In his tent, Ronk keeps a collection of all the orders to move he’s received since he began living outside. “I play their game, but it’s kind of ridiculous.” “I move, bounce back and forth across the street, back and forth for a long time,” Ronk said. His tools were taken during the most recent one. By his count, he’s been swept more than two dozen times in five years. Local government has been little help, he says. He has a job as a mechanic, but says with a monthly $1,000 child support payment, he can’t save up for a down payment on an apartment. He says he's been swept more than two dozen times in five years and keeps a collection of postings in his years outside. Lenny Ronk, 50, has a job but hasn't been able to save for a down payment on an apartment. To the two men, who have been camping in the area for the better part of a decade, the mayor’s announcement is the latest example of the city picking at the most obvious symptoms of a massive, complicated crisis, shuffling people living outdoors “like a deck of cards” without providing the housing to keep them out of the game entirely. And, some, like Muma and his friend Lenny Ronk, have shifted mere feet. Others have moved to different but equally dangerous roadways. Despite Wheeler’s vow that people moved could not return to their old campsites, many seem to have done exactly that. OPB visited 10 sites in the last month that were swept since the mayor’s Feb. The mayor said this week that the order is “saving the lives of our most vulnerable neighbors.”īut while some roadways may be cleaner in the wake of the mayor’s emergency order, it’s far from clear that the people displaced are much safer. The order, and the messaging around it, was couched in humanitarian terms Wheeler offered up the order as a common-sense response to a clearly untenable situation in which drivers sped down bustling streets, sometimes passing mere inches from people protected from the elements by a thin sheet of nylon. It’s been two months since Portland’s mayor barred people from setting up tents near busy roadways, the first in a string of emergency orders aimed at public camping. “I don’t know why they moved me,” said Muma, a 43-year-old from Portland. The main difference between the locations, he said, is the cars zip by faster in the new area - they’re coming onto the bridge at up to 50 miles-an-hour instead of around a curve at half the speed. Gordon Muma Jr., moves his campsite of nearly two years near the off-ramp of the Ross Island Bridge. He collects cans and relies on the receptacles for a trickle of income. He said he wanted to stay near the bridge, which was as removed from the downtown area as he could be while maintaining his access to the trash cans near the waterfront. Muma’s home of almost two years, in the middle of some grass near the west bank of the Willamette River, was one of roughly 40 campsites cleared that month as a result.įor Muma, the moving process mainly involved waiting for lulls in traffic so he could roll the 26 shopping carts filled with his belongings - bedding, clothes, mattresses, tarp tents - across the bustling roadway to his new site, roughly 350 feet away. Mayor Ted Wheeler had recently banned people from setting up tents on dangerous roadways. In mid March, a laminated neon green sign appeared near his camp, a notice from the city of Portland requiring him to leave his campsite. After camping for years near the off ramp of the Ross Island Bridge, Gordon Muma Jr.
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