PORTLAND, Ore. — The downtown Portland homeless camp was so well known, it even had its own informal name: The Pit.
The makeshift neighborhood for homeless people was planted between Northwest Naito Parkway and 1st Avenue in Portland's Old Town neighborhood, with the Steel Bridge on-ramps wrapped around it.
Portland camp removal crews, along with a bio hazard team, began clearing dozens of tents and debris from the site on Monday. City outreach workers moved 19 of the people camping there into the mass-sanctioned campsite in Southeast Portland. However, not everyone got the chance for an orderly move-out.
“I was camped over there myself, all my stuff got taken. I wasn't even there,” said Colt, who’s been homeless on and off for years. Boulders now sit where he once slept in the Old Town camp.
“They said they put up warnings, they put signs. Nah, they didn't put up no warnings or anything. Nah, not at all,” he said.
At least two warning signs dated Oct. 4 were visible when a KGW crew visited the site on Thursday.
“They finally got their eviction notice, thank God! I thought it was never gonna happen,” said Aaliyah Mays, who lives in a nearby condo. She’s reported the camp to the city for two and a half years.
“Hundreds and hundreds of emails…we are finally getting our neighborhood back,” she said.
Neighbors have struggled in the past to get the camp removed or to keep it from re-forming, and Mays said that even though this week's activity is a welcome sign, nearby residents still fear that it's just a matter of time before the camp reestablishes itself.
“It would be naïve of anybody to trust a system that has failed you so many times in the past,” she said.
But there are signs that the current effort could be different. Armed security guards — like Brandon Schandler — now patrol the area.
“To enforce the state trespassing, so where the signs are posted, that's the area where I’m enforcing,” he said when asked what his role would be. Schandler said if someone tries to set up camp, he tells them to leave. If they don't, he files a report and calls someone from the city.
“Then they would have a response unit come down here to help remove the individual if they were being defiant and not following the request to leave,” he said.
Portland is slated to begin enforcing its daytime ban on camping sometime this fall. KGW has been told the city plans to give the community a two-week heads up, but the new type of enforcement in The Pit, with security guards directly stopping people from setting up camp, already marks a departure from the types of homeless enforcement that have happened in Portland thus far.
KGW was told that the security guards are also making sure people don't set up camp under the Steel Bridge itself. Crews are still working to repair it after homeless campers caused a fire under one of the onramps back in March.
It was not immediately clear who hired the security guards, since multiple stakeholders are responsible for the land. Multnomah County, the Oregon Department of Transportation, and the city of Portland all told KGW that they did not hire the security and they don't know who did.
“I mean, the city is doing in my opinion the best that they can, it's just a very large problem,” Schandler said.
One block away from where Schandler was patrolling, Mike D shuffled his belongings into a black trash bag on Thursday. He camped in The Pit on and off for a year, and said he recently moved to a nearby street near Blanchet House, only to be told by Rapid Response this week to move again.
“This is about my seventh time moving in the last three or four weeks,” he said.