Portland and Seattle: Different approaches to a shared homeless crisis

Portland is just down the road from Seattle and shares quite a few quirky traits, but that’s not all the two towns have in common. Portland is also dealing with its own homeless crisis.

“Homelessness is a huge problem here and it’s growing just as I’m sure it is in Seattle,” Portland-based reporter Pat Dooris told Seattle’s Morning News.

But unlike Seattle, the City of Roses has embraced some out-of-the-box thinking to get some homeless individuals out-of-town.

“Frankly, it’s not as crazy as it sounds,” Dooris said.

Related: Seattle has cleared out 179 homeless encampments

Dooris explains that Portland has enacted a program that will provide bus tickets, and even plane tickets out of town for qualifying homeless individuals. What qualifies a person for a ticket? Basically, the city’s housing bureau will verify they actually have a place to go with housing before sending them off.

“Their argument is that there are some people that have come here hoping to find work and accommodations and they are stuck now,” Dooris said. “So if they have relatives or friends in other states that are willing to take them and house them, and they verify that, then the city is willing to give that person a bus ticket, or even a plane ticket to get there.”

The notion echoes one argument made locally by King County Councilmember Kathy Lambert. She has promoted that area officials find out where homeless people are actually from, if not locally, and find them a way to get there.

In Portland, homelessness has become widespread as it has in Seattle and a range of other West Coast cities. So the city has not only tried the novel bus-ticket tactic to remedy it. There are other ideas at work.

“The mayor recently made a rule that homeless folks can now camp out on our sidewalks, overnight, in tents,” Dooris said. “So we are starting to see them in parts of our city we have not seen them in before.”

“The argument I’ve heard is that we have way more people than we have housing,” he said. “So instead of having somebody shivering and freezing underneath an overpass, if you let them put up a tent, at least they’ve got a little bit more protection from the elements.”

Unlike camping, however, with rules such as pack-it-in, pack-it-out, Portland is dealing with another issue that Seattleites are familiar with.

“The idea is that you clean up the tent and the mess in the morning &#8212 that does not always happen,” Dooris said.

“There is quite a bit of conflict building between the business community and the mayor’s office because of the impact, and with the tourist season coming, we are watching closely,” he said. “The police are saying they are going to be doing more sweeps and breaking up some of the big camps. They did one a couple weeks ago. But we have not seen a lot of consistency on that yet.”

For now, it seems that Portland, and its West Coast counterparts are waiting to see if anything they do can remedy the homeless crisis.

“It is a thorny problem that a lot of smart people with good hearts are trying to solve, but so far it’s not been solved,” Dooris said.