A man on dialysis, sucking ice in his tent on a 93-degree day, survives on “food stamps and God.” As he does, he imagines buying a home with tens of thousands from a Social Security Disability lump sum payment he’s confident he’ll get this month.
A Tsimshian Native Alaskan has a stock portfolio and has saved $1,200 from biannual dividends — but he and his campmate still go “canning” almost every day, which helps him budget.
A young woman who recently gave up her 2-year-old toddler to a family member stays with her sick mom, who fell off a barge; she donates plasma to supplement her mom’s worker’s compensation biweekly check of $505.
Coatis Franks with his registered service dog, Harry, in his tent along the Springwater Corridor. Photo by Thacher Schmid.Stereotypes of urban homeless, easily visible on Portland social media threads, gravitate towards “lazy, crazy drug addicts that can’t be helped,” as the National Coalition for the Homeless website puts it. Yet end-of-July interviews with a couple dozen people camping in the Springwater Corridor show the quasi-legal “underground” economy there to be more complicated, creative and multifaceted.
Putting aside their worry about a planned city sweep Sept. 1, campers there carefully budget, creatively scavenge, access entitlements and work jobs. Merged in a survival-based system, the black market for stolen or “boosted” items (bikes and parts, phones, electronics, EBT cards) blends seamlessly with legal stuff (cans, plasma, food, water, services, clothes, furniture) — much of which is gathered through dumpster diving. There are illegal drugs, but also legal ones.
Long-delayed applications for Social Security can represent a ticket out of desperation.
“No evictions, no legal record, not using [drugs],” is how Coatis Franks describes his situation. “I think the mayor needs a check up from the neck up. There’s a lot of handicapped people out here that’s got to die before they get a roof over my head.”
Franks, 47, is confident he’ll receive a lump sum from his five-year-old Social Security application at a hearing this month. “It’s guaranteed — once you start dialysis you automatically get Social Security,” he says. “I’m going to buy a home; I want to own my own shit.”
Franks is stressed by the ways campers are pigeonholed, and upcoming sweeps (he has furniture in his tent, a normalizing source of comfort, he says). Medically vulnerable due to his need for dialysis, he relies on his service dog Harry to alert in case of stroke or heart attack, but it’s not clear how soon medical attention could reach him.
One camper holds his own stock portfolio.
Rob Aquino, 59, practices careful budgeting with dividends from Native Alaskan Tsimshian stocks — and collects cans.
“I have to budget to survive,” Aquino says with a quizzical smile, adding that he has a Master’s Degree in Psychology from Willamette University. “I haven’t been skiing in about three years.”
Rob Aquino at his campsite along the Springwater Corridor. Photo by Thacher Schmid.Aquino says returns are based in the tribe’s logging and fishing industries and have shrunk over time. “When I was a kid it was $20,000 [biannually]. Now, it can be upwards of $2,000, as low as $800.”
So Aquino joins his friend Pauline Greer, 54, on trips to find cans for recycling — $20 total, or 400 cans at a nickle a pop when they “hit it hard,” Greer says.
An Oregon Consensus team surveyed the Springwater camps, looking at public safety, barriers to social services and whether campers are local (83% have been in Oregon for over a decade, they found). The Portland Police Bureau does not have crime statistics from the camps, police spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson said. No one has studied the underground economy in what may be the largest homeless camp in the nation right now.
A minority work. The challenges they face are reminiscent of those faced by other working homeless around the city, such as Jerry Vermillion, “on management track” while working full-time at his job at the Astro gas station on NW 21st but still unable to afford rent in Portland.
Little wonder: a Portland Housing Bureau fact sheet distributed at a June meeting said the city’s rent increases were highest in the nation last year.
Doug Coleman works as a day laborer digging ditches, but has also done “some writing, copywriting,” including for tech blog ReadWrite. “I really just need to step up my game,” Coleman said.
Doug Coleman near Beggars Tick Wildlife Refuge along the Springwater Corridor. Photo by Thacher Schmid.A woman who declined to give her name worked at a bridal store for several weeks while living in the camps but lost the job. She said it was hard to keep her high standards for clothing and hygiene and because she struggled to charge her cell phone, which she used for an alarm clock.
“I was the assistant manager at a bridal shop,” she said. “My dream job — I finally made assistant manager, just to lose everything,” she said.
She echoed other campers’ observation that it’s been getting harder to find cans. “Nine times out of ten, someone’s beaten us to it,” she said. “Sometimes you got to go out further.”
When “further” becomes too far, the survival instinct can turn legal can collection into an illegal trip to the “Go and Get the Goods Store,” in the words of Mohawk, who stays in the largest camp, Lambert Field.
“There is this blend of the legal and illegal economies [in the Springwater camps],” Portland Police Bureau spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson said.
Bartering is common at Lambert Field, where campers walk around hawking new bluetooth headphones, fixing other campers’ tents, working on a bicycle fix or offering up a freshly-grilled steak.
“When you’re in survival mode, you do what it takes to survive,” Simpson said. “What seems unreasonable to most might seem very reasonable when you’re in a desperate situation. That doesn’t make it right.”
“Mostly what [campers] are boosting is stuff they can get money for: tools, electronics, mp3s, tablets, gadgets for bikes, bikes, trailers,” Tammy Morgan said. Crestfallen, she admitted that she recently “boosted” for the first time in her life.
Tammy Morgan used her machete to carve rough stairs in the dirt from the Springwater Corridor trail down to her campsite a few feet away. She asked to leave her face out of the photo. Photo by Thacher Schmid.Morgan, 52, says she has “PERS in the wings” but like most in the camps, relies on $194 in food stamps. The Public Employee Retirement System sent her PERS check for $4,700 to a former address even after she told them repeatedly not to, she says.
“They didn’t listen,” she says. Someone else cashed the check. She’s filed a police report but has to add an affidavit and wait for the government and banks to figure it out. “That will be a way to get out of here,” she says.
Morgan chuckles as she tells stories of fellow campers using bike trailers to transport discarded treasures like pillow top mattresses and dressers. She and her campmate, Earl, get “by with a little help from their friends,” as the Beatles lyric had it: water from a local automotive place and necessities from a Lake Oswego teacher Morgan used to work for.
“She can help me out with the incidentals: shampoos, toothpast, denture thingies, toilet paper, paper towels, sometimes food.”
Zach donates plasma twice a week and goes canning. “On top of that I sell weed too, whenever somebody can come by and grab some,” said Zach, 40.
Zach and Carri Ann Abrahams at their camp, which features well-tended food preparation areas. Photo by Thacher Schmid.“Anything you want on this trail, I can [expletive] get it,” he added, accepting a bottle of water conferred by church volunteers. “I can go put an order in right now and get it tomorrow.”
The nearest plasma donation center screens out homeless people, an assistant manager said. It also pays more for new donors than repeat customers.
Kareem Wilson, assistant manager at Biomat USA on SE 80th and Holgate, said new donors get $50 on their first three donations, $45 on their fourth and fifth. Afterwards, the limit is twice a week, $25 on their first weekly donation and $45 on their second.
Why does the second trip earn more? It improves the accuracy of required tests for diseases, Wilson said.
“You can’t donate if you’re homeless,” Wilson said. “We’re not always able to find out because people aren’t trustworthy, but … if it’s a severe situation, they won’t be able to donate at our center.” Wilson wasn’t sure why homelessness was against the rules, other than association with known risk factors.
Social Security checks are a not infrequent source of income, as in the case of Hillary and Joel, whose carefully-tended garden with seven-foot sunflowers was featured in my July 13 story for Willamette Week. Hillary’s fried green tomatoes, strawberries and jalapeños supplement her SSI check, she says.
Other campers rely on work-related benefits but struggle to balance individual and family needs.
Jazmine Dietz in the tent she shared until recently with her toddler, Diondre. Dietz says she is waiting for a bed to open up in a shelter and hopes to soon be reunited with Diondre, who went to stay with family. Photo by Thacher Schmid.Jazmine Dietz, 22, goes can recycling and donates plasma, she says, but the main source of income in her camp is the worker’s compensation her mother’s received since falling off a barge in the Willamette River, she said.
Dietz says she’s been “going through stuff,” and is caught between caring for her mom and for her son Diondre, 2. Diondre went to live with a family member in mid-July after Dietz called DHS for help, she said.
Dietz, who grew up in foster care, blames the cost of housing, “my laziness” and methamphetamine use for her homelessness. She’s working with a DHS-contracted FIT (Family Involvement Team) worker, “waiting for a bed to open up for my mental health,” and hoping to be back with her son soon, she said.
“It’s enough to survive,” Dietz says of the workman’s comp, cans and plasma. (Plasma donations at nearby Biomat USA earn a donor anywhere from $25 to $50, assistant manager Kareem Wilson said. He added that the center attempts to screen homeless individuals out.)
In the end, the underground economy in the Springwater camps is a humble extension of the mainstream — reminiscent of the tinkers of the 1800s, a professor says.
“The tinkers were people who to some extent lived on the fringe of society, they dealt in bartering and trading, they made things with their hands, and sold pots and pans and other sorts of household items,” says Portland State professor of urban studies Chet Orloff. “It was an economy that wasn’t established, store-based, retail-based. It wasn’t necessarily homeless, but somewhere in between. One notch up from the homeless economy.”
Tinkering appears to be par for the course at Lambert Field, the largest of the Springwater camps. A veteran there whose campsite sits next to Johnson Creek, “Mohawk,” professes to be able to fix anything.
Mohawk is a veteran whose campsite at the heart of Lambert Field sits beneath a U.S. flag. Photo by Thacher Schmid.As a reporter is talking to Mohawk, another veteran, Florida, rides into camp on his “new whip,” a purple Giant bicycle he says he just traded up for. He stops halfway through gobbling down a pint of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream to show off a leather Coach purse — or imitation — he found in a dumpster.
“This is $200 new,” Florida says. “I’ll probably get $50 for it.” His technique, he says, is to smack bags with a stick. “You hear the ting” if there are cans, he explains.
Mohawk grabs the purse, examines it, then holds up a tag triumphantly. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says. “Made in Vietnam.” His tone is mocking; he grins at Florida.
“This authenticates it,” Florida says, with a roll of the eyes, pointing to the serial number inside. “Would you stop?” He turns back to a reporter.
Florida, the self-described “President” of Lambert Field, the largest of the Springwater camps, is a U.S. combat veteran. Photo by Thacher Schmid.“I’m a heroin addict, okay? So I’m gonna take this purse and get $50 worth of heroin for it,” he says. Me and four other guys will go get well.”
He stumbles, drops the leather purse in the dust and starts swearing, before brushing it off. Mohawk laughs.
“I’ll give you ten bucks for it,” Mohawk says. Florida announces his intention to find a tree house to move into after the Sept. 1 sweep — west of Lambert field, not east, the direction everyone else is moving. He grabs the purse, gets on his bike, rides off.
A man walks up, attempts to sell bluetooth headphones. “What’s up, man, you want to buy these? Brand new.”
Mohawk recalls the time he gave new residents in the camp a “brand new, $200 tent with screen porch” he acquired at the “Go and Get The Goods Store.”
“It’s been two months,” Mohawk adds, mournfully. “They haven’t given me a dime.”
Has the “boosting” or thievery campers like Mohawk talk about had an impact on nearby retail stores as the camp has grown?
Police spokesman Simpson says police have made arrests along the Springwater for stealing bicycles or possessing stolen bicycles or frames, dealing drugs, and burglaries, but useful data is tough to come by.
“Certainly there’s a lot more going on there than we could ever prove,” Simpson said.
Managers at big box stores near the camps either declined to comment or said they haven’t seen an uptick in shoplifting. Theft at the store “is a known issue,” said the manager at the local Fred Meyer, requesting his name not be used. “We’re in a rough part of town anyway.”
In the end, whether dumpster dived, bartered or boosted, entitlement-based or the result of hard work, the underground economy in the Springwater camps reflects a simple calculus: survival.
Need.
“It’s all money and barter, trade [in the camps],” Morgan said. “You got a bike? I need a bike. We waste a lot of stuff in our normal lives. Try being out here for a year.”
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