The day after four people living at a homeless encampment in Salem died because an alleged drunk driver crashed his car into their tent community early Sunday, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler says his emergency initiative to reduce traffic-related homeless deaths is progressing.
Wheeler called the Salem incident a “horrible tragedy.”
In early February, Wheeler issued a state of emergency to allow the city to more easily remove tents from busy roadsides and other places the city deemed dangerous for campers to live. This order came in response to a rise in fatal pedestrian crashes among people experiencing homelessness.
“It’s clearly demonstrably dangerous for people to be camped in high crash corridors and that’s the reason why we decided to put the emergency declaration in place,” Wheeler said.
Between Feb. 1 and March 19, just five encampments near freeways or high crash corridors that didn’t already meet the threshold for removal were swept. Since the emergency declaration was issued more than 50 encampments near freeways or high crash corridors have been removed.
Employees in Wheeler’s office could not say Monday how many more encampments near roadways they plan to sweep under the order. Wheeler said everyone who was swept was offered a shelter bed but he did not know if additional services or a route to permanent housing was also offered.
Advocates for people experiencing homelessness worry that the order will simply cause continued shuffling of homeless individuals from one public space to another. With each move, unsheltered individuals become harder for case workers or other advocates to reach, they say.
Wheeler said it is too early to tell if the emergency order has saved lives. The annual look-back at homeless death data will need to be compared to prior years’, he said. But Wheeler is hoping for two markers of success.
“The number of homeless people killed by errant automobiles would go down and secondarily we would see the disproportionate number of homeless individuals who are killed in traffic-related encounters decline,” he said. “Those would be two measurements that we report to the public on a regular basis. I would expect to see both of those numbers declining.”
Nicole Hayden reports on homelessness for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She can be reached at nhayden@oregonian.com or on Twitter @Nicole_A_Hayden.
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