#UFISH HOMELESSNESS FREE#

One that might have helped Kuust and Blackburn is a “safe parking” program, typically a secure, free overnight lot with staff, bathrooms, services, and/or hope for housing. The case appears headed for a jury trial.Īlong with system gaps, there are also solutions. The owners and their attorneys declined to comment, but in legal responses, say Kuust and Blackburn damaged their room and engaged in “fraud, deceit, bad faith and/or deception.” A November court filing requests sundry records, including medical, legal, tenancy, and social media. They’re now plaintiffs in a $1.9 million lawsuit against the hotel’s owners, which claims they established tenancy by staying longer than 30 days, but were forced out after giving managers an eviction moratorium document. The couple were living at the Evergreen Inn and Suites, where they spent $80 a day, $2,400 per month, enough for a market-rate two-bedroom. Blackburn’s legal record includes heroin and meth possession charges, a felony forgery conviction, and a court eviction, which made renting nearly impossible. Kuust and Blackburn identify as white and Indigenous-Kuust says she’s an enrolled Alaskan Sun’aq. Compared to people in emergency shelters, street-based populations are disproportionately comprised of marginalized and vulnerable groups, a HUD report shows. It retraumatizes an already vulnerable group, Rankin says. What Kind of Recovery Comes Next?ĭeprioritizing unsheltered houseless people undercuts progressive ideas like equity, inclusivity, and anti-racism. The Past 2 Years Have Left Portland Reeling. HUD’s data went from “ underestimating” street-based homelessness to missing it altogether. Then, last January, 60 percent of the agency’s local partners-including those with the largest street populations-curtailed street counts.

Before the pandemic closed shelters, HUD’s 2020 count found-for the first time-more unsheltered than sheltered individuals. How many people are homeless? The NHLC estimates 3.5 million, the Department of Education 1.5 million. This imprecision extends to the data, long contentious. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) categorizes vehicle residency as “unsheltered” homelessness, though many live in RVs, designed to shelter. San Francisco’s “ vehicle triage center” signals a mechanical emergency. “Car camping” implies a lark “vehicular” suggests death. Today cars, RVs, vans, buses, and box trucks fill urban margins. In the 1920s and ’30s, US migrant workers from Dust Bowl–ravaged Oklahoma-later dubbed “Okies”-alternated between shanty towns and cars during their trek along Route 66. In Ireland and the UK, says vehicle residency scholar Graham Pruss, itinerant groups like the Irish Travellers have used “ halting sites” since 1917. But cars and campers have been purposed as full-time housing for as long as they’ve been mass produced. Homelessness is changing, and vehicle residency is a guidepost. Three of six unhoused people who died in June in an unprecedented 116-degree Oregon heat wave were vehicle residents. Half those in one California county recently cited “ fires” as a cause of their homelessness a third of the homeless population of Chico are fire survivors. Natural disasters contribute to the pivot toward vehicle homes, and are making them more deadly.

Kuust, who struggles with anxiety and post-traumatic stress, prefers cars to a tent, in which she was once hit in the head with a hard object, delivered with an epithet. In the vehicle, they felt protected from Covid-19, and kept their cats. When Kuust and Blackburn moved into the Blazer, shelters were packed. Vehicles offer their residents security, privacy, storage, and a way to keep pets or maintain family composition, Bauman says. Now, the Seattle Human Rights Commission warns of a “houselessness tsunami.” Los Angeles alone has an estimated 18,904 vehicle residents, according to the latest federal data-collected before a pandemic that made street homelessness worse. It’s “a growing crisis,” says Mark Horvath, founder of Invisible People. The NHLC estimates that 40 percent of unhoused people in West Coast cities, where the problem is concentrated, live in vehicles. “If we pay careful attention to the vehicles lining many city streets and even more remote areas,” Rankin tells me, “we can see this crisis-people living in their vehicles as a last resort-is reaching an unprecedented pitch.”

Ufish homelessness