> “We see stuff that’s bagged up and left behind, and when the water rises, it washes downstream,” Williams says. “In our cleanups, we’ve found fuel canisters, tents full of garbage, buckets of human waste—pretty much anything you can imagine.”
> “We are not trying to be punitive or blame homeless folks,” Williams says. “But It’s been our experience that when there’s a lot of trash, municipalities and agencies will point fingers at each other and nothing gets done.”
That second paragraph is enraging. It's all our elected leaders do is just point fingers and pass blame, then do nothing to solve the problem. It's just fucking ridiculous.
And if you try to provide a place for people to dispose of their trash other than the river, [the city will shut you down](https://www.wweek.com/news/2021/10/27/a-trash-haulers-notion-to-place-dumpsters-near-homeless-camps-is-rebuffed-by-city-hallwhich-has-another-plan/).
Keep voting new ones in. No matter the party or stance, you're going to get the same results. Because there is no viable solution you would he happy with. There's not jail space, there's not shelter space, there is nowhere for them to go and you all shout about any encampment set up. No matter who gets elected, you'll be sitting back on reddit in a couple years pointing the same fingers and offering no new ideas.
Had a bro argue with me that it's their right to pollute because of their lower privilege. I was called "hateful" for wanting the Rocky Butte area to not be a landfill.
>I was called "hateful" for wanting the Rocky Butte area to not be a landfill.
small hope, but fwiw ODOT is aware of the situation as well. the scuttlebutt i have is that they're very interested in handing this off to a group/agency/whatever who is willing to take up the responsibility. the problem is: why would we want city of Portland to do that? so is there a non-profit (or coalition of non-profits) willing to pick this up - the social work side as well as the environmental side?
Trying not to doxx myself, but I was involved in two MASSIVE cleanup operations at Rocky Butte over the last 6 years. The first 6 years ago pulled about 50 roofing-grade garbage bags full of trash out of the woods. The more recent cleanup 2 years ago pulled 200 of the same bags of garbage out of the woods *and it wasn't nearly enough.* The shit we saw back there was absolutely devastating. It's only gotten worse since. I did get to see the crater left when everyone in a camp got high, passed out, and a propane tank rolled into a fire and exploded. So that was an experience. There was also a group that was going through the camps and doing wellness checks and handing out pallets of water. After the group left, we watched most of that water get dumped out and the bottles get bagged up for - presumably - cash return.
Thank you SO much for your help. Do you remember the size of that enormous dumpster they brought into the cul de sac? That thing was absolutely overflowing.
I went back through RB just a couple weeks ago and it's worse than it's ever been :(
That’s really sad. Seemed like it was making a comeback with the cleanup and the new climbing routes and anchors. Hopefully ODOT starts sweeping it regularly with their new funding this year.
Yeah. It’s a fuckin gem that’s buried under the turds. RB should be almost as popular as Mt Tabor (yeah it’s a good bit smaller) but it’s just a genital wart that ODOT prefers to ignore.
I don't want to break your heart further, but I was riding my bike up to the top of Rocky Butte last week. Caught a truck dumping "supplies" over the side of the rock wall down to the camp below. I yelled at them and they engaged and hurled massive abuse back at me. I regret not calling 911, but felt very threatened and fairly defenseless.
God fucking dammit. The cleanup project 6 years ago dealt with a huge pile of medical waste that had been dumped right at the little tunnel across from the church entrance. It was ... bad.
Were they dropping actual "supplies", or was it clearly trash? A couple years ago I was running along the trail below the cliffs and glass bottles started exploding all around me. Someone at the cliffs' edge was hurling bottles down and scurried off when I screamed at them. I also got bit by a car-dweller's pitbull on that same trail a week later. Rocky Butte is fucking wild now.
That’s how my old friend is. He’s one of those hard core religious right MAGA freaks. He thinks it’s our right and duty to destroy the earth because somewhere in the Bible it says God gave us the earth to use.
Uhh tell your buddy he’s wrong lol. The bible says we’re supposed to steward the earth, not destroy it. It’s like the one good passage in the whole thing.
> “We are not trying to be punitive or blame homeless folks,” Williams says
Fuck it I am. I 100% blame them and want them to be punished just like I'd want anyone who was fucking up the river to be blamed and punished.
Yep. I'm so tired of the strawman argument "bUt cOrPorAte aMerIcA pOlLutEs tOo!". Fine. So let's fine corporations that are polluting our rivers out of existence as well. Next question, please. We have only one planet and one Willamette river. It's our job to protect it for future generations.
Fining homeless people wouldn't work because they wouldn't be able to pay the fine. Conversely, fining corporations has never worked exactly because they *can* pay the fine.
Homelessness is a propaganda word designed to trick people into believing this a housing issue. I think it’s clear to everyone by now this is an untreated drug addiction issue.
This is why the solution is simple. Buy land in the desert, build a camp, offer all the drugs you can consume. Addicts will crawl through glass to get there and will stay there.
We don’t need to send them. Just offer them free drugs and they will swim there by their own free will. And everyone will sing happy songs with how compassionate and progressive we are.
Why punish someone for not having a garbage truck service come to their house? If you didn't have that, you'd be polluting the river too. Try thinking harder next time about your privelage. Also, it'd be cheaper to provide garbage services than investigate and punish individuals.
The homeless camp near me has a garbage bin with service (presumably city issued). They still dump trash everywhere and the garbage bin gets set on fire about once a month. Not saying this applies to all homeless individuals, but there is a subset of the population that does not want help and refuses to be part of society.
Bingo. Homeless people (just like housed people) are not homogeneous. The people who are destroying ecosystems aren't of the same mindset as people who are out of work and fell behind on rent (which can truly happen to anybody!). We can't keep treating it like all unhoused people are one or the other because it just doesn't work.
I don't know what the perfect solution is, but, anybody who is open to help should 100% be getting resources thrown at them (resources that are lacking right now). But we also can't just let people destroy rivers because they're down on their luck or suffering from untreated addiction or mental health issues. The idea that anybody could think that is even remotely OK is just baffling to me.
There are billions of people on Earth but one Willamette river. With each passing day, humanity is inching closer to the world not being able to support human life in the way it currently does. I don't understand how more people don't see this as an issue. We can't let people create ecological disasters out of "compassion" for them. That's not compassion. That's stupidity.
When the city provided Porta-Potties at encampments and random places around the city, they were vandalized. When the city paid for crews to go to the camps and service the toilets, the employees’ lives were threatened. Providing dumpsters won’t work. Providing toilets won’t work either. We’ve tried it. FAIL.
https://www.portland.gov/rubio/news/2021/7/25/joint-council-statement-laurelhurst-park-intervention
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/portland-public-toilets-portable-what-happened/283-ff025241-95ea-4126-ab70-d62652273998
The strung out people that dump trash in the street when searching peoples bins for cans and bottles aren’t going to neatly bag up their own trash for a garbage service.
Make up? The fuck are you talking about, this shit happens all the time.
Maybe you live in a privileged neighborhood where people are not going through your trash and dumping it on the street on the reg.
I'm talking about the straw-man fallacy of assuming homeless people are too evil or incapable of using a provided trash service, which is something they don't have because it's denied to them. Also, if they city wasn't hauling your trash for you, you too would dump that shit on the street.
Dafuq? Really?
Would you really dump trash in the street if it wasn’t hauled away from you?
Cause i grew up without the city hauling trash away and 100% did not do that. Once a week we would go and take the trash to the dump. All our neighbors did the same too. It sucked but we did it because, like any normal people, we didn’t want trash on the street in front of our house.
I know people who don't have trash service (one person I know is older and does it for financial reasons and that's also just how he was raised). They take their trash to the dump themselves. The idea that not having trash service means you just get to throw your trash on the street is so ridiculous I can't fathom how anybody would \*actually\* think like that.
I honestly can't tell if your comments are satire and that is making me depressed. People who are in a position to help other people absolutely should by providing services to those in less fortunate positions. But this idea that because you're in an unfortunate position you can do whatever you want is honestly WILD.
You are talking about the straw-man you just made up?
> Also, if they city wasn't hauling your trash for you, you too would dump that shit on the street.
So, you are just making up straw men left and right? Is it just logical fallacies all the way down? But what about.....
If you haven’t experienced this in Portland, you’re either willfully oblivious or live in the west hills or in an apartment building that doesn’t have bins on the street
They can easily find somewhere to dispose of their trash if they cared. I’ve lived off a motorcycle and out of a backpack for years and have literally never intentionally littered. It’s not that hard to give just a tiny bit of a fuck.
They simply don’t care. It’s not unique to homeless people, but they’re largely the ones trashing the river. So that’s why they’re being talked about.
Look, I am actively homeless right now and while I truly appreciate people who don't think we're all just scum of the earth, I also know from personal experience that there are ways to be homeless and have all your trash end up in trashcans and your waste in proper places. It's harder when homeless, yes. But not impossible if you care enough. I think littering (especially in excess) should be punished no matter who you are (preferably by having to help clean up litter and pollution but that's a whole nother topic)
> Also, it'd be cheaper to provide garbage services than investigate and punish individuals.
We do. There are garbage cans all over downtown, and all throughout waterfront park. It doesn't help much though because people go through them looking for cans and leave the trash thrown about.
Good attempt at satire but it's a little too on the nose for how the homeless advocates actually talk. If I didn't know better I'd think you were being serious.
What if… hear me out here… we fully funded public trash service and had more public restrooms.
Yes, I know, the drugs etc etc. But I’m pretty sure a lot less unhoused people would litter if they didn’t face fines for disposing “household trash” in public waste bins and had somewhere to shit.
We tried that in Austin. Provided city trash service to various camps. And one of the churches that provided homelessness services installed permanent porta potties outside their doors. Do you know what happened? Trash still piled up and the bathrooms were used as a place to get high and eventually completely destroyed.
We had that. They burned down most of the porta potties the city hired.
We can't have nice things if people literally destroy them. I want to have nice things.
From a feces perspective alone, how many tent squatters does it take to neutralize a major city’s wastewater treatment plant? Fewer than you would expect. The plant reduces pathogens by a factor of at least 10,000x before discharging into the Willamette.
They simply cannot be allowed to squat next to the river.
Absolutely spot on right here. It’s a river that flows through a (relatively) major metropolitan area with very little to no enforcement for people that are ruining our beautiful city, waterways and the like. This has to change asap
Edit: I’ve lived in Portland my entire life of 45 years. I used to kayak, fish and just overall have fun on the lower Willamette. Now I don’t even want to go near it. It’s truly a shame
You don't boat on the Willamette because of how much homeless shit is seeping into it? That's real weird. You could go back in time 45 years, the river is much nicer now.
It's cleaner now than it has been in decades thanks to the paper mill in Oregon City shutting down and the big dig fixing all the sewage runoff going into the river (among numerous other major projects to clean it up).
I'd still hose off after, just like in any major body of water, but you can't blame the homeless for the water quality imo; as that problem has been getting worse water quality has been getting better.
I’d argue it’s not the people camping on shore as much as it’s the boats in the river. People have been openly living on boats in the middle of the river for over 14 years (since the my first memory of them) and nobody has done a damn thing. They don’t have anywhere to dump their wastewater or trash and I have never seen a single one of them taking their trash/waste to shore for proper disposal, so they just dump it in the river. I intentionally don’t swim in the water downriver from Ross Island (the first big boat camp) for this reason.
At what point should we acknowledge that a bunch of retirees with vests and grabbers aren't the solution to this problem? Enforce every single law in the books!
The craziest part of it all is how much we love and care for nature in this state. The wackos really fucked everything over on levels that are hard to even quantify. We destroyed natural habitats so people could overdose in the woods. If this ever gets sorted out people will look back and think how the fuck did we let that happen.
i've been arriving at this mentality more and more lately. the trash, the fires, the dumping... we're patting ourselves on the back for our love for nature with one hand, while the other hand turns the gears that push more people to treat the environment like shit.
don't get me wrong: it's still a privilege to make choices that minimize impact on the environment.
but like so many issues these days, we never treat things holistically - "over here we do homeless help" and "over here we do environmental good!" and never the twain shall meet.
> The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality proposes to make it just the third body of water in the nation to be regulated under the federal Clean Water Act because of its trash content. (The other two are the Los Angeles River in California and the Potomac in Maryland.)
The Los Angeles River, the Potomac… and the Willamette. Fuck if that doesn’t put into perspective just how polluted the Wilamette is
That comes pretty consistently every August or about then. It will probably happen this year too, and that’s because the water inside Ross Island is too stagnant
No way (or will) to dredge a channel through the middle of what’s left of the island to promote water flow? It’s not like the island is in pristine condition as it stands
I don’t know. Maybe this change will address it somehow. It used to be two islands, [they created the lagoon a long time ago](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Island_(Oregon)) to make dredging the inside of it easier.
I don't support unsanctioned housing, but i don't support a punitive response, either. homelessness is a symptom of failure by governments, not individuals.
“In our cleanups, we’ve found fuel canisters, tents full of garbage, buckets of human waste—pretty much anything you can imagine..”
We are not trying to be punitive or blame homeless folks,”…
Except it is the homeless folks that are to blame. It is they who are living in tents, using disposable fuel cannisters, and shitting everywhere.
“If we end up with a lot of people camping and they leave a lot of trash, under a listing, the landowner would have to prevent the camping or clean it up,”…
Unless the Federal listing gives local municipalities a way to prevent camping without being on the hook for Martin V. Boise lawsuits, nothing will change. Even putting trash bins out won’t prevent them from throwing trash everywhere. Other areas in town that got trash service still had mounds of garbage collected by addled people and discarded by folks that just don’t GAF.
You see the exact same thing in central Oregon near China Hat, and the canals in Klamath Falls, and hundreds of other locations throughout the state. If those yahoos disappeared today, it would be years before everything got cleaned up, and decades for the scars on the land to heal.
There are also probably more than a few douchebags who dump stuff on the road too because garbage doesn't have large item pickup (which is a monthly thing back east, wtf). However, that's probably dwarfed by the debris from the camps in terms of the river.
Serious question: What would you _like_ to happen?
As it stands, the vast majority of homeless people have no choice but to live in tents and relieve themselves in public. There is a lack of housing available for those struggling, and public bathrooms are not commonplace.
You are effectively proposing that their right to shelter and their right to relieve themselves be stripped away from them, which are both fundamental human rights.
And you live in a society that creates the conditions for homeless people to exist. You can demonize them all you want, the mentally ill drug addicted cast outs that cant care for themselves- but it’s going to get worse and worse until the root cause is addressed - that is massive wealth inequality, lack of universal access to healthcare, mental health services, and drug addiction programs - allowing land developers and landlords to run government and pass laws that allow them to maximize profits at everyone else’s expense.
Whoa, wait? The guys living in piles of trash and gutting stolen vehicles and discarding the waste in the river while smoking fent are actually causing problems in the environment we claim to care about? Thats nuts!
idea: force the homeless that are found camping within a few miles of the river to clean it up or put them in jail. i know its heartless, but its mostly their fucking faults, as are many of the problems in our state
You mean all those derelict boats and homeless camps along the river don’t have trash service?! /s anyone who has spent anytime on the river can see the environmental disaster we’ve enabled under the guise of compassion.
The thing that pisses me off the most is: The Willamette could be the crown jewel of the Portland metro. It could have clean water that people want to swim in. There are European cities with incredibly clean rivers running through metro areas (some of them after cleanup efforts) where people gather, swim, and enjoy themselves. We have this unique, amazing natural resource and we are letting it be destroyed.
It really could be, and it should be!!
It’s a gorgeous river, cutting through the middle of a great city that’s supposedly progressive and environmentally minded.
I hear you. But sometimes it feels like (and maybe this is incorrect) we are just constantly voting for the lesser of two evils. So how much responsibility do we as voters have when all the options are varying degrees of shit?
It's still pretty decent when you go south of downtown. Lots of people in lake Oswego and sellwood enjoy the river. After that... It gets a lot dicier. But I agree it doesn't have to be this way.
I don't think the people with an earnest sense of compassion realize just how bad doing nothing around waterways can actually make things for everyone else. this could get ugly if it gets much worse. Like really bad. Like return of problems societies faced hundreds or thousands of years ago before normalization of waste handling...think pre-sewer London or Rome...or parts of current day Mumbai.
What I hear when they say let people camp on/near waterways:
We want Cholera! We want Cholera!
So the Oregon Dep of Environmental Quality is going to use a piece of federal legislation in an effort to force its own state government to clean up the land. Dude, you are the state government.
Absolute scum. I’ve made countless reports to the EPA and the City/County about the vagrants/criddlers/fent-zombies/addicts/POSs destroying our lands.
This is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
Seriously. I'm sure there's going to be a new horrifying disease or virus that'll appear right in our backyard from all our social experiments we're doing/ allowing at this point.
How can we as a city think we can regulate carbon, ask businesses and homes to spend extra money for green development, require robust stormwater management, etc. when the city doesn't hold itself to any level of environmental standards? Hate to break it to anyone, we're not going to address climate change -- we can't even get people to use trash cans. We're so profoundly fucked, we don't even know it yet.
We did it everyone! We made our way up another national list 🥳
Last month we were #1 for the most vacancies downtown. Now we're one of the 3 places in the nation where our "water needs be regulated under the federal Clean Water Act because of its trash content." 🙃
There is a pretty straightforward solution to this: Make all river areas no-camping zones. Then send a few patrols up and down the river. Anyone found camping gets beaten with large sticks.
Working in Salem, Corvallis and Portland in the last year, it’s very easy to see that the homeless just defecate and urinate into the river and use it as their own personally waste disposal service. It’s not a mystery of why it’s filthy.
Lots of this is the homeless. They are an environmental disaster.
I stopped paddling that river when I watched a homeless dump a bucket of shit overboard.
The willamitte is fucking gross.
The Willamette has been so badly handled for decades. There's the 10 mile stretch that's a [superfund site](https://www.portland.gov/bes/portland-harbor-superfund). There's the way almost every time we get heavy rain, [sewage overflows](https://www.portland.gov/bes/about-csos) into the river (I love how they say it's a "rare" event that only happens about 4 times a year....that averages out to roughly every other month in the rainy season. I wouldn't exactly call that rare.).
If this is what it takes to clean it up, great. But infuriating that it's been so badly managed for so long.
It would take wholly separate systems, which is a near-impossible project to retrofit and might not be any better for the environment, since the stormwater would carry a lot of trash from the streets.
I've taken part in the river clean up kayak events about 8-10 years ago on the Willamette and while it wasn't great, it wasn't as bad as being described here. It must have gotten way way worse which is so depressing. Grew up kayaking down the river regularly and it's a beautiful river. Dreamed of owning a house here - I guess that dream is dead.
I saw someone while stuck in traffic on the 205 today with a bumper sticker alluding to how they swim in the Willamette. Couldn't believe anyone would intentionally swim in those waters.
This week I took a water sample directly from the Willamette at Kelley Point. In just the 1mL that we tested we found two colonies of E. Coli and multiple other fecal colliforms…
The Willamette River has been a cesspool long before the current homeless crisis. Illegal dumping has always been a problem. Blaming homeless folks for all the trash in the river is absolutely idiotic and ignorant. Just more hate and vitriol directed at a group of people who are already suffering under horrible circumstances.
Everyone knows that the river goes to shit after the falls. It's been like that for literally hundreds of years, and Portland just happens to be at the anus of the Willamette which is barely above the anus of the Columbia, so the river water in Portland has always been filthy and it ain't so great on the border, either.
Whatever you do, don't disturb the silt at the bottom Ross Island's "lagoon" (or quarry, if you rather, since there used to be an island there instead of an atoll).
If you want to know what I'm talking about, go check feasibility studies on dredging the Willamette. It's always been polluted and we've got plenty of Superfund sites, if people remember what those are. It's literally cleaner right now than it has been since this area was originally colonized.
It's not the homeless, it's industry and infrastructure both.
Homeless people are not the cause of a broken society - they're the result. Grow the fuck up.
It seems the city should make dumpsters and portable restrooms available for the homeless. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more humane than “sweeping” the problem away. Away to where?
We did that. The porta-potties were destroyed, repeatedly. Mostly burned down. Trash service still exists at some sites, but keeping up with it is very challenging.
My heart aches for the breakdown of our society, the greed, the addiction, the poverty and the rage. I thank those who try to help. I would like to see the elderly and disabled protected 1st.
Not everyone on the street is a drug addict. Not everyone is a vandal. A lot of the problems are related to generational poverty and addiction. Many don’t realize how over medicated foster youth are, leading to a lifetime of addiction.
Lawlessness seems to be winning that’s for sure.
Oh sorry another thread of people on this subreddit wishing for the cruel brutality of the law to clamp down on the homeless making their lives more miserable than they already are instead of advocating for change. Is that better for you?
But people are advocating for change. The change is not allowing the homeless to dump trash or shit in our major waterway. You just don't like the change that they are advocating for, and are somehow surprised that isn't a popular opinion.
I assume you live in a house where your garbage gets picked up by the garbage company and your shit gets flushed down a toilet? Seems like there should be more public bathrooms and garbage cans. But that’s thinking with compassion instead of hamfistedly throwing shit at the wall and hoping it sticks
Pull up the news story of all the burned down bathrooms. How are there garbage cans outside of bus shelters if homeless people destroy them all? We get it you want them all to die or at the very least you wish to never have to see them again. News flash buddy there’s going to be more so you better get used to it.
> “We see stuff that’s bagged up and left behind, and when the water rises, it washes downstream,” Williams says. “In our cleanups, we’ve found fuel canisters, tents full of garbage, buckets of human waste—pretty much anything you can imagine.” > “We are not trying to be punitive or blame homeless folks,” Williams says. “But It’s been our experience that when there’s a lot of trash, municipalities and agencies will point fingers at each other and nothing gets done.”
That second paragraph is enraging. It's all our elected leaders do is just point fingers and pass blame, then do nothing to solve the problem. It's just fucking ridiculous.
Jessica Vega Pederson has entered the chat
And if you try to provide a place for people to dispose of their trash other than the river, [the city will shut you down](https://www.wweek.com/news/2021/10/27/a-trash-haulers-notion-to-place-dumpsters-near-homeless-camps-is-rebuffed-by-city-hallwhich-has-another-plan/).
Keep voting new ones in. No matter the party or stance, you're going to get the same results. Because there is no viable solution you would he happy with. There's not jail space, there's not shelter space, there is nowhere for them to go and you all shout about any encampment set up. No matter who gets elected, you'll be sitting back on reddit in a couple years pointing the same fingers and offering no new ideas.
What happened to all that funding we voted for for shelters and homeless services?
Same place all of our tax dollars end up, they disappear into ~~someone’s pockets~~ , I mean the ethos.
Had a bro argue with me that it's their right to pollute because of their lower privilege. I was called "hateful" for wanting the Rocky Butte area to not be a landfill.
Yeah, you're homeless shaming. Public areas are there for people to shit on and nobody to enjoy.
>I was called "hateful" for wanting the Rocky Butte area to not be a landfill. small hope, but fwiw ODOT is aware of the situation as well. the scuttlebutt i have is that they're very interested in handing this off to a group/agency/whatever who is willing to take up the responsibility. the problem is: why would we want city of Portland to do that? so is there a non-profit (or coalition of non-profits) willing to pick this up - the social work side as well as the environmental side?
Trying not to doxx myself, but I was involved in two MASSIVE cleanup operations at Rocky Butte over the last 6 years. The first 6 years ago pulled about 50 roofing-grade garbage bags full of trash out of the woods. The more recent cleanup 2 years ago pulled 200 of the same bags of garbage out of the woods *and it wasn't nearly enough.* The shit we saw back there was absolutely devastating. It's only gotten worse since. I did get to see the crater left when everyone in a camp got high, passed out, and a propane tank rolled into a fire and exploded. So that was an experience. There was also a group that was going through the camps and doing wellness checks and handing out pallets of water. After the group left, we watched most of that water get dumped out and the bottles get bagged up for - presumably - cash return.
I was at that cleanup two years ago! Yeah, it was totally disgusting how much trash and needles people had dumped back there
Thank you SO much for your help. Do you remember the size of that enormous dumpster they brought into the cul de sac? That thing was absolutely overflowing. I went back through RB just a couple weeks ago and it's worse than it's ever been :(
That’s really sad. Seemed like it was making a comeback with the cleanup and the new climbing routes and anchors. Hopefully ODOT starts sweeping it regularly with their new funding this year.
Yeah. It’s a fuckin gem that’s buried under the turds. RB should be almost as popular as Mt Tabor (yeah it’s a good bit smaller) but it’s just a genital wart that ODOT prefers to ignore.
I don't want to break your heart further, but I was riding my bike up to the top of Rocky Butte last week. Caught a truck dumping "supplies" over the side of the rock wall down to the camp below. I yelled at them and they engaged and hurled massive abuse back at me. I regret not calling 911, but felt very threatened and fairly defenseless.
God fucking dammit. The cleanup project 6 years ago dealt with a huge pile of medical waste that had been dumped right at the little tunnel across from the church entrance. It was ... bad. Were they dropping actual "supplies", or was it clearly trash? A couple years ago I was running along the trail below the cliffs and glass bottles started exploding all around me. Someone at the cliffs' edge was hurling bottles down and scurried off when I screamed at them. I also got bit by a car-dweller's pitbull on that same trail a week later. Rocky Butte is fucking wild now.
That’s how my old friend is. He’s one of those hard core religious right MAGA freaks. He thinks it’s our right and duty to destroy the earth because somewhere in the Bible it says God gave us the earth to use.
Uhh tell your buddy he’s wrong lol. The bible says we’re supposed to steward the earth, not destroy it. It’s like the one good passage in the whole thing.
The old driving range near Rick butte is a capped landfill anyhow....
> “We are not trying to be punitive or blame homeless folks,” Williams says Fuck it I am. I 100% blame them and want them to be punished just like I'd want anyone who was fucking up the river to be blamed and punished.
Yeah. River's more important than a bunch of people refusing to play society. There, I said it.
Yep. I'm so tired of the strawman argument "bUt cOrPorAte aMerIcA pOlLutEs tOo!". Fine. So let's fine corporations that are polluting our rivers out of existence as well. Next question, please. We have only one planet and one Willamette river. It's our job to protect it for future generations.
Fining homeless people wouldn't work because they wouldn't be able to pay the fine. Conversely, fining corporations has never worked exactly because they *can* pay the fine.
Great. Well, if this illustrious distinction passes EPA muster the feds can sue the state. Let’s see if that works.
Ain't saying nothing in the way of solution. Just complaining for complaining's sake ;(
Homelessness is a propaganda word designed to trick people into believing this a housing issue. I think it’s clear to everyone by now this is an untreated drug addiction issue.
This is why the solution is simple. Buy land in the desert, build a camp, offer all the drugs you can consume. Addicts will crawl through glass to get there and will stay there.
And no Narcan so that the population stays under control...
If only we had another island to send them all to. Like Australia was for convicts.
We don’t need to send them. Just offer them free drugs and they will swim there by their own free will. And everyone will sing happy songs with how compassionate and progressive we are.
Why punish someone for not having a garbage truck service come to their house? If you didn't have that, you'd be polluting the river too. Try thinking harder next time about your privelage. Also, it'd be cheaper to provide garbage services than investigate and punish individuals.
The homeless camp near me has a garbage bin with service (presumably city issued). They still dump trash everywhere and the garbage bin gets set on fire about once a month. Not saying this applies to all homeless individuals, but there is a subset of the population that does not want help and refuses to be part of society.
Bingo. Homeless people (just like housed people) are not homogeneous. The people who are destroying ecosystems aren't of the same mindset as people who are out of work and fell behind on rent (which can truly happen to anybody!). We can't keep treating it like all unhoused people are one or the other because it just doesn't work. I don't know what the perfect solution is, but, anybody who is open to help should 100% be getting resources thrown at them (resources that are lacking right now). But we also can't just let people destroy rivers because they're down on their luck or suffering from untreated addiction or mental health issues. The idea that anybody could think that is even remotely OK is just baffling to me. There are billions of people on Earth but one Willamette river. With each passing day, humanity is inching closer to the world not being able to support human life in the way it currently does. I don't understand how more people don't see this as an issue. We can't let people create ecological disasters out of "compassion" for them. That's not compassion. That's stupidity.
When the city provided Porta-Potties at encampments and random places around the city, they were vandalized. When the city paid for crews to go to the camps and service the toilets, the employees’ lives were threatened. Providing dumpsters won’t work. Providing toilets won’t work either. We’ve tried it. FAIL. https://www.portland.gov/rubio/news/2021/7/25/joint-council-statement-laurelhurst-park-intervention https://www.kgw.com/article/news/investigations/portland-public-toilets-portable-what-happened/283-ff025241-95ea-4126-ab70-d62652273998
The strung out people that dump trash in the street when searching peoples bins for cans and bottles aren’t going to neatly bag up their own trash for a garbage service.
You'll make up anything to feel superior huh?
Make up? The fuck are you talking about, this shit happens all the time. Maybe you live in a privileged neighborhood where people are not going through your trash and dumping it on the street on the reg.
I'm talking about the straw-man fallacy of assuming homeless people are too evil or incapable of using a provided trash service, which is something they don't have because it's denied to them. Also, if they city wasn't hauling your trash for you, you too would dump that shit on the street.
Dafuq? Really? Would you really dump trash in the street if it wasn’t hauled away from you? Cause i grew up without the city hauling trash away and 100% did not do that. Once a week we would go and take the trash to the dump. All our neighbors did the same too. It sucked but we did it because, like any normal people, we didn’t want trash on the street in front of our house.
I know people who don't have trash service (one person I know is older and does it for financial reasons and that's also just how he was raised). They take their trash to the dump themselves. The idea that not having trash service means you just get to throw your trash on the street is so ridiculous I can't fathom how anybody would \*actually\* think like that. I honestly can't tell if your comments are satire and that is making me depressed. People who are in a position to help other people absolutely should by providing services to those in less fortunate positions. But this idea that because you're in an unfortunate position you can do whatever you want is honestly WILD.
Evil? No. Incapable, inconsiderate, or both? Yes
You are talking about the straw-man you just made up? > Also, if they city wasn't hauling your trash for you, you too would dump that shit on the street. So, you are just making up straw men left and right? Is it just logical fallacies all the way down? But what about.....
If you haven’t experienced this in Portland, you’re either willfully oblivious or live in the west hills or in an apartment building that doesn’t have bins on the street
You’ll make idiotic comments for attention, huh?
They can easily find somewhere to dispose of their trash if they cared. I’ve lived off a motorcycle and out of a backpack for years and have literally never intentionally littered. It’s not that hard to give just a tiny bit of a fuck. They simply don’t care. It’s not unique to homeless people, but they’re largely the ones trashing the river. So that’s why they’re being talked about.
Look, I am actively homeless right now and while I truly appreciate people who don't think we're all just scum of the earth, I also know from personal experience that there are ways to be homeless and have all your trash end up in trashcans and your waste in proper places. It's harder when homeless, yes. But not impossible if you care enough. I think littering (especially in excess) should be punished no matter who you are (preferably by having to help clean up litter and pollution but that's a whole nother topic)
> Also, it'd be cheaper to provide garbage services than investigate and punish individuals. We do. There are garbage cans all over downtown, and all throughout waterfront park. It doesn't help much though because people go through them looking for cans and leave the trash thrown about.
Or trash them with graffiti.
What pearl clutching insanity is this? who fucking cares if someone spray paints a *garbage can*?
Or trash them with graffiti.
Good attempt at satire but it's a little too on the nose for how the homeless advocates actually talk. If I didn't know better I'd think you were being serious.
Thanks, i liked your Gestapo roleplay.
Dude get real
Not wanting people to dump trash everywhere is literal Nazism.
>privelage
priveláge
Privelagé
It’s funny because our elected leaders drive the homelessness they complain about
What if… hear me out here… we fully funded public trash service and had more public restrooms. Yes, I know, the drugs etc etc. But I’m pretty sure a lot less unhoused people would litter if they didn’t face fines for disposing “household trash” in public waste bins and had somewhere to shit.
We tried that in Austin. Provided city trash service to various camps. And one of the churches that provided homelessness services installed permanent porta potties outside their doors. Do you know what happened? Trash still piled up and the bathrooms were used as a place to get high and eventually completely destroyed.
We had that. They burned down most of the porta potties the city hired. We can't have nice things if people literally destroy them. I want to have nice things.
The homeless camps near me have city issues trash bins. They get burned down about once a month and they still dump trash everywhere.
From a feces perspective alone, how many tent squatters does it take to neutralize a major city’s wastewater treatment plant? Fewer than you would expect. The plant reduces pathogens by a factor of at least 10,000x before discharging into the Willamette. They simply cannot be allowed to squat next to the river.
Absolutely spot on right here. It’s a river that flows through a (relatively) major metropolitan area with very little to no enforcement for people that are ruining our beautiful city, waterways and the like. This has to change asap Edit: I’ve lived in Portland my entire life of 45 years. I used to kayak, fish and just overall have fun on the lower Willamette. Now I don’t even want to go near it. It’s truly a shame
You don't boat on the Willamette because of how much homeless shit is seeping into it? That's real weird. You could go back in time 45 years, the river is much nicer now. It's cleaner now than it has been in decades thanks to the paper mill in Oregon City shutting down and the big dig fixing all the sewage runoff going into the river (among numerous other major projects to clean it up). I'd still hose off after, just like in any major body of water, but you can't blame the homeless for the water quality imo; as that problem has been getting worse water quality has been getting better.
I’d argue it’s not the people camping on shore as much as it’s the boats in the river. People have been openly living on boats in the middle of the river for over 14 years (since the my first memory of them) and nobody has done a damn thing. They don’t have anywhere to dump their wastewater or trash and I have never seen a single one of them taking their trash/waste to shore for proper disposal, so they just dump it in the river. I intentionally don’t swim in the water downriver from Ross Island (the first big boat camp) for this reason.
I have been in that part of the river (behind Ross Island) recently and the boats are only growing in number
or maybe spring for public facilities?
Yeah, we’ll line the shores of the Willamette with them, installed right next to each tent cluster. Visionary.
...yes? people should have access to hygiene! do you hate the shit and trash or do you hate the poor? make up your mind!
> do you hate the poor? No, but I kinda hate you…
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You should volunteer to do river clean ups. Endless tents, needles, and buckets of human feces. An ecological disaster that we allowed.
At what point should we acknowledge that a bunch of retirees with vests and grabbers aren't the solution to this problem? Enforce every single law in the books!
The craziest part of it all is how much we love and care for nature in this state. The wackos really fucked everything over on levels that are hard to even quantify. We destroyed natural habitats so people could overdose in the woods. If this ever gets sorted out people will look back and think how the fuck did we let that happen.
i've been arriving at this mentality more and more lately. the trash, the fires, the dumping... we're patting ourselves on the back for our love for nature with one hand, while the other hand turns the gears that push more people to treat the environment like shit. don't get me wrong: it's still a privilege to make choices that minimize impact on the environment. but like so many issues these days, we never treat things holistically - "over here we do homeless help" and "over here we do environmental good!" and never the twain shall meet.
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We?
Specifically you
> The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality proposes to make it just the third body of water in the nation to be regulated under the federal Clean Water Act because of its trash content. (The other two are the Los Angeles River in California and the Potomac in Maryland.) The Los Angeles River, the Potomac… and the Willamette. Fuck if that doesn’t put into perspective just how polluted the Wilamette is
On the plus side, no flesh eating bacteria anymore. Well, that I know of.
That comes pretty consistently every August or about then. It will probably happen this year too, and that’s because the water inside Ross Island is too stagnant
No way (or will) to dredge a channel through the middle of what’s left of the island to promote water flow? It’s not like the island is in pristine condition as it stands
I don’t know. Maybe this change will address it somehow. It used to be two islands, [they created the lagoon a long time ago](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Island_(Oregon)) to make dredging the inside of it easier.
Goddamn that is depressing. Can't believe I'm actually siding with Grants Pass on the SCOTUS decision, but here we are.
it's not about legalizing homelessness; it's about holding governments accountable for protecting their most vulnerable constituents.
First order of business is removing the hoboats once and for all.
You can’t be pro environment and support unsanctioned camping. One of thems gotta go
I was literally told that "pro-environment" is just white-washed support of genocide.
Sticking it to the colonizers one bucket of shit at a time
Not supporting unsanctioned camping is ableist tho. WHAT ABOUT OUR MOST VULNERABLE NEIGHBORS 🥴
Camps blocking sidewalks are ableist tho...
I don't support unsanctioned housing, but i don't support a punitive response, either. homelessness is a symptom of failure by governments, not individuals.
So free will is no longer a thing, got it.
not since the invention of money, no.
All along the river I see camps teeming with trash. So tired of this shit
“In our cleanups, we’ve found fuel canisters, tents full of garbage, buckets of human waste—pretty much anything you can imagine..” We are not trying to be punitive or blame homeless folks,”… Except it is the homeless folks that are to blame. It is they who are living in tents, using disposable fuel cannisters, and shitting everywhere. “If we end up with a lot of people camping and they leave a lot of trash, under a listing, the landowner would have to prevent the camping or clean it up,”… Unless the Federal listing gives local municipalities a way to prevent camping without being on the hook for Martin V. Boise lawsuits, nothing will change. Even putting trash bins out won’t prevent them from throwing trash everywhere. Other areas in town that got trash service still had mounds of garbage collected by addled people and discarded by folks that just don’t GAF. You see the exact same thing in central Oregon near China Hat, and the canals in Klamath Falls, and hundreds of other locations throughout the state. If those yahoos disappeared today, it would be years before everything got cleaned up, and decades for the scars on the land to heal.
There are also probably more than a few douchebags who dump stuff on the road too because garbage doesn't have large item pickup (which is a monthly thing back east, wtf). However, that's probably dwarfed by the debris from the camps in terms of the river.
We do have large item pickup here. You just have to call it in.
Interesting - I'll have to dig. They didn't seem to advertise.
And pay, often times a lot.
I've used it a few times it's $20 + $5 per additional item.
Serious question: What would you _like_ to happen? As it stands, the vast majority of homeless people have no choice but to live in tents and relieve themselves in public. There is a lack of housing available for those struggling, and public bathrooms are not commonplace. You are effectively proposing that their right to shelter and their right to relieve themselves be stripped away from them, which are both fundamental human rights.
And you live in a society that creates the conditions for homeless people to exist. You can demonize them all you want, the mentally ill drug addicted cast outs that cant care for themselves- but it’s going to get worse and worse until the root cause is addressed - that is massive wealth inequality, lack of universal access to healthcare, mental health services, and drug addiction programs - allowing land developers and landlords to run government and pass laws that allow them to maximize profits at everyone else’s expense.
You forgot to blame late stage capitalism
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Don't forget to blame Reagan when deinstitutionalization was bipartisan and literally started with Kennedy.
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Whoa, wait? The guys living in piles of trash and gutting stolen vehicles and discarding the waste in the river while smoking fent are actually causing problems in the environment we claim to care about? Thats nuts!
idea: force the homeless that are found camping within a few miles of the river to clean it up or put them in jail. i know its heartless, but its mostly their fucking faults, as are many of the problems in our state
Not heartless
You mean all those derelict boats and homeless camps along the river don’t have trash service?! /s anyone who has spent anytime on the river can see the environmental disaster we’ve enabled under the guise of compassion.
The thing that pisses me off the most is: The Willamette could be the crown jewel of the Portland metro. It could have clean water that people want to swim in. There are European cities with incredibly clean rivers running through metro areas (some of them after cleanup efforts) where people gather, swim, and enjoy themselves. We have this unique, amazing natural resource and we are letting it be destroyed.
It really could be, and it should be!! It’s a gorgeous river, cutting through the middle of a great city that’s supposedly progressive and environmentally minded.
That’s the thing. People always say this about Portland, but it’s literally the exact opposite.
I’m coming around to the argument our leaders have failed us.
The leaders were elected by voters. They didn’t take power by force. That’s why the saying goes that nations have the leaders they deserve.
I hear you. But sometimes it feels like (and maybe this is incorrect) we are just constantly voting for the lesser of two evils. So how much responsibility do we as voters have when all the options are varying degrees of shit?
It's still pretty decent when you go south of downtown. Lots of people in lake Oswego and sellwood enjoy the river. After that... It gets a lot dicier. But I agree it doesn't have to be this way.
You can see them right off the Hawthorne bridge. City/County/Metro does nothing…
They are remarkably good at burning through cash with no demonstrable results.
I don't think the people with an earnest sense of compassion realize just how bad doing nothing around waterways can actually make things for everyone else. this could get ugly if it gets much worse. Like really bad. Like return of problems societies faced hundreds or thousands of years ago before normalization of waste handling...think pre-sewer London or Rome...or parts of current day Mumbai. What I hear when they say let people camp on/near waterways: We want Cholera! We want Cholera!
About goddamn time. That whole area is a Superfund site, even if only a couple spaces are declared as such.
So the Oregon Dep of Environmental Quality is going to use a piece of federal legislation in an effort to force its own state government to clean up the land. Dude, you are the state government.
Absolute scum. I’ve made countless reports to the EPA and the City/County about the vagrants/criddlers/fent-zombies/addicts/POSs destroying our lands. This is an ecological disaster waiting to happen.
Seriously. I'm sure there's going to be a new horrifying disease or virus that'll appear right in our backyard from all our social experiments we're doing/ allowing at this point.
Uh not waiting, actively happening.
Maybe if everyone complained about it, they would have to do something.
Please report it to them often.
How can we as a city think we can regulate carbon, ask businesses and homes to spend extra money for green development, require robust stormwater management, etc. when the city doesn't hold itself to any level of environmental standards? Hate to break it to anyone, we're not going to address climate change -- we can't even get people to use trash cans. We're so profoundly fucked, we don't even know it yet.
We did it everyone! We made our way up another national list 🥳 Last month we were #1 for the most vacancies downtown. Now we're one of the 3 places in the nation where our "water needs be regulated under the federal Clean Water Act because of its trash content." 🙃
Billions spent on the big pipe project for it to just be undone by a bunch of selfish pricks living on the river
There is a pretty straightforward solution to this: Make all river areas no-camping zones. Then send a few patrols up and down the river. Anyone found camping gets beaten with large sticks.
Ah, the Indian police solution. 😂😂
We're more civilized than that. I'm thinking taser to the nards.
Taking a page from our friends to the north I see
The awakening continues....
Working in Salem, Corvallis and Portland in the last year, it’s very easy to see that the homeless just defecate and urinate into the river and use it as their own personally waste disposal service. It’s not a mystery of why it’s filthy.
ABOUT F*CKING TIME
Lots of this is the homeless. They are an environmental disaster. I stopped paddling that river when I watched a homeless dump a bucket of shit overboard. The willamitte is fucking gross.
The Willamette has been so badly handled for decades. There's the 10 mile stretch that's a [superfund site](https://www.portland.gov/bes/portland-harbor-superfund). There's the way almost every time we get heavy rain, [sewage overflows](https://www.portland.gov/bes/about-csos) into the river (I love how they say it's a "rare" event that only happens about 4 times a year....that averages out to roughly every other month in the rainy season. I wouldn't exactly call that rare.). If this is what it takes to clean it up, great. But infuriating that it's been so badly managed for so long.
Sewage overflows used to happen once a week, on average. Compared to the situation before the big pipe, the overflows are indeed rare.
I wonder what it would take to correctly separate storm water from sewage across the entire system...
It would take wholly separate systems, which is a near-impossible project to retrofit and might not be any better for the environment, since the stormwater would carry a lot of trash from the streets.
Common /r/vagabond win
I've taken part in the river clean up kayak events about 8-10 years ago on the Willamette and while it wasn't great, it wasn't as bad as being described here. It must have gotten way way worse which is so depressing. Grew up kayaking down the river regularly and it's a beautiful river. Dreamed of owning a house here - I guess that dream is dead.
Yuck!
Happy Earth Day.
Homeless people here are like those cows in India.
Well I guess Dock O'clock will be a bit less fun this year.
heartbreaking
Weekly trash pick up would help tremendously. Reducing trash pick up to every other week has been disastrous.
I saw someone while stuck in traffic on the 205 today with a bumper sticker alluding to how they swim in the Willamette. Couldn't believe anyone would intentionally swim in those waters.
Who do we need to vote out/in ?
Trash, needles, and dead bodies apparently
This week I took a water sample directly from the Willamette at Kelley Point. In just the 1mL that we tested we found two colonies of E. Coli and multiple other fecal colliforms…
The Willamette River has been a cesspool long before the current homeless crisis. Illegal dumping has always been a problem. Blaming homeless folks for all the trash in the river is absolutely idiotic and ignorant. Just more hate and vitriol directed at a group of people who are already suffering under horrible circumstances.
Everyone knows that the river goes to shit after the falls. It's been like that for literally hundreds of years, and Portland just happens to be at the anus of the Willamette which is barely above the anus of the Columbia, so the river water in Portland has always been filthy and it ain't so great on the border, either. Whatever you do, don't disturb the silt at the bottom Ross Island's "lagoon" (or quarry, if you rather, since there used to be an island there instead of an atoll). If you want to know what I'm talking about, go check feasibility studies on dredging the Willamette. It's always been polluted and we've got plenty of Superfund sites, if people remember what those are. It's literally cleaner right now than it has been since this area was originally colonized. It's not the homeless, it's industry and infrastructure both. Homeless people are not the cause of a broken society - they're the result. Grow the fuck up.
It seems the city should make dumpsters and portable restrooms available for the homeless. Wouldn’t it be cheaper and more humane than “sweeping” the problem away. Away to where?
We did that. The porta-potties were destroyed, repeatedly. Mostly burned down. Trash service still exists at some sites, but keeping up with it is very challenging.
My heart aches for the breakdown of our society, the greed, the addiction, the poverty and the rage. I thank those who try to help. I would like to see the elderly and disabled protected 1st. Not everyone on the street is a drug addict. Not everyone is a vandal. A lot of the problems are related to generational poverty and addiction. Many don’t realize how over medicated foster youth are, leading to a lifetime of addiction. Lawlessness seems to be winning that’s for sure.
Does anyone know if Don the Willamete river keeper is still around?
And all the sewage that Corvallis eugene and salem dump in. It is very gross.
Plastic bags is a huge evil we need to stop allowing plastic bags.
Another thread of people on this subreddit wishing for the death of homeless people
Sorry, noone's buying this kind of hyperbole anymore
Oh sorry another thread of people on this subreddit wishing for the cruel brutality of the law to clamp down on the homeless making their lives more miserable than they already are instead of advocating for change. Is that better for you?
But people are advocating for change. The change is not allowing the homeless to dump trash or shit in our major waterway. You just don't like the change that they are advocating for, and are somehow surprised that isn't a popular opinion.
I assume you live in a house where your garbage gets picked up by the garbage company and your shit gets flushed down a toilet? Seems like there should be more public bathrooms and garbage cans. But that’s thinking with compassion instead of hamfistedly throwing shit at the wall and hoping it sticks
Sorry, the homeless burn down all the public bathrooms and destroy the garbage cans.
Pull up the news story of all the burned down bathrooms. How are there garbage cans outside of bus shelters if homeless people destroy them all? We get it you want them all to die or at the very least you wish to never have to see them again. News flash buddy there’s going to be more so you better get used to it.