"Even Portland"? Ted Wheeler has been trying to ban camping, or taking steps to effectively circumvent county and state attempts that prohibited him from banning camping, for _years_ now. He's been gunning for it for both of his terms and keeps failing to get anywhere.

First of all, Portland tried to regulate daytime tent camping in 2016. It failed after six months. Wheeler ran for mayor that year saying he would solve homelessness; through both of his terms, it's gotten steadily worse.

The current camping ban idea first came up in 2022: https://apnews.com/article/health-ted-wheeler-oregon-portlan...

He then proposed 1,000-person indoor mass shelters in 2022. That failed when the state refused to fund it, with everyone from homeless advocates to commissioners who endorsed him having predicted that it would at best fail and at worst exacerbate the problem: https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2022/02/portland-mayor-now-s...

He experimented with closing a homeless campsite at a public park for plans to build pickleball courts and a skate park: https://nypost.com/2022/11/03/portland-mayor-ted-wheeler-rem...

(It didn't work; the camps predictably returned within months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVnVnMeKcfQ)

He tried to enact his camping ban and build state-funded outdoor concentration camps staffed by the National Guard in 2023. The state and county refused to fund them: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2023/03/portlands-mass-t...

The current ban proposal was first drafted after that failure. Due to the lack of anyone wanting to be associated with the plan, Wheeler planned to spend $27 million of city's own funds on three of his own designated outdoor shelter cities: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2023/02/mayor-ted-wheele...

(While all of that was happening, the city under Wheeler has had near-weekly police-backed camp sweeps, a prototype for the ban where city contractors tear down the camp, confiscate property, and offer shelter options that don't have capacity or are often unsuitable for families, the mentally ill, or people with addictions. Some people have been relocated dozens of times: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-hom...)

The proposed law issues fines with or without jail time if you refuse to accept a shelter offer. But even now there aren't enough shelter beds for the people who are already voluntarily seeking them: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-mul...

So homeless people will end up going to jail one way or another. They can't afford housing, so they sure as shit can't afford lawyers. What does Oregon also have a chronic shortage of? Public defenders, which Oregon doesn't employ but contracts out (with caseload maximums): https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/01/24/record-numbers-of-peop...

And if one can't be provided in seven days, a federal court rules that the offender has to be released: https://www.opb.org/article/2023/11/09/oregon-public-defende...

A lot of this is also being pushed by one commissioner who's aggressively and loudly seeking the mayor's office and using this law to get attention: https://www.opb.org/article/2024/04/17/camping-ban-portland-...

(He's also maybe the least politically savvy guy to run for this office here in a while, which is already a stupendously low bar: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/rene-gonzalez-trimet-...)

His first proposal would've given the mayor total control over the ban, which would be himself if he wins the election: https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/04/17/gonzalez-seeks-to-put-...

(And we know he'll fit in great as mayor because his proposal failed two days later: https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2024/04/19/gonzalez-pares-ba...)

Anyway, the mayoral and commissioner efforts have been so poorly received for so long, with no improvement in sight, that voters threw the entire city government charter out the window in 2022 in favor of ranked-choice voting and a more traditional city council system: https://www.portland.gov/transition/news/2022/11/9/portland-...

That won't solve any problems, but fuck if anyone here seems to know what would.

(Did I mention that Oregon is a "kicker" state? As in we get individual tax refunds when the state has a budget surplus? There's been one every two years since 2014. The state never has the money to house the homeless, whether in or beyond Portland, except for the _$10 billion_ returned over the last 10 years — $5.6 billion this tax season alone, most of which wasn't even claimed as of a month ago — because this incompetent state legislature can't budget to save its fucking life.)