Change happens slowly in the Pacific Northwest. After Oregon’s blazing summer cools into a colder, kinder fall, it takes several months for Portland to slump into its vague, monotone winter.
First, the leaves’ blazing yellows, reds, and oranges hush into a melancholic gray and collect in piles, just off the street. Next, those piles decompose into a mushy brown pulp, which sticks to white shoes and slithers into storm drains. These changes happen quietly, in slow motion.
All the while, the sky keeps on falling. Rain, sleet, snow, hail, more leaves (from where?), there is never a moment of reprieve. While most cities enjoy the occasional “blue bird” day to break up the gloom—Denver, Colorado, for example, which averages 300 days of sunshine a year—Portland’s winter slides through the city like a suffocating glacier, oblivious to its inhabitants. And nobody knows this fact more intimately than those without shelter.
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I remember camping near the foot of Mt. Hood, just once— 69 miles from Portland—in the dead of winter. To get to the lake where we planned to camp, my friends and I enjoyed a sunny hike through the snow-laden forest, only to arrive and realize we forgot the rain cover to our tent. This meant there stood nothing between our bodies and the unforgiving mountain air. By the time the sun set, our boots were sogged with snow, and anything we found resembling firewood was too wet to catch a spark.
We spent hours trying to shiver ourselves to sleep.
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Winter isn’t the only time shelter matters in Portland. The Summer of 2021 marked the city’s second-warmest year on record. By August, three monstrous heatwaves had scorched a city whose infrastructure was simply not built to survive that kind of heat. (And “survive” is the optimal word, here.) If the previous year’s 100 days of extreme air pollution caused by wildfires didn’t solidify the importance of shelter in the midst of an ever-worsening climate crisis—the heat waves did.
In late June 2021, a single 116-degree day killed 96 people.
“Even one day of breathing in polluted air is dangerous for our health,” said Jessie Kochaver, Campaign Associate with Environment Oregon Research & Policy Center. “100 days is unacceptable.”
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In his 2021 State of the City address, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler lumped the city’s significant uptick in unhoused communities into his address of a broader “crisis,” comprised of “the global pandemic, the homeless crisis, the concerns people justifiably have around their own safety . . . and the reality that we have a livability problem in a city that has historically been seen as one of the most livable cities on this planet,” he said.
The way he said it made the whole situation sound solvable. Or at least like something he was interested in trying to solve. “Safety” and “livability,” after all, seem like pretty important ideas.
In the same address, Wheeler announced his “Clean and Green” citywide clean-up initiative, a fund that promotes “livability” by halting illegal dumping, litter, graffiti, human waste, abandoned cars, and through street sweeping.
To fund this initiative the mayor collected the necessary support from donors like Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle, who committed $100,000 to the measure. OPB reported in March 2021 that, down the road, Multnomah County officials expected the initiative to bring in $100 million each year. Mayor Wheeler pledged to allocate at least $300,000 of these funds toward creating jobs for, “homeless people to help clean up the city.”
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Before coming to mean what it does today, the word shelter began its arduous journey as the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root dreu-, meaning “be firm, solid, steadfast,” as it refers to “wood” or “tree.” The same root would later form words like endure, durable, duress, tree, tar, etc. At some point, dreu- mingled with the PIE root skel- (“divide, split, separate”) to form scyldtruma in Old English and sheltron, sheldtrume in Middle English, meaning “roof or wall formed by locked shields,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary.
In the 1580s, shelter (n.) referred to a “screened, protected” shelter. By 1888, shelter (v.) meant “to protect from the usual hardships of life.” Within that same decade, the Salvation Army used the word “shelter” to refer to “temporary lodging for homeless poor.”
The Cambridge Dictionary defines “have/lead a sheltered life” as “to have a life in which you are protected too much and experience very little danger, excitement or change.”
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From a bird’s eye view, the cost of living in Portland is 33.7 percent higher than the national average. This factors in food, healthcare, transportation, and other necessities. When it comes to housing specifically, Portland’s cost is 81.3 percent higher than the national average. You might assume this cost is most apparent when Googling “Portland 2-bedroom apartments Zillow.com.” But, really, you feel it every time you leave the house.
Walking anywhere in the city, especially in the winter, means walking past ramshackle tents, over soggy sleeping bags, and around groups of houseless folks smoking, laughing, or shuffling aimlessly, keeping to themselves. In a city that averages 43 inches of rain every year, it’s impossible to keep things dry—so you may as well keep moving. (In the summer, shelter can be just as precarious. A two-person tent meant to keep you dry in the winter transforms into a 230 x 160cm sauna, in the summer.)
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Witnessing the failure of a city to take care of its residents—realizing the fact that its government is more interested in beautification than basic survival—never feels how you’d hope it feels. It feels sad. But it also feels impatient. You are always wishing somebody else would figure all this out.
That or you leave. My parents would always much prefer I visit them in the suburbs than the other way around. (How different is impatience from indifference?)
In the end, it won’t matter at all how “livable” Portland appears to be. If the real goal of Wheeler’s “Clean and Green” initiative is to displace unhoused folks in favor of cleaner sidewalks—or to capitalize on their condition to that end—then it would seem we’ve all missed the point. We’ve also misunderstood the meaning of livability in the first place.
Not, of course, to bludgeon you with that collective “we.”
In 2021, the city and Multnomah County worked together to open a “no-turn-away” shelter to house folks on the coldest and most harrowing winter nights.
Andrea Matthews, board chair of the Arbor Lodge Neighborhood Association, said she was surprised locals didn’t have the traditional “not in my backyard” reaction to the new shelter.
She said, “What I’ve really heard is: ‘Why aren’t you involving us more? Why aren’t you asking us for donations? We want to help. We want to be there. We want to be on-site, and make this thing work.’”
Justin Duyao is an art writer and editor. He is pursuing an MA in Critical Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and holds degrees in English Literature, French, and Religious Thought from Harding University. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
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