Opinion: Our city prepared for the Championships by pushing the impoverished out of sight and putting Eugene on a trajectory that serves elite interests.
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The world has come to town
But what it saw was not Eugene. The 2022 World Athletics Championships brought over 200 countries, 50,000 daily visitors and prominent government officials. The city they witnessed was a quaint Oregon town — Tracktown, USA, if you will — of bike lanes and vegan breakfast cafes.
Our guests did not see the city with the second highest number of chronically homeless individuals and the highest number of homeless families in the United States. The city where you have to work 1.5 full time jobs to afford rent. The city whose police use more force during arrests than 68% of all departments, the city where the life expectancy is 13 years shorter on one side, nor the city where 68 people have died on the streets in the last two years.
Those systemic issues were swept away with the cruel policies that our city and police have been employing for years; however, the rate of violence increased to make things presentable.
Thus, in a twisted sense, the Eugene the world saw was the “real” Eugene — mechanisms of state oppression that script forced displacement to allow development which ignores the struggles of the working and exploited classes.
Don’t get me wrong, it was certainly neat to see the World Athletics Championships’ first time in the United States. I mean no offense to the athletes; they did a great job running in circles. Rather, the event’s inclusion in Eugene only exacerbated our community’s problems by hiding them, making any progressive reforms more unlikely. It prompts the city to expedite construction of areas that act as exclusion zones segregating the population along class lines, forcing complicity to the brutal structures that drive development.
I’m not promoting an isolationist Eugene that is unfriendly to visitors. No, the Eugene I want has vast public resources and commons available to all, understanding it is post-scarcity and the only obstacle is distribution. I am opposing a socioeconomic model that prioritizes the development of high-end luxury infrastructure and draconian enforcement, which caters to the out-of-town rather than the actual people of Eugene that live and work in this city.
Nike’s Phil Knight may have brought the championships to Eugene through a sketchy private bidding deal, but his blood money did not host it. The working class — the real people of Eugene — did.
The $40 million Oregon paid for the event could’ve actually addressed the material problems that burden our community, instead we got a sporting event which causes our houseless neighbors increased harm.
The visibility of the problem is the problem
Eugene joins the prestigious halls of other worldly cities who’ve sanitized national images upon hosting sporting events. Just as the Brazilian government prepared for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro by pushing out all homeless from tourist areas, according to Reuters at the time.
Kelly McIver, the communications manager for Eugene’s Unhoused Response, was adamant that there is no linkage between removals of encampments and Oregon22.
“Never at any time was Oregon22 part of our planning,” McIver said. “There is no support for activist’s claims other than conjecture.”
McIver did confirm that there was an increase in enforcement starting March of this year — three months before the Championships — but he is right: there is no way to conclusively prove correlation between the city’s unhoused response and a want to sanitize Eugene’s image. But that’s a burden of proof I don’t need to meet because it does not matter what motivated the sweeps. The actions the city took were identical to those it would take if the desired outcome was making the unhoused invisible.
It is a distinction without a difference.
The city’s strategy of addressing the houseless crisis is obfuscation; moving those already living in precarity to the physical fringes. An approach orchestrated by the city council, the Eugene Police Department and Parks and Open Spaces, created a cycle of cruelty that only increased in anticipation for Oregon22. Rending the houseless unseen manifests in three ways: sweeps of encampments, relocation to city-sanctioned camps and establishment of exclusion zones.
Sweeping is the act of physically clearing an encampment, usually for the justification of cleaning the site. The sweep of Washington Jefferson Park, the largest recent camp, was carried out on March 16, 2022. The 78 campsites moved with many belongings left behind and trashed — leaving the former residents on the streets with even less.
Anya Dobrowolski, a member of Stop the Sweeps Eugene, spoke to me about why the Washington Jefferson sweep was different.
“The day before the city fenced off WJ so no one could go in and help,” Dobrowolski said. “It was very dystopian, like a refugee camp.”
Chance McCartney, an unhoused person who has been swept 22 times in two months and been banned by the city from all Eugene parks, recounts how the demeanor around sweeps has changed.
“In this last year, they’ve gone from allowing you some time to grab necessaries to straight up ‘Get out of your camp and start moving,’” McCartney said. “They don’t even hand you a property tag anymore for your stuff.”
The neglect of procedure and lack of compassion defines the city’s responses to unhoused encampments. EPD or Parks and Open Spaces are supposed to give 72 hours eviction notice, but this is rarely the case, especially because many have outstanding warrants or citations simply for the crime of being unhoused.
“EPD will come and say, ‘Move right now without the 72 hours notice or I’ll arrest you,’” Dobrowolski said. “They get 15 minutes to pack their lives up.”
I reached out to EPD via email about the usage of warrants to which they relayed that “if it [a site] gets posted to be cleaned, the property can be seized without a warrant.” Moreover, EPD does not need a warrant if the tenant fails to assert their fourth amendment right to protection from search or seizure.
However, McCartney has observed eviction notices postings either mere hours before a sweep or even after a sweep has been completed. Furthermore, only giving the unhoused their constitutional rights if they remember to assert it while their lives are being upended is cruel and exploitative.
She has also seen firsthand the tactics EPD uses to coerce people into moving.
“The cops will buy people cigarettes and beer now,” McCartney said. “It's been slowly gaining in implementation for the past 12 months as a physiological manipulation tool.”
Whether or not these tactics are disjointed and confusing on purpose does not matter. All departments of the city are siloed so as to not take accountability, according to local advocate Sam Yergler.
“Everyone loves to pass the buck,” Yergler said. “You can’t get them in the same room; it really shows they don’t care.”
The city doesn’t care that sweeps are dangerous; camps were still swept against CDC COVID-19 guidelines in 2020 and during the heatwaves in 2021. Scattering people to the wind so a park under a freeway looks nicer causes bodily harm and stops advocates from being able to deliver aid and supplies.
A few weeks after Washington Jefferson, an unprecedented early morning weekend sweep of an RV encampment occurred in West Eugene.
Thirty people died while houseless in 2020 in Eugene and 38 in 2021. While it is impossible to prove if a sweep contributed to these deaths, these people could still be alive if our city enacted policies that actually helped this population.
How many will we sacrifice on the streets the next time we want to fill Hayward Field?
The camps
The Safe Sleep Sites were constructed in 2021 by the city to provide “safe and lawful places for people to sleep.” However, it's clear that visibility was a motivator. Almost all of the Safe Sleep Sites are located in West Eugene, as far as possible from Hayward Field or anywhere people would visit during their stay. Further, these sites only provide one meal a day and disallow cooking, as reported by Double Sided Media.
At time of writing all Safe Sleep Sites are at capacity with waitlists hundreds long. So the city’s response is also legally dubious, as under the 2019 Martin v. Boise ruling, homeless persons cannot be punished in absence of alternatives.
While non-residents are not allowed into the sites, according to McIver, it is clear from the outside that these sites function like open-air prisons: there are daily bed checks and 24/7 camera surveillance.
“These sites might have looked more humane, but they provide the most limited resources,” Dobrowolski said. “They’re taking away people's dignity and autonomy.”
Dobrowolski, Yergler and McCartney all independently and unprompted used the term “concentration camps” to describe the Safe Sleep Sites.
The sites have been extended at least until 2024, with more locations on the way. These systems of relocation display a paradigm of banal brutality, of uncaring bureaucrats using the police to inflict undue harm. Regardless of your personal grievances and experiences with those lacking a house, understand that this treatment is a humanitarian crisis, especially in a city that has so much money for sports. The funding of city developments like the Riverfront Park may look nice, but like UO’s campus, it will only serve as another exclusion zone for the unhoused — even if it's marketed as a “welcoming place for all people.”
My problem is not that the city has band-aid resources — of which I can’t say with certainty are better or worse than the streets — rather it’s the lack the will to do what is required to break us out of this cycle.
You are significantly closer to being houseless than you are being anything beyond middle class. Have solidarity with your neighbors; advocate for progressive housing policies and stop being complicit in the brutal tactics of our state.
Not for us
The rhetorical argument that brought the World Athletics Championships to Eugene was that it would be good for the community and local businesses; it would put the city on the proverbial map. However, these claims need to be seriously interrogated.
Zondie Zinke, a former Eugene mayoral candidate, spoke to me about the city’s priorities.
“It's egregious that $40 million of public funding went for this non-priority to the people,” Zinke said. “A sparkling athletic event does something for real estate owners, but nothing for the common people.”
If a business gets more customers, those profits go solely to the owner; the workers still get paid the same wage. But this discussion is moot because, as was reported by Eugene Weekly, restaurants flopped during Oregon22, with some eateries losing thousands of dollars.
The investment in tourism and sports instead of tangible local problems with real material care is vile. The Eugene Chamber of Commerce conducted a report on homelessness of 150 stakeholders in 2021, finding that the prevailing desire is to shift from managing the crisis to actually solving it.
This is more frustrating because the solutions are known; invest in healthcare and mental health services, not $15 million for cops. Fund affordable housing, not $20 million tax breaks for riverfront development.
The best way to reduce houselessness, crime and the need for mental health responses is to ensure that everyone has access to adequate housing, a well-paying job and healthcare. Reactionary forces — like law enforcement — will never solve anything; a proactive, progressive change is needed.
A progressive overhaul would not be some radical transition, but a shift in values. The current order of things makes value judgments every day by failing to respond to suffering it is aware of — allowing 68 deaths was a value judgment.
The only way to reverse course is with grassroots mobilization of the average working people of Eugene, housed and unhoused. Only then can we understand that we are not a small town anymore, and a better world is possible. One that can be built by our hands in our backyards for our interests, so the next time the world comes to visit we don’t have to hide who we are.