Portland Homeless: City Clears Springwater Corridor

At 8:00 Thursday morning, the deadline arrived along with dozens of city workers.

After months of planning - and a further one month delay - the removal of homemess camps from the Springwater Corridor was underway.

More than 300 people had been living in the area - some for seven years or more - but with the increase in homeless, there had been increases in crime both in the corridor and neighborhoods bordering it.

"We have resisted removing campers from the area because we don’t yet have good options for all the people living there," Mayor Hales said in July when he announced the clean-up would happen. "But public safety and environmental issues have reached a tipping point."

The mayor reported at the time that there has been a 50 percent increase in reports of simple assaults along the corridor compared to last year.

The plan was to originally have the sweep occur on August 1st but it was delayed one month to give people more time to relocate and more time for outreach workers to provide assistance.

The city has been struggling to deal with a growing homeless crisis.

Last October, Portland declared a housing state of emergency to allow them to suspend some zoning laws and open more shelters quickly.

Earlier this week, the state's Land Use Board of Appeals ruled that in at least one case - plans to move the Right 2 Dream Too homeless camp from Chinatown to an industrial area - the city had overstepped its bounds.

The city is also trying to convert a warehouse at Terminal One into a 400-bed shelter.

When outreach workers arrived at the camp on Thursday, there were only about two dozen people still in the area. At its peak, the camp - located along the 14 miles of the trail that snakes through Portland - was home to more than 300 people.

The camp - as with others in Portland - had developed a sense of organization, complete with a civic council to help try and keep things from getting out of control.

Unfortunately, city officials said, the growth in crime had showed things were no longer working as they had been.

Photo: City of Portland