdoor shelter for homeless residents who live in their own vehicles.
"The easiest part of this project is finding the dirt," said Bob Lloyd, the Portland are coordinator for the Salvation Army. "The complex part is talking about all of the issues on pulling, dragging, and towing RV units onto the site and how you’re going to deal with complex issues that come with substandard RVs."
The site is operated by The Salvation Army and Multnomah County's Joint Office of Homeless Services.
"The Sunderland site has been ready since November and I am relieved the good people at The Salvation Army and Multnomah County have signed the contract! Soon Portlanders suffering from chronic homelessness living in RV’s can improve their lives in this innovative safe park setting," Commissioner Dan Ryan said in a statement.
The site is funded in part by $1 million from the state and federal grant funds from the American Rescue Plan.
At Monday's early look, officials said the site would open "in the next couple of weeks" with people moving in in July.
The village is located off of Northeast Sunderland Avenue to the west of Portland International Airport, an area that is already home to large numbers of homeless residents living in RVs and trailers lined up along Northeast 33rd Avenue.
Dan Field, Joint Office of Homeless Services Director, said outreach workers will first look to move people who are living in campers just a street over.
"We’re going to start with folks on Northeast 33rd and move forward to the rest of the county from there," Field said.
It will have room for 55 vehicles, and residents will have access to case manager and on-site mental and behavioral health services just like at the other Safe Rest Village sites.
People who are homeless and live in RVs and cars will not be allowed to show up and move in. Instead, Ryan said the city of Portland's homeless outreach workers will refer people who are a good fit for the Safe RV Park.
"Increasingly we have better information about who is willing and ready to receive services and move forward in life, so that’s a part of the criteria," Ryan said. "In this case obviously there’s many RVs nearby and that will be filtered into the criteria."
The site has had a long road to become operational. As Ryan noted, it's been move-in ready for months, but the county and the Salvation Army were still working out the specifics about the budget and operational rules in order to hammer out a contract.
The six Safe Rest Villages were all originally planned to be open by the end of 2021, but the actual rollout has been far slower than that timeline — the first of them didn't open until June 2022, and some of the five tiny home sites still have not opened.
The Safe Rest Villages are separate from the more recently announced Temporary Alternative Shelter Sites, a planned series of six large-scale sanctioned campsites that Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler announced earlier this year.
The mass campsites are similarly intended to provide homeless residents with safe areas and access to services, but they may or may not include shelter pods, and they're intended to house more people per site.