The Wheelerhouses: Precedent for Ted Wheeler's Homeless Camps

Where Have We Seen This Before?

Calling for a ban on public camping, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler has begun what might be the most significant, expensive, and massive action against homelessness in the Portland Metro Area in recent years. His plan includes the building of massive, government-sanctioned homeless camps that will service up to 150 — perhaps even up to 500 — homeless people at a time. This plan was met with both words of support and vitriol, some claiming that this is the best way to get people off of the streets of the city, and others arguing that it is inhumane to essentially force people into camps. This latter group has often referenced internment camps, like those seen in Nazi Germany, or even those in our own, national history, evoking the Japanese internment camps during World War II. This begs some questions: What precedent is there to Mayor Wheeler’s plan, and how accurate is the comparison between his camps and internment camps?

The National League of Cities, in their “Overview of Homeless Encampments”, examines the causes of homelessness and the effects of homeless legislation, ultimately advocating for more humanitarian solutions to homelessness. In this report, the NLC highlights two cities that instituted effective and empathetic responses to homeless encampments. Both cities — Oakland, California and Las Cruces, New Mexico — instituted sanctioned encampments. Importantly, these cities worked with social service agencies and volunteers to provide food, relief, and assistance with addiction, health issues, and with finding permanent housing. 

In Oakland, these efforts resulted in over half of the initial 40 residents finding housing. In Las Cruces, 41% of the 174 inhabitants found housing. 

The NLC says that these sanctioned camps, which are paired with access to social services, as well as access to food, water, and waste services, best operate as an “intermediary step, making it easier for individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness to live with dignity while being connected to formal service provision and more permanent housing.” 

Though Mayor Wheeler’s plan, which aims to provide the aforementioned services and use the camps as a tool to get people into more permanent housing, seems to align with NLC’s recommendations, there are some important differences. Chiefly, the National League of Cities recommends against the criminalization of homelessness. The ban Mayor Wheeler calls for on camping is clearly at odds with this. The Las Cruces example, as well, departs from Mayor Wheeler’s plan in that the highlighted sanctioned encampment was self-governing. Mayor Wheeler’s camps likely will not allow for its residents to govern themselves.

Though Mayor Wheeler’s announcements were met with shock, from both those who support the initiative, and those who are violently against it, there is precedent for his plan. The camps themselves, and the goal to build 20,000 units of affordable housing, are largely similar to those seen in Oakland and Las Cruces. 

Where Mayor Wheeler starts to travel into uncharted territory, then, is in the ban on public camping, which would effectively force people into his camps. It is on this point, regardless of the benefits of the camps themselves, that makes Mayor Wheeler’s plan hard to accept, as it seems too close to ignoring the history of internment in America during World War II, or current events in China, where over a million Uyghurs have been forced into camps. When have we looked back on mandatory camps and seen anything but the destruction of humanity? Yet, when we instituted them in World War II, they seemed necessary, like the right thing to do. What does it mean, then, that it seems to many like the right thing to do now? 

See the National League of Cities’ recommendations on homelessness here: https://www.nlc.org/resource/an-overview-of-homeless-encampments/

Written by Bennett Kohler