City homeless agencies weather historic storm

Unprecedented demand for food and shelter mostly met

By peter korn

The Portland Tribune, Jan 8, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTO

An Old Town Salvation Army-run shelter for women victims of domestic violence was one of many that had to turn people away during two weeks of winter storms. But city officials opened enough emergency shelters to provide beds for all who wanted them.

It could have been so much worse.

With Portland residents complaining about buses and trains that didn’t run frequently enough, and streets that weren’t plowed and sanded, city officials and nonprofit agencies that help the homeless say collectively they came through two weeks of winter storms with a new sense of just how much they can accomplish in an emergency.

Mostly, they say, Portland relief agencies and citizens responded heroically to emergency conditions. From emergency shelters opening on little more than a few hours notice – and staying open as long as two weeks – to mid-storm citizen drop-offs of blankets and jackets, help for the homeless was unprecedented.

And all that despite the fact that a week before the first storm hit, the city did not have an emergency shelter plan in place.

“We never had a two-week period where we had this much need,“ says city Commissioner Nick Fish, who took over the city’s Bureau of Housing and Community Development when he became commissioner in June 2008.

On many winter nights, more than 500 homeless people are turned away from Portland’s overflowing shelters. Yet during the storms, beds were found for all who wanted them, and only one Portland resident was believed to have died as a direct result of being outside during the storms – a homeless man found dead of exposure at Lone Fir Cemetery in Southeast Portland.

“The ultimate test of how successful we were was how successfully we saved lives. We saved dozens of lives through the storms. I have never been prouder of a community,” Fish says.

A number of administrators at nonprofits echoed Fish.

“It wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly more than we’ve been able to do in the past,” says Marc Jolin, executive director of JOIN, a Southeast Portland nonprofit that helps the homeless. Jolin says that as far as he can tell, every homeless person who wanted to get inside had a place to go.

Still, not everybody believes the city did all it could to help the homeless.

James Sloan, Portland metro coordinator for the Salvation Army, says in the early days of the storm, especially, there was more chaos than coordination. And Sloan says his agency knew that would be the case.

“The city made a valiant effort,” Sloan says. “But the problem with the city is, they address things when a crisis is upon us. We asked them to look at this a number of months ago. It’s no surprise that it gets cold in the middle of December. There was really nothing addressing this until there was a crisis, and that was very sad,” Sloan says.

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