City council eyes rules for homeless camps

PORTLAND, Ore. – It's an idea floating around Portland's city hall: rules for what happens in Portland's tent encampments.

Though it's technically illegal to set up camp within Portland city limits, it still happens. Even Portland police look the other way – unless there's a complaint or the group gets too big.

"Camping is not allowed," said Portland Commissioner Nick Fish, "but it is tolerated in our community."

So, the idea floating around city hall is this: set some strict rules to better control what happens in these growing tent cities.

"We don't have the police to patrol and arrest everybody who's camping and move them along," Fish said. "And from a humanitarian point of view, when you have almost 2,000 people sleeping outside we have to maybe reconsider our policy and say what's in our best interest."

Their story
For Portland residents such as Howard Web and Lyndon Small, "home" is a few tarps under an Interstate 405 overpass. "We stay here because we're not a nuisance downtown," Web said. "We're not panhandling; we don't need all that."

They join others from throughout the city, like those camping near Southeast Water Avenue and Ankeny Street, who are trying to live by the rules while still having a place to lay their head.

"We have permission from the owner here, and we're not on the sidewalk," Small said.

Under city hall's new plan, they may soon be allowed to pitch a tent in other spots around Portland without getting hassled.

With not enough shelters, and an anti-camping law being challenged in court, Commissioner Fish said Portland needs to better manage health, safety and sanitation concerns. So, without getting rid of the law, Fish wants to give police better guidelines for enforcing it. 

Possible rules
The idea is to allow camping starting at 9 p.m. in certain areas. Each camp would be limited to four tents and eight people, with one "camp site" per block.

"We would not be opening up the city to camping; that's not a good idea," Fish said. "We would not be encouraging mass camping in any particular place. We would not be saying it's OK to camp downtown or in parks. What we would be looking for is some creative options."

The camps would also be required to be quiet, clean and completely gone by 7 a.m. the next morning. That's a rule Web and Small said does not solve the real problem.

"Where do you go at 7 a.m.? Nowhere," said Web. "We have nowhere to go."

As for Small, "in the bad weather like we've had it's a lot nicer to be able to crawl under something without getting soaked."

Camping also would be allowed in cars, but limited to two people.

The other part of this plan would be to let churches host a limited number of campers. That idea will be presented to Portland's city council first, likely within the next few weeks.