Thread by @washingtonpost

After more than a year of allowing most homeless camps to remain intact so as not to displace people during the pandemic, cities across the country are now beginning to confront another public health crisis unfolding on their streets wapo.st/3gNHvgN

This month, as Portland announced plans to start removing more camps, the city said it has gone from having an average of about six large encampments before the pandemic to what it now estimates to be more than 100 wapo.st/3gNHvgN

One of them was Jeremy Wooldridge’s camp on Emerson Street, which had grown during the last year into a small village of six tents and five makeshift structures built from fencing, wood pallets, disassembled trampoline parts, and tarps wapo.st/3gNHvgN

Neighbors, who called the camp the “Mansion on Emerson street,” had filed 174 complaints since the start of the pandemic. They’d called 911 about homelessness issues at least 14 times. The fire department had responded to two out-of-control campfires. wapo.st/3gNHvgN

Recently, three people – contractors with the Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program tasked with removing illegal campsites – came to tell Jeremy that he and the others living at the camp had 48-hours to leave. wapo.st/3gNHvgN

Jeremy, who was 43, saw the only possessions he owned — items he could repair, trade, or sell in order to live a life on the distant margins of a city where he increasingly had nowhere else to go.

Read the full story: wapo.st/3gNHvgN

(Mason Trinca/The Washington Post)