Homelessness in Portland, part 3: The Road Warriors

At this juncture, I want to point out that my comments are not intended to be authoritative or exhaustive on the nature of homelessness in Portland. Rather, they’re an accumulation of observations and information gathered by a longtime downtown resident.

I’ve had close-up views of people on the streets for decades now, but that doesn’t mean I understand everything about their situation or their origins, let alone their motivations. I merely offer my remarks as an addition to the general public discussion.

We have come to the group that causes much more of the problems on the street that we attribute to “the homeless” than some of the actual homeless people I described here last week.

And I would argue that this group should not be classified as “homeless.”

Category 4: Road Warriors / Vagrants

A type of street person that has become prominent in recent years are folks the police and social service workers refer to as “road warriors.” These individuals tend to be young -- teens and early twenties -- but some are older.

They travel up and down the West Coast with their gear, following the good weather from city to city (and possibly dodging fines, citations, and potential or actual stopovers in jail). They may be in couples; they may have a pack and bedroll, and a dog. So you are more likely to see them in Portland during the summer and fall, when the weather is its best, and you encounter them far less often during the rest of the year. Unlike some of the folks in the preceding categories I’ve described, I’ve never recognized any of them from one year to the next.

Carole and I learned a bit about “road warriors” during meetings of the Public Safety Committee of the Portland Downtown Neighborhood Association when we lived in that area. According to the government and nonprofit professionals who deal with them on a regular basis, many have either run away from home as minors, or aged out of the foster care system.

Longtime, difficult backgrounds

These street people may have come from households plagued by substance abuse, or physical and sexual abuse; or they simply became conditioned by their upbringing never to depend on adults or to believe they could settle in any one place for long. Teenaged or twenty-something refugees from foster care may be legal adults (or not), but they have few or no job skills, spotty schooling, and no further social infrastructure, either in the form of family ties or nonprofit and government support, once they’ve grown too old for foster care.

Social workers say these young folks don’t trust any authority figures, whether law enforcement or counselors, and their sense of “long-range planning” extends no further than 24 to 48 hours. It’s all but impossible to get them into a shelter or deliver other forms of counseling and care, partly because of that basic distrust of everyone, and partly because they refuse to abide by even the lightest house rules (e.g., no alcohol or drugs, and too often, no animals).

Not polite, not grateful

Other than they’re here and gone rather than recognizable year round, what distinguishes the behavior of members of this group from the first three types I’ve described is that they’re often aggressive panhandlers, and they want only money. Sometimes they’ll reject social agency food coupons. They’ll throw fresh food you’ve given them in the gutter. (Apparently, beggars CAN be choosers.) The money you hand them might go for food, but it might just as easily purchase cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs.

I’ve personally witnessed a young traveler let her dog drop a load of solid waste on the lawn of the South Park Blocks in front of the Portland Art Museum without picking it up, and another do the same in the middle of the intersection of SW 6th and Washington. I’ve seen several males pee on the exterior walls of buildings downtown and in the Pearl, and solid waste that might have been canine or just as possibly human on the sidewalk outside the front door of our former downtown apartment.

The dogs are mostly calm and well-behaved because, unlike the ones that bark anxiously from behind the doors in our apartment complex as we walk down the hall (because their humans have abandoned them for hours on end), they are constantly with their “pack” of humans. However, road warrior canines may have been stolen, or handed from person to person, and they may be prone to sudden outbursts of violence.

Collateral damage

In the fall of 2014, a pit bull in the company of a 16-year-old girl on the Portland Streetcar attacked another rider’s Pomeranian and killed it. Blood sprayed across the floor, and other riders who tried to intervene got bitten.

The aggressor turned out to be microchipped, reported stolen out of Colorado three months prior, and had a history of not getting along with other dogs before it was adopted out of a shelter in Longmont, Colorado, two years before the incident in Portland. Initially, the owner in Colorado wanted her dog returned, but local humane society officials deemed it a threat to the community, so the owner relinquished her rights and the dog was euthanized here in Portland.

How the pit bull came into the possession of a teenager on the streets of Portland more than 1,200 miles away from its home will never be known. The “minor in possession” -- whom local officials located in the company of a 47-year-old man, another bad sign -- was banned from mass transit in Portland for 90 days but not cited by the police because the attack “violated no state laws or city codes,” according to a story in the Oregonian.

Two summers ago, residents of the apartment and condo buildings along the North Park Blocks in The Pearl reported street people openly engaging in sexual intercourse on the grass. Carole and I were crossing one of the bridges east over Interstate 405 (probably SW Taylor) into downtown some years ago when I observed a man masturbating on the open ground between SW 13th and the freeway below. Fortunately, I managed to keep my wife talking to me and facing away from the sight so she never became aware of it.

The biggest difference from other street people

Unlike the quiet and polite folks of the first three categories I’ve discussed, these people of the streets may react violently toward one another, and toward the public. Last week the Portland Police Bureau’s Twitter account reported a typical incident: a stabbing under the Burnside Bridge. Some folks specifically prey on the other, less aggressive street people.

When Carole and I were trained to become members of the Friends of South Park Blocks volunteer group several years back, parks rangers and police officers warned us never to touch a sleeping person on the street, because many are armed with a knife for self-protection and may lash out swiftly if they’re disturbed.

So why not “homeless”?

I would not term many of the members of this category homeless because, though they evidently lack a permanent address, they also don’t seem to desire one. They avoid the shelters and free meals furnished by social service agencies because, the manager and volunteers report, they don’t care to abide by the barest house rules of behavior and mutual respect.

They may reject some forms of help, such as fresh food or coupons, because they insist on getting only the kind of support they want -- and that’s cold, hard cash.

So don’t call them homeless. “Homeless” implies the person is looking to settle, that he or she craves a home ultimately, and that doesn’t appear to be the case with many of these individuals. Call them street people, transients, or the term that city ordinances historically employed for undesirables on the streets: vagrants.

NEXT: Why are all these people in Portland?


Go to part 1: Homelessness in Portland - the traditional and temporary homeless

Go to part 2: Homelessness in Portland - the professionals