A tale of two encampments: blurring notions of temporary and permanent, home and assembly

Map of Occupy Portland encampment (by Jonathan Hill for Willamette Week)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

In this week's Willamette Week, Aaron Mesh reports on his 48 hours living in the Occupy Portland encampment and protest downtown in Chapman Square and the adjacent Lowndsale Square. But it isn't just a campout happening on these blocks, nor is it solely a protest.

As Mesh learns, the Occupy encampment has, in some respects, become its own city. He begins the encampment by visiting an engineering department to have a parcel of grass assigned to him and receive help with a makeshift shelter. He visits a library with over 200 volumes and even a librarian. There is a portion of the Occupy encampment devoted to families and children. There is a KBOO radio station, there are religious services, and a security committee.

Regardless of one's political affiliations, if one stops for a moment to look at the sheer ingenuity and cooperation going on in the Occupy Portland camps, it's a testament that - however much gridlock and standoffishness happens in the US Congress - ordinary citizens are still capable of inspiring cooperation and ingenuity. Yet you wouldn't learn this from most media outlets covering the protests. The Oregonian, for example, took the perspective of following the police blotter. This perspective represents a lot of people who pass by the Occupy camps along Third and Fourth Avenues; they react to the dirtiness of the camps and the lack of a coherent message.

Even so, one of the problems besetting Occupy Portland - the fact that it's become populated with many homeless and street people, some of whom care little about politics - may be result of its own success. The first commenter for Mesh's story writes, "Social service agencies are sending people they can't serve to the camp with the promise of free food. Newly released prisoners are making the camp their first stop in search of something to eat and drink." I can't confirm that this is true, but it would make perfect sense. Given today's economy, local shelters are being pushed to capacity and beyond. So even though Occupy is largely about how economic policy favors the top one percent of the income pyramid in the United States, the fact that homeless and needy people are being driven there for reasons other than politics becomes a detraction.

Two protesters at Occupy Portland (image by Tyler Clifton via Flickr)

Part of the Occupy Portland drama is based on a question that remains unanswered: how long will they remain? For the protesters, abandoning Chapman and Lownsdale squares is equated to giving up on their demands for greater financial parity and opportunity for all. For the authorities, it's a kind of tightrope walk. Most elected officials in Portland proper are left-leaning, and generally sympathetic to Occupy protesters' basic tenets. For now, individual arrests and other issues notwithstanding, they're willing to let the Occupy occupation go on.

Yet this tolerance is based on the idea that ultimately the protest, or at least the tents and tarps marking mass overnight stays in these public parks, are temporary. When and if the Occupy occupation continues on over the weeks and months, the pressure will grow on local leaders to evict them, as is already being done in Oakland, for example.

A few blocks away at Fourth and Burnside, another encampment has a different set of challenges and ambitions.  Right 2 Dream Too, also known as R2D2, is described by Amanda Eckerson of Street Roots as a "rest area for houseless members" of the community.

The effort is organized by a grassroots group called Right 2 Survive, which also organized a similar tent city in Seattle. This isn't just squatting on a vacant lot. It's being done with the owner's permission, complete with a lease and insurance. The lot isn't making its owner money sitting empty, so until or in lieu of a building being built, allowing an organized, paid-for encampment of homeless people in tents is a way to help those in deed and make some very modest income. Eckerson reports that although Right 2 Survive members endeavored to create their tent-city lot lawfully, "When they opened their doors on Oct. 11, the national day of action for homelessness, city planners came questioning their right to be there."

Comparing R2D2 and Occupy Portland, she writes, "one is an occupation of public land, the other has a lease on private land. The occupation has been given tentative permission by the city, while R2D2's occupancy is being disputed as illegal. People are virtually abandoning their homes to join the Occupy Portland movement, while members of R2D2 are reacting to the fact that they have no place to sleep."

"Despite these elements," Eckerson adds, "there is a deeper strand of solidarity that exists between these two movements. Both groups are responding to the larger inequity of our social system, the lack of access to political power, and the rights of all of us to dream."

So far, neither R2D2 nor Occupy Portland has been shut down, but it may be inevitable that both are gone within upcoming weeks or at least months. Ultimately, the Occupy encampments, be there in Portland, New York or elsewhere, have already made a significant impact on the national consciousness. Although there is much skepticism about individual protesters or people populating the  protests, a New York Times/CBS News poll released yesterday (October 25) reports that about 46 percent said Occupy reflects the sentiment of most Americans (compared with 27 percent for the Tea Party). That means that, whatever sniping about people on the front lines of the movement needing showers, the broader message has been heard. More importantly, though, at some point authorities will come back around to the fact that the Occupy encampments are bending to the point of breaking the notion of what can be permanent habitable space.

In the case of R2D, the space is private but the structures themselves - tents, handmade shelters - are meant to be temporary. If the tents are truly permanent, they become architecture, and thus subject to building codes. Even if the individual tents and other structures change, if the use of the land as encampment becomes quasi-permanent, it too could be subject to zoning and code strictures or land-use laws. What's more, the fact that R2D2 is right on Burnside, the border between Downtown and Old Town, is a kind of taunt to Portland's leaders. For years the City Council has devoted resources to curbing homelessness, with the recently opened Bud Clark Commons just the latest example of a public building meant to provide an alternative to sleeping on a park bench or, in this case, in a tent on a vacant lot. R2D2 may be simply an earnest act to provide shelter for those in need, yet it symbolized blight at the epicenter of millions of dollars of effort to stop it. As another recent Willamette Week cover story explored, for all the investments we've made in infrastructure and promoting creative-class development, there is another Portland, surrounding the central city, with no sidewalks and much higher joblessness. R2D2 is a reminder that close-in Portland can't, and shouldn't be, a perfectly pretty bubble untouched by poor people's problems.

No one can say for sure when these encampments will end, or if they will at all. Yet they each, because of this, provide a case of blurred lines between temporary and permanent space, as well as a painful reminder of the Great Recession's deep impact - or, to the select few in the increasingly targeted one percent of Americans controlling nearly half of the wealth, a lack thereof.