Abstract
This paper analyzes the City of Portland, Oregon's recent zoning code amendment which legalized sanctioned homeless encampments. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Portland, the paper details how the City Government's long-held opposition to homeless camping shifted to a position of acceptance. The paper identifies the state of emergency (SOE) on housing and homelessness as a critical moment for developing not only a legal foundation, but also a social justification, for legalizing encampments as an official shelter strategy. In contrast to research over the past few decades articulating the camp as the realization of punitive sovereign power, the paper suggests the relationality of emergency governance, or “governing-through-emergency,” instead provides an opportunity to legitimate the lived experiences and desires of unhoused people residing in sanctioned encampments. It concludes by warning that, although emergency governance serves as a critical tool to advance the interests of the unhoused, such governing strategies are limited by structural forces producing homelessness more broadly.
Introduction
On April 28, 2021 the City Council of Portland, Oregon unanimously approved a seemingly ordinary amendment to its zoning code. It was an everyday legislative action. But the amendment was anything but quotidian municipal decision making. By passing Ordinance No. 190381, the Council ended a decades-long struggle by Portland's houseless communities to legally operate sanctioned houseless encampments on public and private properties. 1 No other U.S. city has established legal protections enabling this type of alternative shelter to proliferate.
This paper examines how and why Ordinance 190381, an ordinance which legitimates what I refer to as the “Portland encampment model” (PEM), came to be. Engaging a growing literature that examines self-organized and sanctioned houseless encampments with a much larger scholarship on governance of “the camp,” the paper illustrates how Portland's declaration of a state of emergency (hereafter SOE) on housing and houselessness was a crucial step toward developing a legal infrastructure through which to accommodate encampments as legal urban land uses. In particular, the paper details the historically uneven application of the city's houseless camping policies and ordinances to illustrate how the legitimization of the PEM likely would not have happened without an emergency governance period. It details how the City's previous hostility toward self-organized encampments eased through suspensions of land-use ordinances during the SOE, a unique attribute of governing through emergency.
The paper begins by conceptualizing how “the camp” has been examined in studies of emergency governance. Much work has drawn from the concept of “exceptionality” within this scholarship to explain how sovereign entities govern political and social exclusions specifically through the production and maintenance of encampments. To this scholarship, I connect a smaller literature on emergency governance which focuses less on how sovereigns produce states of exception and more so on how governance itself is re-shaped and achieved through emergencies. I use this framing to detail how self-organized houseless encampments, and later tiny house villages in Portland, emerged as legitimate land uses during the city's SOE, illustrating how governing through emergency enabled the City to formalize the PEM. In analyzing the City's vacillating approach to camping ordinances, I discuss what the decision to legalize sanctioned houseless camping reveals about the capacity of emergency governance as a governing tool to make difficult land-use decisions.
I conclude by arguing that the SOE was not simply a legal tool suspending normal governance procedures in order to amend a decades-long, anti-camping ordinance. Rather, Portland's SOE experiment with loosened camping restrictions was a means of morally justifying houseless encampments into the city's service provisioning landscape. The result of the amendment illustrates the powerful capacities of municipal governments to utilize emergency governance as a means of imminently providing shelter options for those needing them. I end with a note of caution, however, arguing that emergency governance is less likely to mitigate issues of houselessness or affordable housing as much as it is a means of advancing contested causes which, prior to the state of emergency, show less obvious pathways toward their legal implementation.
The paper draws from two primary sources of data. First, I turn to ethnographic fieldwork in Portland, Oregon conducted in 2017–2018. During this period, I interviewed 28 residents of four self-managed encampments, observed weekly meetings with three of the encampments, and volunteered with two encampments throughout the year. I interviewed four local government staff members (City of Portland; the City/County collaboration, Joint Office of Homeless Services; and Clackamas County) who work directly with encampments and thus who shape government decision-making on encampments. And I interviewed 12 homeowners neighboring the four encampments, homeowners in opposition and in support of encampments. For the purposes of this paper, the interviews I draw from are primarily those with government staff and homeowners, as the point of emphasis for this paper is less about the operations and resident experiences of encampments and more so concerned with how municipal governing strategies were affected by land-use ordinances enabling or prohibiting sanctioned encampments to operate. 2 Although interviews with encampment residents and observations of the encampments themselves are less prominent herein, these insights nevertheless shape how I understand the development of the PEM.
To supplement interviews, I also analyzed local news media reports detailing the history of camping ordinances and officials’ responses to their changes from 1980 to 2022; government records explaining the specific changes to land uses; as well as Portland City Council meetings concerning the implementation of municipal land-use ordinances prior to, and especially during, the City's 2015 SOE declaration. I focus primarily on the Portland SOE period (2015–2021), as this was the critical set of years in which the PEM was being developed and enacted. Before turning to the case of Portland, I position the role of “the camp” within the literature on emergency governance.
Conceptualizing Encampments: Emerging from the Exceptional
Over the last two decades, many scholars have conceptualized the role of “the camp” within political life. No work has been more influential on the camp than that of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The camp, for Agamben, is both figurative and a literal place. Camps host displaced individuals and represent spaces where citizenship and human rights-protections are absent. For Agamben (1998, 168–9), camps are created through “temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger,” placing camp sites outside of the juridical order. As sites where resident rights are disregarded, camp residents are effectively resigned to mere biological existence, or “bare life” (Agamben 1998, 8). From this perspective, the camp represents the very tension between “anomie and nomos,” or life and law.
As sites remaindering people outside, and from the protection of, the law, Agamben notes a paradox of camp spaces; camps also include rights-less individuals within law, given government ability to exclude them from its protections. For Agamben, then, the production of the camp illustrates the extension of state sovereignty to except individuals and groups outside of legal and political norms while simultaneously controlling their biological existence, or what he calls the “state of exception.” The “state of exception is not a special kind of law… rather, insofar as it is a suspension of the juridical order itself, it defines law's threshold or limit” (2005, 4). Given the regularity through which states produce such spaces, Agamben (2005, 2) argues the state of exception has come to be “the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics.” As a representation of this sovereignty, the camp functions as a political-normative site through which issues of state power are realized.
Analyses of the camp as spaces representing a state of exception have been widely shared (Nair 2022). Scholars particularly of refugee camps have drawn from Agamben's bare life thesis to rightly highlight how political rights restrictions deprive camp residents of fundamental political and social protections (Diken 2004; Ramadan 2009; Hanafi and Long 2010; Agier 2011). The state of exception and bare life theses have been used to frame studies of migrants as well as political prisoners in spaces of detention, in sites in Southern Eastern Asia (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2004) and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (Gregory 2006), along with sites of “informal” camp dwellers in urban Zimbabwe (Kamete 2017). Such studies help point to how different types of camps enabling bare life are produced and maintained through the political-economic geographies in which these spaces are situated.
The political-philosophical analysis of camps as spaces maintaining bare life and representing the state of exception is powerful at a certain analytical level. To the extent that the camp as a state of exception signals how “the normative aspect of law can … be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that … still claims to be applying the law,” (Agamben 2005, 87), the camp offers a useful heuristic which illustrates the capacity of state power to maintain such extra-legal spaces while they still fully remain within the juridical grasp of the state.
At another level of analysis, however, one that is trained more closely on the internal relations of the camp, Agamben's notion of the camp as a state of exception is less pertinent. Many note how the concept reduces the agency of individuals living within encampments by overlooking the social and political relations producing these spaces as sites of life and resistance, where claims to rights and political membership indeed are not eradicated but persist, as spaces of potential (Gregory 2006; Husymans 2008; Sigona 2015; Tuastad 2017). For this reason, some suggest we ought to re-center our analysis of camp spaces as “exceptional.” For instance, Sigona (2015, 6) argues camp studies ought to examine the “materiality” of the camp's production through the social relations of camp membership, or what he calls “campzenship.” Doing so can give life to the rendering of camps as spaces of exception by elevating the lived experiences of camp residents as spaces of the political.
Despite rather prolific analyses of the camp within studies of refugees and migration, few scholars examining houselessness in the Global North have analyzed encampments through the state of exception lens (for a re-interpretation, see Hansson and Mitchell 2018). And perhaps for a good reason. As Speer (2018, 163) notes, the situation of most U.S. houseless encampments do share in Agamben's depiction of the camp, in that “they embody the underlying condition of placelessness that camps have historically sought to regulate.” Speer's study of large-scale, state-run encampments indeed shows how such camps are akin to “tent wards,” or “quasi carceral spaces that govern homeless mobility” (p. 160). At the same time, Speer recognizes that most U.S. houseless encampments hosting residents who lack traditional housing are not “legally understood as internally displaced,” an experience more common for refugees residing in government-run camps. Underlying much of this scholarship is the notion that encampment residents are not legally displaced from stable and affordable housing as much as they are economically displaced from the stability of shelter.
To correlate the experiences of refugees and political detainees held in camps throughout the world with those of self-managed and tiny-house villages like those located in Portland, would be problematic. The geographic, cultural, and socio-economic contexts of camps hosting the legally displaced and those without rights are rather distinct compared to organized encampments hosting economically displaced people in the U.S. The two have distinct origins and are affected by very different forces of government power which share little in common with each other. Yet, certain analytical insights deriving from studies of camps as spaces of exceptionality can help to inform how municipalities in the Global North govern the rise of sanctioned houseless encampments. In particular, expanding the concept of emergency governance beyond the notion of an immutable state of exception, to one geared more toward analyzing how governance itself is capable of being re-shaped, helps frame the relationship between municipal governments and their response to houselessness emergencies.
Little scholarship has addressed how organized encampments are facilitated or legitimized by emergency governance. This is not to say that houseless encampment scholarship has not addressed the role of municipal governments in managing sanctioned encampments. Herring (2014), for instance, notes how local governments in a range of U.S. west coast cities tolerate encampments as a means of dealing with the unhoused by excluding them from public spaces. Encampments can reduce fiscal responsibility of municipal governments for providing emergency shelter spaces while also appearing to address the spatial management of houselessness. Within this sort of public-facing tradeoff, encampments host those excluded from public spaces, but they also effectively marginalize the unhoused as sites of seclusion (Herring 2014, 288). In this way, encampments function simultaneously as “tools and targets in the management of marginality” for governments (Herring 2014, 303). At the same time, municipal governments are beginning to recognize that some encampments serve as spaces of hospitality that many unhoused people welcome, as they foster a stronger sense of dignity and agency for their residents (Sparks 2017; Przybylinski 2021a, 2022). Herring and Lutz (2015, 695) speak to this dualism, noting that even though “encampments function as complementary strategies to exclusionary policing for the local state that partially relieve the fiscal and legitimation crisis of criminalization, they simultaneously serve as preferred safe grounds for homeless campers from the heavily policed zones of exclusion.” Scholarship on U.S. houselessness thus articulates organized and sanctioned encampments not as being exceptional, in the sense that they are spaces of bare life (though see Feldman 2004). Instead, encampments are contingently produced through government-encampment relations and struggles.
If this is the case—that self-organized and sanctioned encampments are preferred spaces enhancing residents’ dignity and autonomy, while at the same time they are also necessarily dependent on the authorization of local government to function—the proliferation of sanctioned encampments demands new attention. The constraints lifted on government capacities throughout the COVID-19 pandemic accentuates exactly the uneven, yet expeditious, nature of emergency governance policies aimed at better supporting the unhoused population (McGuirk et al. 2021). In particular, what seems crucial to examine is how organized encampments are supported, if not promoted, by the very capacity of municipal governments to suspend the law, whereby encampments are excepted from legal ordinances which would otherwise prohibit them. This offers further insight into how emergency governance reshapes norms around land-use ordinances beyond periods of emergency.
Unlike top-down, state-run “tent wards,” self-organized encampments and tiny house villages cannot be considered rights-less spaces of bare life. They are life-sustaining emergency stopgaps intended to facilitate access to stable housing for their residents, thereby helping to diminish the criminalization of unhoused peoples’ need to exist somewhere in space. Here, the state of exception concept does not adequately account for the relations between the local state and organized encampments. Instead, I suggest what better connects the state of exception's analysis of government exceptionality, with one more attuned to municipal governments’ reaction to housing crises, is found in the closely related concept of the “state of emergency.”
While the state of exception has become a common frame for analyzing how and why state sovereignty produces “the camp,” exceptionality does not exhaust analytical approaches to examining encampments. Adey, Anderson, and Graham (2015, 4) argue that “as much as the ‘exception’ may have proliferated in analysis, it has proliferated as analysis,” co-existing with, if not dominating, other assessments of governing emergencies. They note that emergencies have been and can be examined differently than through the lens of exceptionality. To declare a SOE is to claim “that action is necessary immediately in order to meet the event that becomes the exception” (Anderson 2017, 469, emphasis added). In other words, declaring a SOE indicates that current “crisis” situations should be imminently addressed by government, not excepted from political action, to attempt to prevent that emergency from reoccurring.
In general, a SOE is an official response to some immanent harm by which a sovereign suspends normal governing procedures to urgently address a given issue. The “emergency” refers to an event or situation of limited but unknown duration in which some form of harm or damage is in the midst of emerging (Anderson and Adey 2012). A SOE can respond to effects of “natural” disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, etc., as well as to social issues. Yet, it is worth reiterating that emergencies themselves are not “unpredictable exceptions to an otherwise stable life” (Adey, Anderson, and Graham 2015, 5). An emergency declaration on houselessness suggests that harm was not already immanent for many people living without housing in the period leading up to an official emergency declaration.
To examine how emergency governance is reshaped in response to a housing and houselessness crisis can help to explain how formal government may mitigate or reinforce very predictable experiences of short and long term houselessness. As such, it is important to consider how “emergencies may be problems for government,” as much as they are means “through which government is assembled and achieved” (Adey, Anderson, and Graham 2015, 9). More so than the state of exception, the SOE supports an analysis of emergency governance as a mutable and shifting set of power relations. And this can be seen in Portland, where organized houseless encampments have emerged as unexceptional and legitimate land uses even when their effect on mitigating houselessness remains all but certain.
Governing Through Land-Use Ordinances: Portland's Approach to Homeless Camping
Recent national attention toward land-use ordinances both restricting and allowing for houseless camping reflects the challenge long faced by urban governments to consider how to respond to unsheltered houselessness. In many U.S. west coast cities where unsheltered houseless populations have been increasing, municipal governments have tried a range of approaches to manage unsheltered houselessness (absent permanent supportive housing). One recently used approach has been to declare SOE to draw attention to the complexities of houselessness at local and state scales. For instance, Los Angeles, Seattle, and the State of Hawaii declared SOEs in 2015; San Francisco followed suit in 2016 with a citywide emergency (NAEH 2016), and again in 2021 applicable specifically for the Tenderloin district (City of San Francisco 2021). Housing and or shelter emergencies were also declared by the cities of Eugene, OR, as well as San Jose and Oakland, CA in 2015. And so too did Portland, Oregon declare a SOE on housing and houselessness on October 7, 2015, an emergency period extended multiple times since then.
Although sometimes merely rhetorical, in effect, SOEs can and do provide more options for governments to manage and hopefully mitigate houselessness quicker. At its onset in 2015, Portland's SOE declaration was premised upon two primary goals. One was to bring new rounds of financial investments into housing and houseless services. For example, the City expanded rental assistance, eviction prevention, housing placement support, and the construction of new affordable housing as well as emergency shelter bed capacity (NLIHC 2015). The second goal focused on institutional reform, particularly with an understanding that speeding up service provisioning helps to bypass time-intensive bureaucratic processes. For example, the City eased zoning and building regulations to site emergency shelters and encampments as well as to repurpose vacant City-owned buildings (NLIHC 2015).
In Portland, the effect of using the more targeted approach of SOE funding to mitigate housing instability has been prolific, connecting unhoused people with a range of services that were previously unavailable, especially funding for permanent housing. 3 Equally as important to the number of individuals who have become more stably housed during the SOE is the effect of emergency initiatives on those yet to become housing stable. As such, the SOE must also be understood for how it uniquely shaped the decision-making surrounding houseless camping throughout the city. Significantly, throughout the SOE, the City temporarily eased zoning criteria, allowing for permitted encampments to establish themselves and navigate the permitting system with the city government. The emergency period provided time and space to experiment with formalizing self-managed encampments, breaking from the City's decades-long punitive approach toward denying and sweeping relatively organized encampments. This shift in approach, toward rejecting self-organized and sanctioned encampments to legalizing them, came through the suspension of land-use ordinances which normally deny such camping. To detail this shift, the paper turns to the relatively recent history of the City's anti-camping ordinances to illustrate the path toward acceptance, and eventual formalization, of the PEM.
Camping Ordinances Prior to the State of Emergency
People have been living without access to shelter or housing in Portland for a long time. Although no systematic count of the houseless population in Portland was made until the late 1990s, historians of the city indicate there were earlier periods when houselessness was prevalent. Like many U.S. cities during the 1930s, “Hooverville” encampments were present in Portland's Sullivan's Gulch neighborhood, for example, while seasonal workers living without stable housing were present in downtown's Old Town neighborhood as far back as the first few decades of the 20th century (Abbott 2001, 113). It was not until the 1980s, when a country-wide uptick in unsheltered houselessness, affected Portland as well. With the increase in unsheltered houselessness, the rise of camping and organized encampments became far more commonplace than they had been before.
In response to the increased visibility of houselessness in the city, Portland's Government passed its first “unlawful camping” ordinance in June 1981. 4 The ordinance prohibited temporary campsites on public property or on public rights-of-way. Portland's City Code defined camping as “any bedding, sleeping bag or other sleeping matter, or any stove or fire … whether or not such place incorporates the use of any tent, lean-to, shack or any other structure or any vehicle or part thereof” (Slovic 2016). The 1981 ordinance was not challenged in the courts until 2000, when the Multnomah County Circuit Court arbitrated a case concerning two unhoused men who were cited for sleeping in public. 5 The Circuit Court judge argued the City's camping ban was unconstitutional on the grounds that it restricted individuals’ freedom to move or stay in place and that it punished houseless people for their status of being houseless. Despite the ruling, the City did not change its practices. “‘This is just one decision of one judge,’ former City Attorney Jim Van Dyke, then a deputy city attorney, told the Oregonian at the time. ‘We've had other decisions of other judges upholding that ordinance,’” he responded (VanderHart 2014). Thus, while the judge's decision provided support to overturn the City's anti-camping policy, the City Government nonetheless continued to find ways to enforce the ban through other policies. 6
Despite the apparent ineffectiveness of the Multnomah County Circuit Court decision on the City's actions, the decision nonetheless generated a wave of optimism among activists and advocates, helping to re-imagine what more accommodating land-use policies could look like regarding collective living for unhoused people. Shortly after the ruling, for instance, Portland activist Jack Tafari wrote an op-ed piece in the City's houseless newspaper Street Roots entitled “We Need a Tent City.” Tafari called for Portland—its bureaucrats, unhoused people and their advocates—to consider creating a sanctioned tent city. Tafari explained that a sanctioned campsite would allow houseless people a safer place to sleep and to leave their things, protection from the elements, as well as an alternative to the “sanctimony” encountered in the City's missions (Tafari 2000). As far as the City Government was concerned, however, camping was still illegal. And it continued to take no real action on camping assistance. Within a few months of his written plea for a tent city, Tafari led a campaign called “Out of the Doorways.” The campaign convened a small group of houseless individuals who were residing in tents on public property at the time. Through civil disobedience, the group camping in various spaces around downtown persisted through a cycle of police sweeps, decrying the very conditions that the Multnomah County Circuit Court had recently opined was unconstitutional.
Out of that initial group of protestors arose an unhoused collective called “Camp Dignity.” For nearly a year, Camp Dignity continued to camp in opposition to Portland's City Code while negotiating with the City to find a sanctioned place for a tent-city to operate. In 2001, the two parties came to an agreement, which permitted Camp Dignity the use of a City-owned property far outside of the center city near the city's international airport. It was at this site that the group was refashioned into the now well-known “Dignity Village,” North America's longest running self-managed houseless encampment.
The newly sanctioned Dignity Village was not intended to be permanent, at least from the City's perspective. In February 2004, after several failed attempts at relocating Dignity Village, the City passed Resolution No. 36200. The resolution defined Dignity Village as a “designated campground,” a designation that was allowed under state land-use regulations, Oregon Revised Statute (ORS 446.265). This state statute allows for each Oregon municipality to establish campgrounds “to be used for providing transitional housing accommodations” which were expressly meant for “persons who lack permanent shelter and cannot be placed in other low-income housing” (Oregon Laws 2017). The City resolution secured the legal means by which Dignity Village could operate and the encampment has remained operating at this same site ever since.
Although Dignity Village succeeded in securing a legal permit, unsanctioned camping remained otherwise illegal throughout Portland. The City's anti-camping ordinance was still in effect and would not be challenged for another seven years after the Dignity permit. It was then, in a landmark case for the City and anti-houselessness advocates, that the constitutionality of the City's camping ban was considered in the U.S. District Court of Oregon. In the Anderson v. City of Portland (2011) complaint, a class of unhoused people sought redress from the City of Portland, arguing that the City's anti-camping ordinances criminalized the status of houselessness in violation of the Eighth Amendment, because of how it punished them for sleeping in a public place even though they had no lawful place to sleep. 7 The plaintiffs made the additional claim that the ordinances were being enforced selectively, that is, only against houseless people. The District Court, however, found that the City's camping ordinance was not unconstitutional per the Eight Amendment, nor that it was applied unequally for all houseless people in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Once again, the City's anti-camping ordinance was challenged and found not to be legally consequential to the plight of unhoused Portlanders.
The District Court's decision did nonetheless generate some actionable responses from the City Government. Although the houseless plaintiff's motion was denied in the courts, a resulting settlement from the class action suit effected some changes to Portland's camping ordinances. Importantly, the settlement re-defined what constituted “camping” in addition to instructing what constituted proper police engagement with unhoused people. For instance, the changes required that police officers must give additional notice to houseless individuals before sweeping their camps, “no less than 24 hours after and within seven (7) days of [the date and time the site is posted for cleanup]” (Anderson et al. v. City of Portland 2012). Additionally, the settlement required that police follow specific procedures when clearing a campsite, especially when taking people's property, such as by photographing and itemizing all confiscated property. Finally, the settlement expanded the definition of “campsite” beyond the more general one found in the original anti-camping ordinance. Now, after more than thirty years, the definition of a campsite encompassed more personal property (e.g., shopping carts and belongings within them) in order to ensure that people could retrieve their belongings after police intervention. Despite these changes, the camping ordinance remained in place.
It would not be until the City declared a SOE in 2015 that Portland's anti-camping policies would be drastically reworked. It was at that time that the City introduced a set of contested camping policies that would lay the foundation for the legalization of organized houseless encampments in the city today.
“Safe Sleeping” Through a State of Emergency
Portland's 2015 SOE declaration was intended to relieve many issues related to growing unsheltered houselessness in the city. As it pertained to camping ordinances, however, the SOE facilitated a radical departure from the City's punitive anti-camping ordinances up to that point. The main SOE policies intended to lessen the restrictions of anti-camping ordinances were implemented four months into the emergency, when the City announced its “Safe Sleep” initiative. Safe Sleep was a set of policies aimed at making it easier for houseless individuals to rest in public spaces throughout the City without being ticketed. The policies were implemented in recognition of the large disparity between the number of unsheltered houseless people in the city and the lack of available emergency shelter beds.
As the second phase of the City's SOE, the Safe Sleep policies provided houseless individuals four new options for resting or sheltering. The first, and most straightforward, was directing people toward traditional emergency shelter. While the City had only nominally expanded shelter capacity at the onset of Safe Sleep, it eventually created more shelter space shortly thereafter. A second option, intending for individuals to shelter in cars or RVs in an “organized” space, never took off. It would later be adopted in modified form by the City, allowing individuals to sleep in their cars without citation (VanderHart 2016). The third option allowed for individuals to sleep on sidewalks (while somehow still adhering to the City's sidewalk management plan) throughout the day, though they could do so with only a sleeping bag or tarp, not with a tent or larger structure. From 9 pm to 7 am, individuals could erect tents on public rights-of-way or “remnant” municipal property. Individuals were instructed to sleep with six or fewer tents in one location, presumably to avoid growing into a larger camp. Tents were then to be taken down at 7 am and any remaining garbage was to be cleared out.
The fourth and final option was equally as controversial as the third. It allowed for self-managed, sanctioned encampments to operate on City-owned property. Newly created and sanctioned encampments were expected to partner with a local non-profit which had experience in such service provisioning, to serve as a point of contact for the City. Sanctioned encampments were to establish and follow a “code of conduct” and the sites would have City-provided portable restrooms and sanitation services (VanderHart 2016). The City's guidelines stated that sanctioned encampments were to operate only for the duration of Safe Sleep, which at that point had no sunset.
Some advocates endorsed Safe Sleep as a compassionate approach toward working with houseless individuals. An attorney for the Oregon Law Center who had worked on some of Portland's largest cases involving camping stated that Safe Sleep was “the most comprehensive, progressive and deeply rational [policy] that has ever come from City Hall” (Willamette Week 2016). Supporters of the new policies, who were incensed by the history of sweeps in the city, hoped that the new Safe Sleep guidelines would eradicate the need for sweeps altogether. So too was then-Mayor Charlie Hales and his chief of staff encouraging of the progressive new policies. Announcing the roll-out of Safe Sleep, the Mayor's chief of staff Josh Alpert asserted that the City needed to try out new policy, to experiment. “The simple truth of the matter,” Alpert said, “is that we do not yet have enough indoor safe places for people to sleep, which means we must try to accommodate as many people as we can who must sleep outdoors, while we continue to add more indoor space” (Willamette Week 2016). From the perspective of the Mayor and his staff, Safe Sleep was a means of taking seriously the SOE, recognizing it as an extant, on-the-ground emergency requiring an unconventional governing response.
Safe Sleep was extraordinary in that it was the first and only serious attempt at decriminalizing houselessness in Portland's history, if only temporarily. From the get-go, however, Safe Sleep was an uphill battle for the City. The new rules were slow to reach unhoused individuals who were unsure as to what was and what was not City-owned property, and thus where, exactly, it was and was not okay to sleep. Police also had difficulty educating people as to what the differences between “safe-sleeping” within the guidelines and what was still considered “unsanctioned camping.” What made this confusing is that camping in Portland was allowed in many public spaces, but it was not universal everywhere and at all times. Understandably, unhoused individuals were confused as to where and when they could sleep and took the new policies to mean that camping was now legal anywhere in the city. 8 Thus, without clear distinctions between City-owned and other public properties, the result was that street sleeping became even more visible within Portland's landscape.
Critics of Safe Sleep denounced the policies for different reasons. One coalition of neighborhood and business groups joined together in suing the City, citing the lack of authority on behalf of the Mayor to unilaterally suspend the City's anti-camping ordinances. These groups argued that Safe Sleep did nothing to solve the emergency of houselessness. And, in a turn of phrase, they were arguing that Safe Sleep was inhumane, in that it “resulted in violence, unhealthy conditions, and pain and suffering for [the City's] most vulnerable residents” (Smith 2016a). Although the lawsuit was unsuccessful, the arguments represented in the lawsuit reflected a broader public perspective that people should not be sleeping without shelter and that more affordable housing was needed.
Some who supported decriminalizing houselessness also found that Safe Sleep was wholly inadequate. As one advocate-participant on a City Government led Safe Sleep work-session committee put it: Overall, safe sleep was a net negative. As far as public perception, it was a colossal failure. It wasn’t implemented properly. There should have been, across the City, coalition building first. [To do that] you get the police leadership and the union on board. You start town-halling it to the neighborhoods. You connect it to services and public communication. So, you should spend some money … [instead, the City] made cards. It needed to be better communicated. (Personal Communication, August 2018)
After months of facing these constraints, on August 2, 2016, almost 6 months after Safe Sleep was announced, Mayor Hales called an end to Safe Sleep. In effect, this meant that individuals living in public could once again be cited for camping in violation of the City's anti-camping ordinance. It also meant that police once again would be able to ticket groups who were now adjusting to the Safe Sleep guidelines.
Despite the demise of Safe Sleep specifically, the SOE was still in effect. And the Mayor's ethos concerning camping at that moment remained steadfast. Upon announcing the sunset of Safe Sleep, he nonetheless requested there not be a “citywide sweep of homeless camps” and that individuals who live in peace throughout the city should be left alone (Smith 2016b). “What was true last night is true tonight,” the Mayor stated the day after the sunset of the Safe Sleep policy. “We do not have enough shelter beds. Some people are going to sleep outside. Some people are going to put tents up” (Smith 2016b). The Mayor and other City staff reiterated that even though Safe Sleep had ended, houseless people would continue to be treated compassionately. This was, after all, the primary intention behind Safe Sleep.
Portland's experiment with suspending land uses in order to decriminalize camping was not insignificant. The Safe Sleep period marked a critical shift in the thinking by some government staff about the relevance of self-managed encampments. During a City Council work session on houselessness that took place the first week of Safe Sleep, the Mayor's chief of staff Josh Alpert articulated what role he saw encampments playing in the SOE and service landscape. “We’re offering a structured, organized camping program,” Alpert told the Council in justifying the loosened camping restrictions of Safe Sleep. Underscoring the newness of working with two unpermitted encampments that had emerged at the beginning of the SOE, he noted how there was “an effort to organize and actually create capacity to get people to agree to a code of conduct.” He continued: The past two months or so, we've been very hands-on with Hazelnut Grove, on trying to figure out whether even that model was worth exploring to create a system around. I believe the short answer to that is yes. And we've seen really good things come out of Hazelnut Grove. Again, the process of how we got there I know leaves a lot to be desired. But at that time, really trying to figure out just whether it would work or not was what we were interested in doing … Through some trial and error with the camp itself we, I believe, got to a point that gave us confidence that we should actually get a large group of people together to see if we could build a system. (City of Portland 2016, emphasis added)
While Safe Sleep is largely understood to have done little more than help unhoused people avoid camping citations for six months, hidden from popular attention was the slow institutional development of encampment policies behind Safe Sleep, a turn in positionality which enabled the houseless community and its advocates to participate in shaping the government's acceptance of the encampment model. For, not only did some of the encampments that had existed at the beginning of the SOE become more organized during this time, within a few more years of the SOE, self-organized encampments and tiny house villages would become officially recognized modes of alternative shelter for the City Government.
After Safe Sleep: Establishing the Portland Encampment Model
When Portland's Government declared its SOE in October 2015, it wanted to devote needed resources toward an issue that had been developing for years. The rapid growth of the city in the first two decades of the twenty-first century brought pressure on housing affordability. Affordable housing was increasingly difficult to obtain, rents were rising, and wages were not rising along with the rate of inflation. By 2015, nearly half of Portland's houseless population was categorized as unsheltered, about 1,900 individuals (Krishnan and Elliott 2017). Never before were there so many unhoused Portlanders occupying spaces on streets and in unorganized encampments. It was due to these circumstances, coupled with the Hales mayoral administration's experimentation with alternatives to mass sheltering individuals, that the idea of self-managed encampments became a common place idea.
After the fallout of Safe Sleep, however, there was no evident path toward legitimizing self-organized encampments. Again, while sanctioned encampments were technically legal within the suspended land-use restrictions of the SOE, many encampments that had attempted to organize themselves to become sanctioned before this time were unsuccessful in obtaining permits from the City. The City's traditional disposition was to get unhoused people to use traditional shelters over encampments (Margier 2022). And the rhetoric of the incoming mayoral administration after Hales’, a team that had seen the consequences of Safe Sleep, was ambivalent about the future of encampments.
In January 2017, 14 months after the SOE began, Portland's new mayor Ted Wheeler began his first term. Wheeler was set on mitigating the houselessness crisis that had become the city's priority over the previous few years, albeit differently than had Hales’ administration. To begin, Wheeler was initially opposed to self-managed encampments and disapproved of Hales’ looseness with SOE exceptions for camping. In June 2016, as mayor-elect, Wheeler stated during a public forum on houselessness in the city that he did see value in using City-owned property, but only to “get the homeless off the street while bigger projects are in the works” (Richman 2016, 6). He was clear that when his new administration took over, that this would not include using public property for “campsites” (Richman 2016, 6). While “campsites” included unsanctioned, single-site tents, Wheeler was clear that he wanted to move away from organized, self-managed sites like those of Right 2 Dream Too, Dignity Village, and Hazelnut Grove. In a January 2017 interview, Wheeler said his focus was on “creating as many alternatives to people living on the street or in camps” as possible (Harbager 2017). At the beginning, it was unclear how Wheeler's administration would situate the role of encampments within the broader houselessness services landscape.
Throughout his first year, however, Mayor Wheeler seemed to depart from his previous position on encampments. The mayor came to not only express an openness toward sanctioning certain types of new encampments, but he also became a vocal proponent for them. In March 2017, for instance, Wheeler endorsed Kenton Women's Village (KWV), a new City-financed tiny house village that would open later that year. At the KWV commencement, the mayor stated: “We do not see this as an end solution. This is not permanent housing. This is not necessarily supportive housing. But it's a good next step … [for] addressing the homelessness situation” (Hewitt 2017). He continued, “assuming that this pilot is successful, then I would expect that we’ll see other tiny home villages in the community as well” (Hewitt 2017). Although Wheeler still rejected the existing self-managed encampments endorsed by the previous administration, his support for the KWV tiny-house model nonetheless developed upon the very groundwork of the Hales administration to promote City-sponsored and non-profit run tiny-home villages.
The physical and organizational differences between the City's existing self-organized encampments and the KWV model are small, but substantial differences in funding mark them as distinct encampment types. KWV was not only provided with new tiny houses, its water and electricity was subsidized by the City. And it employed an onsite social worker to help connect residents with various types of housing and job support. For the most part, Hazelnut Grove, Dignity Village, and Right 2 Dream Too were responsible for providing these resources and support for themselves. Among other things, it was this lack of formal City and non-profit support that Wheeler did not like about self-managed encampments. Which made his support for saving Right 2 Dream Too the following month inconsistent with his previous call to move away from self-managed encampments. Following the years long work primarily of City Council Member Amanda Fritz to keep the encampment operating, the mayor brokered a last-minute deal to re-locate the encampment onto City-owned property in April 2017 (Przybylinski 2021b). Reflecting upon his different challenges with houselessness among other things throughout his first year in office, Wheeler noted that his administration did not plan to be “governing from one crisis to the next,” (Floum 2017, 6) indicating that the city's SOE provided no blueprint for how to manage the houselessness crisis.
By 2018, the government staff in Portland with whom I spoke recognized the benefits of self-managed and City-sponsored encampments more explicitly than the administration had previously. As one of Wheeler's staff members acknowledged, self-managed encampments provide “a sense of community, and that is needed for the individuals resting there. [There is] also flexibility in regards to what is allowed. And also a sense of safety for some … this is somewhere for people to go instead of on the streets that may open themselves up to victimization” (Personal Communication, August 2018). Another Mayoral staff member noted that benefits of self-managed communities derive from the fact that residents have some control in shaping the space. “There is a sense of literally building your own thing … [which allows] individuals to feel a sense of ownership over their structure.”
Government staff also acknowledged why self-managed encampments can provide better options than the traditional shelter system. As one staff member of Clackamas County (Metropolitan Portland) stated: Shelters don’t make use of any of the strengths of the people in them. They don’t even identify the strengths of any of the people in them. They just say, ‘oh, you don’t have any housing, you need a bed for the night, and see you in the morning—goodbye.’ In a village, you are a part of the value of the village. You are the village. You are a cog that keeps the village going. You have responsibility and dignity. And accountability to your fellows. All the things that you lose when you losing housing. You get to build back some of that dignity. And you are providing a service to others by yourselves. No one else is doing it for you. (Personal Communication, July 2018)
It was not just government staff, but some of the public who saw the benefits of sanctioned encampments as well. One neighbor of Hazelnut Grove who was opposed to that particular encampment, nevertheless noted that “[KWV] is great. You have [a non-profit provider] there, and they are connecting residents to job training, and substance use treatment if they need it, and helping to find housing.” When asked about replicating the model in the city, this same homeowner noted that “if the City said … they are going to do all things [for Hazelnut Grove] like they did in Kenton, that is something I think the neighborhood would rally behind. I would support that.” While not all interviewed homeowners saw the value of encampments, especially the self-managed ones with less City support, the overwhelming support for the tiny-house village model was clear.
The push for self-organized encampments to become City-sponsored villages continued from 2018–2020. In late 2018, the City declared its intention to relocate Hazelnut Grove to a formally planned village at a new site with water and electric hookups as well as with new tiny houses (Vaughn 2018). Talks begun in early 2018, when Joint Office of Homeless Services staff met with members of Hazelnut Grove to hear their ideas for what they would like in a new village, and crucially, where it should be located. The result was St. John's Village, which opened in May 2021. At the commencement, various City and County Commissioners whose planning went into the development were reflected in the Mayor Wheeler's speech. “Look at what we have created! This village-model shelter is not just a dignified place for participants to stay and receive the services they need to end their houselessness; this is an attractive addition to the neighborhood,” the mayor said (Multnomah County 2021). The City seemed to be going all-in on the village model, not just as an emergency service, but one that could integrate into the city of neighborhoods more broadly.
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020, one of the ways in which Portland's Government attempted to protect unhoused Portlanders was to replicate the successes of the self-managed encampment model. With the help of Right 2 Dream Too's representatives, the City funded three new temporary encampments under the banner of “Creating Conscious Communities with People Outside,” or C3PO. Each village had approximately 60 tiny homes and had government-approved staff helping with housing placements. In developing the C3PO villages, the Joint Office of Homeless Services noted how the new encampments reflect “what we have learned throughout our [SOE] response to homelessness … [that] not every unsheltered person is willing or able to live in a congregate shelter environment. We believe our shelter system should offer a range of models … This village model provides individuals experiencing homelessness with shelter, increased safety, and stability” (AHFE 2022). A year into the pandemic, the City staff in Portland's Homelessness Reduction Program observed that, although “we had to set up temporary emergency shelters due to the pandemic … it has allowed us to start developing a formal framework for creating and operating permanent outdoor shelters” (City of Portland 2021b). From the City's perspective, the model largely initiated during the SOE was proving effective as a sheltering option for a second overlapping emergency.
By 2021, the City Government's general stance on organized encampments was moving from a position of mere tolerance to one of sanctioned approval. There was a problem, however, in that the clock on the SOE period was winding down. The sunset of the SOE would once again render that all encampments would no longer be in accordance with land-use ordinances. Despite, or perhaps because of, the continued sanctioning of encampments, the City nevertheless used the upcoming end of the SOE to press for the protection of encampments and for the model itself.
In reality, the notion that self-managed encampments could eventually be approved land uses, and thus necessary services amenable to the City’ land-use code, was already evident to the Executive Director of the Joint of Office of Homeless Services as far back as 2018, who then recognized that the impending end to the SOE would be a crucial moment of change through which to establish a legal means toward protecting sanctioned encampments. “Because the SOE will not be with us forever, we want the gains [of encampments] to last. So, we need to do the institutional reform during this period that it is going to take to sustain it. We needed to look at the codes and zoning to allow ourselves to have made the changes necessary to go beyond the state of emergency” (Personal Communication, August 2018). And it was this type of structural planning throughout the SOE that eventually brought the City Government to their decision to amend zoning ordinances three years later, making such land uses permanent accommodations throughout the city.
Legalizing Sanctioned Houseless Encampments
By March 2021, Portland's City Council had publicly workshopped its plan which capitalized on the land-use easements allowed by the SOE. What emanated from this process was the policy initiative called the “Shelter to Housing Continuum” (S2HC), which sought to update City Code by bringing encampment land use and building allowances into accord with many zoning categories throughout the city. Then, on April 28, 2021, the City Council unanimously approved the amendments in the S2HC plan, officially revising the City Code and bringing Ordinance No. 190381 into life. While S2HC addressed issues beyond encampments, such as the citing of traditional indoor shelters and vehicle sleeping, significantly, the ordinance added a category to the City Code which enabled sanctioned encampments to legally operate.
Title 33 is Portland's City Code for planning and zoning regulating all land uses in the city. The S2HC amended Title 33 by adding an additional category of shelter called “outdoor shelter” (City Code 33.100.100). Creating this new shelter type within the City Code added to the previous community service use types of mass shelter and short-term shelter and re-structured the relationship between encampments and the City's regulation of space. First, it made approval of outdoor shelters exempt from extended design review (City of Portland 2021a). This allowed new developments to by-pass what was previously a longer conditional use review, a process which primarily examined the development of permanent buildings, not temporary or changing structures. 9 Now, encampments within all zoning categories—except Open Spaces and some Industrial zones—did not need conditional use review. Second, the amendment waived “system development charges,” the fees for new applications, lowering costs and speeding up approval for new shelters. Finally, it formalized something that had already been in practice throughout the city's encampments, that all new encampments must be operated by local government or a non-profit agency. This does not mean that encampments could no longer be self-managed, but that some partner would provide support services on site, usually through the use of part time staff. Amending Title 33 created not only a quicker and cheaper path for siting new encampments. Significantly, it provided the needed legal protection for encampments so that they could continue operating after the SOE.
Before casting their final “yes” votes in the meeting to amend the zoning code, Portland City Commissioners took a moment to discuss the benefits of the amendment changes. Commissioner Ryan stated, “right now, we face unprecedented emergency on our streets. And as the number of chronically houseless individuals has grown … our current response is inadequate, as our work to site shelters has been hampered by restrictive zoning codes.” 10 Commissioner Hardesty added that she was “proud” of the sanctioned encampments that paved the way for the vote. Amending the land uses to accommodate sanctioned encampments, she noted, provides “opportunity for people to be able to live with dignity on our streets, while [the City] continues to use every resource to make permanent housing that people can afford to live in a reality.” Finally, Mayor Wheeler nodded to why the City's codification of the outdoor shelter amendments was necessary. “These ordinances give us the foundation we need to continue our work to address homelessness without the need to be perpetually relying on emergency powers … The changes that these ordinances make give us the flexibility to do so [beyond the SOE].” The comments reflected the approving sentiment that changing land-use ordinances would help make sanctioned camping legitimate, while also acknowledging the limited duration of using emergency governance as a decision-making tool.
Portland's land-use decision and the emergency powers used to facilitate it are undoubtedly innovative for houselessness policy making in U.S. cities. The decision establishes a pathway to consider for other cities facing similar constraints on where and how to accommodate growing unsheltered populations within a general landscape of ordinances which criminalize both unorganized and organized types of camping. Whether this progression will lead to better outcomes for unhoused communities remains to be seen, however, and it should not be separated from the political and social consequences that follow.
Discussion
Drawing from the case of Portland, Oregon, this study illustrates the effects of “governing through emergency” as it relates to legalizing sanctioned encampments through the city's state of emergency on housing and houselessness. It extends scholarship on “the camp,” which has long used the concept of the state of exception to illustrate the depoliticizing nature of government and encampment-resident relations, to reveal how emergency governance can be used to affirm the rights of unhoused people living in collectively run encampments and villages within urban landscapes. In Portland, this was partly accomplished by amending City Codes through land-use ordinances. Given the City's regular maintenance of anti-camping ordinances since 1981, the legalization of self-managed encampments during the SOE was difficult to foresee. So, what happened during the SOE that initiated the eventual legalization of encampments leading to the legitimation of the PEM and what does this tell us about the governance of encampments?
The SOE was a catalyst for more seriously developing the legal infrastructure for PEM in at least two ways. First, the SOE eased portions of the City's zoning and building codes which could more easily accommodate previously unpermitted settlement types like self-managed encampments. It expedited the planning processes for approving such temporary use of space agreements for encampments which theoretically made it easier for them to operate on municipal and approved private properties throughout the city. Indeed, within the Portland Metropolitan area, four self-managed encampments began operating within the first three years of the SOE, with three more self-managed encampments established at the beginning of, and as a response to, the COVID-19 pandemic. In early 2021, the City announced its intention to sanction six additional “Safe Rest” villages in neighborhoods throughout the city (Garcia 2022). Each series of new encampments was modeled (the Safe Rest encampments only partly) on the knowledge and practices of the previous encampments.
Second, the SOE gave City Government time, perhaps unintentionally, to recognize the use value of encampments. The six years of the SOE leading up to the 2021 land-use amendment provided Portland's government (and the broader public) the opportunity to engage with self-managed encampments and tiny house villages, to learn from them, and plan a response within the confines of land-use laws which could largely enable encampments to remain operating on their own terms. It is unlikely that without this time and space that the city's zoning code would have been amended. For, the rather chaotic start to the SOE, and its perpetual extension, allowed the City—its mayor and council members—to identify the strengths of the model by re-thinking how it would accommodate the encampments, effectively changing the government's perspective on why this type of shelter was preferred for many unhoused people. For instance, shortly after opening, the success of KWV was quickly championed by the public and government as the go-to village model. The further extension of the SOE allowed time for assessment and adjustments to be made to replicate the model elsewhere, such as in St. John's Village. When COVID-19 began, the PEM was already understood to be a reliable model for the City to shelter more unhoused people. The PEM emerged and was legitimated because it illustrated to government how self-organized tiny home villages can provide a better option for many unhoused individuals compared with traditional shelters. Without the ability to suspend land-use restrictions, many of these encampments would likely not have been sanctioned.
Despite the PEM now being recognized as an official strategy for sheltering unhoused people, accommodating houseless encampments into City zoning ordinances carries with it a variety of implications both political and moral in nature. The moral implications are reflected in discourse surrounding the encampments in the city. Some residents with whom I spoke, for instance, suggested that incorporating encampments as an official land use devolves government responsibility from doing more to help unhoused people. As one Portland homeowner stated regarding the City's support for the encampments, “It's unacceptable … I realize that people walk into homeless situations for all kinds of reasons [but] that doesn’t mean that we as a society don’t have some role to help these people land on their feet… somewhere. Or at least, somewhere safe.” For this person, encampments simply cannot be safe spaces for unhoused people. Another homeowner similarly suggested that the traditional shelter system is that safer space. “How is letting people live on the streets humane?” they asked. “Let's get them into some shelter where they can stabilize and get help. Not just say, ‘oh, we’re just going to let you camp everywhere.’ That's not solving the problem. That's abdicating responsibility for the problem. And that's not what government should be doing.” Such perspectives reflect a general sentiment that organized encampments should not be permitted, much less tolerated by government.
At the same time, advocates of encampments responded by noting that because the City cannot produce affordable housing quickly enough, that encampments are not only necessary emergency services, but they offer a better model for accommodating unhoused people during their period of housing precarity. One North Portland homeowner who supported encampments felt that the government's support for sanctioned encampments was appropriate. “It is a good move for the City to support self-managed places. Believing that people are capable of caring for themselves and one another, and meeting ones needs through a supportive environment … I think it is powerful that places like that exist.” The dignity felt by people living in encampments compared to traditional shelters cannot be understated.
There are also political implications to the ethical challenges of helping unhoused people become stable in this way. The fact that organized encampments were legalized into land-use code because of the SOE does not mean that the very real emergency for thousands of other unhoused Portlanders has been or will be resolved. When the SOE ends, houselessness, and in particular, unsanctioned camping, will remain an issue for the City to govern through “non-emergency” ordinances. The use and efficacy of SOE governance has limited duration. As the executive director of Portland's Joint Office of Homeless Services put it: Homelessness is an ongoing emergency. Even as you house 10,000 people, 10,000 more are going to come in behind. So, the response is not the same as a natural disaster. It's not a one-time basis fix. What the [government thinking behind a] SOE is, is how do we build the infrastructure so that it is bigger and better to deal with the fact that this is an ongoing crisis. (Personal communication 8-10-2018)
Thus, while Portland's emergency governance achieved an outcome intended to help unhoused people, which non-emergency governing approaches likely would not have, there are nevertheless limitations to the City's approach that are more broadly instructive for similar attempts at mitigating and managing houselessness. First, the long process toward legalizing organized encampments into the land-use code does not mean that encampments will necessarily proliferate and therefore ameliorate the need for more dignified shelter space in the city. Instead, legalizing encampments simply highlights the capacity of municipal government to now permit self-managed encampments if they satisfy certain land-use and organizational requirements. Second, the unique outcomes of Portland's SOE are shaped by their geographic and socio-economic context. Portland's encampments are not the spaces of exception highlighted earlier which host rightless or stateless individuals. Rather, Portland's encampments are relatively autonomous communities hosting economically displaced people who are situated within the comparative political-economic stability of one of the U.S.'s larger cities (which is not to say that the situations of Portland's unhoused residents are any less dire). Even when looking within the U.S. itself, the scale of Portland's houseless population compared to cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco suggest that replication of this type of shelter model may be difficult to implement to an adequate scale. Finally, this case does not show us how emergency governing strategies would be able to resolve deeper structural problems producing houselessness in the first place. These encampments are sites of temporary assistance, and it is difficult to square how government might use emergency governance strategies to incentivize the development of extremely low-income housing needed for long term housing stability in the city. It is unlikely that such an amendment to the city's zoning code and building codes would be accomplished via emergency governance. Indeed, the reality of sanctioned encampments highlights well that emergency governance offers no ultimate solution to ending houselessness within the market constraints of liberal capitalism (Przybylinski and Mitchell 2021, 45). At the level of municipal governance, governance through emergency is still limited in its constitutional reach.
What the case of Portland does do, however, is inform our understanding of how municipal governments actualize contested decisions surrounding houseless camping, which in turn, nuances how we may see the “exceptionality” of camp governance. The data from this study point to how suspending normal governing procedures for houseless camping enables a more relational governing process itself. Unlike camps analyzed as “spaces of exception,” Portland's camping ordinances were not implemented to except the government from legal and moral responsibility over residents using these encampments, but rather, to hasten government action toward realizing the self-governing desires of encampment residents themselves. Contra literature framing encampments as de-politicized spaces, where rightless individuals are reduced to “bare life” by sovereigns, this study points toward the adaptive capacities of governing-through-emergency as a tool for transformation. To the extent that the camp functions as a medium through which governmental exceptionality is actualized, the legalization of Portland's encampments illustrates exactly how governing through SOE rather than states of exception may assist in facilitating more dignified emergency shelter options for unhoused communities.
Policymakers at the municipal level contending with similar issues around camping can learn from the emergency governing strategies of Portland's approach to legalizing sanctioned encampments, even, and especially, if it comes to pass that such land-use amendments will ultimately not aid in Portland's ability to mitigate houselessness. Whether or not Ordinance No. 190381 will advance these goals, the legalization of the PEM should not be mired so much in debates over whether or not sanctioned encampments are a reasonable choice for sheltering the unhoused when there are otherwise few legitimate options for doing so. Rather, it should be seen more for what it acknowledges—that unhoused people with no options for sheltering must be somewhere, and that it is better to support unhoused people by helping themselves than it is to punish them further with punitive land-use ordinances which simply criminalize their existence. The suspension of legal ordinances during the SOE enabled Portland to do just that, to come to grips with this grim reality, and will hopefully allow self-managed encampments and tiny house villages to emerge beyond the exceptional.
Conclusion
By detailing the City of Portland, Oregon's shifting position on houseless encampments through an analysis of camping ordinances, a shift from rejection to legitimation, this article highlights how the use of a state of emergency functions as something more than simply a temporary suspension of zoning constraints. The decision made by the City Government to legalize organized houseless encampments, instead, presents a novel case for assessing the social and political relations which undergird the implementation of SOEs more broadly. Ultimately, it shows how SOEs, while providing new attention and resources to a given issue, also invite experimentation and innovation into the process of providing alternative solutions to an issue. In Portland, this experimentation has made encampments less of an exception and more the norm. Of course, suspending law to amend land-use ordinances has potential downsides as well. It remains to be seen whether legalizing houseless encampments, making them unexceptional, will better facilitate the transition to stable housing that unhoused people desire. As such, the recent political and legal transformations of Portland's houseless camping ordinances ought to be considered with caution, as it is difficult to disentangle what ultimately marks progress and what is merely politically progressive with legalizing houseless encampments. As urban governments consider replicating the PEM, therefore, equal attention must be given to the advances made by, as much as with the limitations of, governing through emergency, particularly as it leaves unresolved much of the conditions leading to the emergency in the first place.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
