A Tale of Two Tent Cities

Sonya’s bed is soaking wet.

For three days, the 33-year-old woman has been living in a blue tent on a North Portland hill overlooking the Fremont Bridge. Rain is seeping in. She needs wooden pallets to lift her tent off the ground—pronto.

She heads downhill on the triangle of land between North Greeley Avenue and Interstate Avenue. Her camp has no wooden pallets. But the other camp on this land—a place called Hazelnut Grove—has a stack of them. All the donations seem to go to Hazelnut Grove.

“Whose pallets are these?” Sonya asks. “I need four of them.”

She promises to pay a man named Marvin a few dollars, loads the pallets onto a warehouse cart, and starts dragging it through the mud on a Sunday afternoon.

Sonya, who declined to give WW her last name, isn’t sure what will happen to her. She’s applied for housing with the nonprofit JOIN but hears the wait list takes seven months. She doesn’t know if City Hall will let her camp stay in North Portland.

“And on top of that, I’m getting ready to have a baby,” says Sonya, who’s due in February. “I’m just trying not to bother anybody or make any wrong moves.”

The establishment of a tent city in Portland’s Overlook neighborhood has drawn increasing attention since September, when organizers vowed to make the camp they dubbed Hazelnut Grove a long-term place to live.

The Overlook Neighborhood Association has demanded the city kick the camp out. Volunteers have brought food and firewood. Mayor Charlie Hales has praised Hazelnut Grove, and now appears poised to give camp organizers official permission to stay—making it the third city-authorized homeless camp in Portland.

“Hazelnut Grove has been largely doing a good job,” says Hales chief of staff Josh Alpert, “providing a safe place for people to sleep and a community for people to plug into.”

A few days at the campsite, however, tells a complicated story. The campers living here have ambitions to make this place a home and a model for other people living on the streets. But there are two camps on this North Portland hillside, and a hierarchy has been established in the past two months—between haves and have-nots. The camps distrust and resent each other.

The residents of Hazelnut Grove will probably get to stay. The fate of Sonya and her camp is less certain.

The divisions at the Overlook camps also point out how City Hall continues to improvise its approach to homelessness. The most prominent camp in the city, Right2DreamToo in Old Town, is in the midst of a rocky relocation. If Hazelnut Grove succeeds, Hales and City Commissioner Amanda Fritz could let its organizers test the policy for how such camps are handled across Portland.

“It’s like eight seconds on the bull right now,” says Joe Bennie, who helped create Hazelnut Grove. “This combines everything I’ve been striving for, for so many years.”

Bennie is a gray-haired veteran of the Occupy Portland movement, which took over two city parks in downtown Portland for 39 days in 2011. He identified this North Portland camp in September as a quiet site that could be organized without too many cops or troublemakers.

A large canopy tent with a chimney vent in the roof houses the camp’s fire pit. As Saturday evening wears on, more camp residents find their way to the fire. They use the front of a broken guitar body to feed air to the fire, which is especially smoky because of the damp firewood.

One of the residents, a man named Michael, says he’s at Hazelnut Grove temporarily while he lines up housing for school. He’s a semester away from finishing a second master’s degree, he says, this one in library science.

A small radio in his lap produces a tinny rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”

“I’m going to be out of here in a couple of weeks,” he says. “I’ve got a whole family 3,000 miles away, and they can’t help me.”

Bennie and other organizers have set rules for Hazelnut Grove. No violence. No needles or meth. Those rules were once posted on a tree, but the laminated sign is nowhere to be seen.

Bennie sees this peaceful setting as a model for the city.

“I’d like to see 100 little villages of around 30 people,” he says.

Green plastic fencing separates Hazelnut Grove from its neighboring camp. Hazelnut Grove has capped its population at 25. But as many as 45 more people live on the other side of the fence.

The main structure at this second camp is a small kitchen made of plywood, pallets and tarps. It’s called “Forgotten Realms.” A notice board facing the sidewalk lists chores and requested donations.

The kitchen sleeps six at night, according to the man who built it, a blue-eyed 54-year-old named Wesley Courverler.

He says Hazelnut Grove is controlling the donations—firewood, boots, propane—brought by Portland volunteers, including the political consultant Rich Rodgers.

“I don’t get a half of ’em,” Courverler says, “I don’t get a third of ’em, I don’t get a fourth of ’em unless I fight for it.”

Hazelnut Grove organizers attribute petty crime to the unnamed camp—and perhaps to a third camp growing at the edges of the second one. Courverler says he can’t police the people who aren’t willing to listen to him.

“I don’t wear a badge,” he says. “I can’t put ’em out. I can’t tell my fellow man to go stand out in the rain.”

On Monday, Dec. 7, the rain gets worse. The center of Hazelnut Grove turns into a lake. Organizers use pallets to create a boardwalk from the camp entrance to the fire pit. The residents unclog a storm drain, and the lake drains away.

By Tuesday morning, Bennie and fellow organizer Jose Serrica are in a good mood. They’ve met with Portland officials, and are confident City Hall is about to give Hazelnut Grove a permit to stay for the foreseeable future.

They expect to add new residents—but only a few. The other campers will probably have to go somewhere else.

“They can go establish their own camp,” Serrica says, “and we’ll help them organize it and maintain it if they want.”

Stop by later this week for a video tour of Hazelnut Grove and its neighboring camp.