Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler plans to ban homeless camping along the city’s common walking routes to schools, according to a draft copy of his emergency order.
The draft, obtained Thursday by The Oregonian/OregonLive, declares that children traveling to and from schools are a vulnerable population potentially endangered by trash, biohazards or restricted rights of way that can accompany tents and makeshift dwellings.
The order prohibits encampments along the extensive network of residential and commercial streets already identified as common walking routes to school by the city’s transportation bureau.
More specifically, said Dylan Rivera, spokesman for the transportation agency, “They are streets that are most likely to have the most students walking on them to access a school, the streets where community members said they want to see more investment in transportation safety and streets where the community and the bureau’s technical analysis agreed more investment is warranted.”
Citywide, 111 private and public elementary, K-8 and middle schools have numerous streets within a half-mile to mile radius of their campus designated as official “primary investment routes.”
Wheeler’s order would dramatically expand his monthslong emergency ban on homeless camping near dangerous roadways, which he issued in February. It comes less than two weeks before the beginning of the school year.
The mayor expects to sign the expanded camping ban Friday, according to multiple City Hall sources briefed on the plan. His staff began circulating copies of the draft order to City Council offices earlier this week.
Reached by phone Thursday, Cody Bowman, a Wheeler spokesman, declined to comment.
Limiting the locations of homeless encampments remains a longstanding goal of the mayor and is supported by most business leaders and some residents.
Yet most of the city’s thousands of campers remain on the streets, only with fewer places they are allowed to go.
Advocates for the homeless, as well as some living on the streets, have expressed dismay and alarm with the mayor’s position, which they say often criminalizes the city’s most vulnerable residents and further traumatizes many of them.
The city’s actions to date have primarily resulted in Portlanders without homes shifting their tents, RVs and other DIY outdoor dwellings from one place in the city to another, sometimes returning to the spots they were forced to vacate within days.
Despite offers to refer some of those booted from their encampments to county-run shelters, only a small portion of them accept, according to advocates and weekly figures released by the city.
Wheeler’s draft emergency order instructs city staff tasked with sweeping homeless encampments to prioritize those that are located along the designated walking routes to schools, within 150 feet of a school building and along major roadways deemed physically dangerous to campers.
While the order prohibits camping in these areas, there remains no clear indication of how city officials plan to enforce those bans.
Under Portland’s city charter, an emergency declaration grants expansive powers to a mayor and allows them to bend or suspend city policy and largely sidestep opposition by other members of the City Council.
While such declarations sunset after two weeks, they can be renewed indefinitely.
-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh; 503-294-7632
Email at skavanaugh@oregonian.com
Follow on Twitter @shanedkavanaugh
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