Street homelessness in Eugene: What is to be done?

by Ted M. Coopman

“Blinded by the Plight” explored the economic and social costs of street homelessness on neighborhoods and businesses. Part 2, “X Marx The Spot: What Is To Be Done?” makes the case that decisive action to address street homelessness is cheaper than attempting to merely managing it and perpetuating those costs.

Render unto Salem what is Salem’s

While I certainly have had my critiques of Eugene’s City Council members, the reality is they are faced with an impossible task, no resources, and little support. As with all Oregon cities, Eugene has been hamstrung by poorly-designed, overly-restrictive, and unfunded proscriptive state legislation for addressing homelessness, such as HB 3115.

A significant piece of Eugene’s budget shortfall is due to spending on homeless services and trying to mitigate the effects of street homelessness. If the state makes demands on cities and counties, they need to either supply the revenue or change tax laws to allow cities and counties to raise their own. No mandates without money.

The responsibility for homelessness, mental health, substance abuse, and housing falls wholly on the state, which funds and executes programs via the counties – not the cities.

While nearly all states, along with the federal government, have failed tragically to address homelessness, that is no excuse for inaction. It is also no excuse for our own elected representatives, most of whom do not have to deal with unhoused people on a daily basis, to throw up their hands and proclaim there is nothing they can do. That is not true.

Is there a way forward?

Track street homeless counts

Current reporting on the number of homeless people uses the federal definition, which counts people as unhoused if they are not in what is considered “permanent shelter.”

That obscures the scope and nature of the problem. How many beds do we really need? How many people are on the streets? Are we making progress?

Currently, there are about 3,000 “unhoused” people in Eugene, but about 2,000 without permanent shelter. That is, about 1,000 people are in temporary shelters. In public communications, use the number of people who are not permanently or temporarily sheltered. Sheltering, and by extension eliminating all unsanctioned camping, should be the goal to focus on.  

Repeal Grants Pass restrictions

HB 3115, the state restrictions on how cities and counties address the effects of homelessness, must be repealed for three reasons:

• First, tying the hands of local governments and offering no solutions or funding isn’t working.
• Second, everyone has an equal right to access public space, which means no group can unilaterally seize or privatize public space and exclude others.
• Third, there is no right to live in public space or violate basic health and safety codes on where and how people can live.

Realistically, this requires providing sheltering options. Only by providing options for shelter can we eliminate street camping

No camping, no exceptions

We restrict where and how people live for very good reasons. Basic safety, health, and sanitation are mandated by code. Housing that fails to meet these requirements is red tagged as uninhabitable. Living outdoors in areas without facilities means trash and human waste in public spaces.

How can we deem some housing as unlivable while tolerating the health and safety implications of camping without adequate facilities?

Regardless of the desires of people who are unhoused, we simply cannot allow anyone to live unsheltered outdoors, period. This includes living in vehicles outside of designated facilities. Taxpayers are not going to foot the bill for shelter and services unless we can effectively eliminate camping in public spaces. 

Accept the shelter provided, find your own legal shelter, leave, or go to jail.

Place conditions on aid

All services for unhoused people that use public funds, government support, or use public space should require recipients to be registered on the Lane County Homeless by Name List. No services without conditions. Public support should be focused on getting people off the street, in a program to get them sheltered, off drugs, and assistance in dealing with mental illness. These are all legitimate government interests for the public good.

Eugene’s homeless population has a criminal vagrant element seasonally inflated by “travelers” who are more than happy to feed off the trough of free food, free clothing, and free medical care at the expense of the truly needy. This parasitic element often victimizes the struggling homeless majority, fuels much of our property crime, sells drugs to addicts, and traffics homeless women. If you want the public’s support and taxpayer dollars, you need to be on a path to get off the streets. Keeping homeless people on the perpetual edge of survival is not compassionate, it is cruel.   

Shelter first

“We could end unsheltered homelessness in a year. If an earthquake hit and put 4,000 of our neighbors in San José out on the streets, you’d have FEMA trailers at the county fairgrounds in 72 hours … we need to act like (this is an emergency).” —-San José Mayor Matt Mahan

San José, California has embraced a shelter first policy. When people are displaced by a disaster, we don’t let them twist in the wind while we try and rebuild their homes. We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. That means sheltering people who are homeless in managed campsites that have sanitation and security. 

We know the number of people who lack shelter. In Lane County that means we need to triple the number of shelter spots. Once we get people into managed shelters we can work on permanent housing and health.

Why make people suffer on the streets and neighbors suffer the impacts waiting for the housing market to catch up and the state to create affordable housing? This is like building a fire truck when your house is on fire.

Real compassion

As the failed Measure 110 demonstrated, you can’t expect drug addicts to make rational choices. Substance Abuse Disorder degrades the ability to make choices because the need for the high eclipses everything. Similarly, someone in the throes of a debilitating mental health crisis lacks the ability to make decisions to ensure their own survival. Is leaving these people to suffer and die on the streets as they traumatize those around them and degrade life for everyone compassionate? 

A few years ago, a woman was standing in the park by my home, without pants, screaming at the top of her lungs. CAHOOTS came, Eugene/Springfield Fire came, and the Eugene Police came, and all left. She refused help and was left, half-naked, screaming in a public park. Legally they could do nothing.

We constantly hear that forcing someone into treatment “doesn’t work,” but how is letting people suffer and die on the street an alternative? For their own safety and the public’s safety and well-being we need to revisit involuntary commitment as with Florida’s Baker Act. Debilitating mental health and drug addiction issues can be overcome with care, professional help, and time. Death? Not so much. Every minute a person spends on the streets makes recovery harder.

Oregon cities are revolting (or should be)

Oregon cities should have been in court over the state’s failure to meet its responsibility years ago. Cities spent money on what were state responsibilities—effectively expropriated money that is needed desperately for other services.

The League of Oregon Cities should sue the state and demand funds that have been spent to date on homelessness. Our local elected officials need to stop just standing there getting fiscally punched in the face and throw their own punches. There are solutions out there and we need to demand that the governor and legislature stop avoiding the hard choices we need to make to get our fiscal house in order.

Fix Oregon taxes

Our tax system is deeply broken. No one likes to pay taxes, but everyone wants the services that taxes provide. A progressive tax policy means everyone pays and those with more pay more.

• Property tax: When property sells, property tax should reset at the sale price, not at some imaginary number based on a complex formula. Due to Measures 5 and 50, the taxable assessed value generally cannot increase by more than 3% per year, regardless of how much the market value increases. Resetting the property tax at the sale price is not unreasonable. And major improvements do allow property taxes to increase, creating a perverse incentive to make changes without obtaining permits.
• Land value tax: When you upzone and when you improve public amenities, you increase the value of land. The community is creating the value. You can capture some of that increase in value at the point of sale and put that into subsidized housing. The market simply can’t provide affordable housing for the bottom 30% of earners.
• Tax on services and transactions: Sales taxes are inherently regressive. That means, as a percentage of income, taxes on food, clothing, appliances and other essentials consume a higher percentage of low-income household budgets than higher income households.  However, taxing services can extract value from high earners who use wealth advisors, stockbrokers, accountants, lawyers, and similar services.
• Kill the kicker: If state personal income tax revenues exceed projections by more than 2% over a two-year budget cycle, the surplus is returned to taxpayers as a credit. Due to the structure of the tax credit, which is proportional to tax liability, the richest 20% of Oregonians receive about two-thirds of the total kicker funds. When federal timber money dried up, counties were promised the shortfall would get made up – it never was. Get Republican legislators onside by directing that money to counties that lost that timber revenue. Let them decide how to spend it instead of using it to achieve partisan policy goals. Local governments are best placed to spend revenue where it is needed most and can be held more accountable by their constituents.

Consolidate homeless services

Homeless services are largely a hodgepodge of nonprofits dependent on volunteers and poorly-paid workers doing incredibly difficult and emotionally-draining work. There are dozens of shelters in Lane County, all operating with different criteria for whom they serve. There is no central clearinghouse that indicates available beds. Duplicated costs and inconsistent management make this system inefficient, prone to abuse, and rife with incentives for extracting the maximum amount of public funding, creating what is pejoratively known as “the homeless industrial complex.” 

Homelessness is a government scale problem that needs professionally trained and compensated staffing and oversight that is not met by our current boutique approach. Ideally, the goal should be to have all homeless services provided by the state. But until then, exempt cities from homeless services. Place all funding and oversight in the hands of counties supported by state funding. Duplicating services with cities is inefficient. Focus funding on the most successful models to scale them up and encourage consolidation. Standardize approaches, set metrics for accountability, and require professionals for most positions.

Remove homeless services from near homes and businesses

The placement of homeless services, shelters, and outreach should be separated from homes and business by wide buffers. Areas near homeless services suffer serious impacts with trash, human waste, drug use, and crime. Without exception, homeless services are in low-income neighborhoods, often with mostly renters, where land is cheap, or near industrial and similar facilities. This is classist. Because marginalized communities make up disproportionally large percentages of low-income neighborhoods, this also is racist. Those providing homeless services must provide security around those facilities and be responsible for nearby impacts as a condition of operation.

Low-hanging fruit

A lot of effort has been directed toward sheltering families with children and veterans, with much success. However, a major input into the chronically homeless, drug-addicted, mentally ill, and prison-bound population comes from unaccompanied homeless youth under 24. Shutting down that pipeline should be our priority. 

Oregon does an exceptionally poor job on homeless youth, one of the worst in the nation. A shocking 70% of unaccompanied homeless youth are unsheltered. Yet this is a small percentage of Oregon’s overall homeless population, about 1,500 out of 27,000.

In Eugene, that number is about 300. Oregon has the capacity to shelter every unhoused youth NOW. Certainly, even for the hard-hearted, youth bear little reasonability for their plight. Youth aging out of foster care have few options and often wind up on the street. Homeless youth, particularly girls and young women, run a high risk of being trafficked or exploited.

Suck it up and get it done

That is a long list of suggestions, but the basic outline for what needs to be done is obvious. The status quo is an abject failure. We need to invoke our forbears who paid the price and made the effort to build post-war America: Stop wringing our hands and muddling through with half-assed inadequate solutions.

Suck it up and get it done. It’s not like we really have a choice.

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Ted M. Coopman is no Marxist, but points out that Marx was the first to call into question that a ruling elite with all the power and resources and a permanent underclass were simply the natural order. He also asked, “What is to be done?” Some scholars have argued he was the first social scientist.

Western Exposure is a semi-regular column that looks at issues and challenges from a West Eugene perspective – a perspective that is often ignored or trivialized by city leadership and influential groups and individuals largely based in south and east Eugene. 

Western Exposure rejects the fauxgressive party line, performative politics, and “unicorn ranching” policy in favor of pragmatism focused on the daily experiences of residents and small businesses in Eugene—and West Eugene in particular.

Ted has been involved in neighborhood issues since 2016 as an elected board member and chair of Jefferson Westside Neighbors and has 30+ years experience as an activist and community organizer. In a 2025 national competition, JWN’s neighborhood e-newsletter was awarded first place and its print newsletter awarded third place.

He earned a Ph.D. in Communication (University of Washington) and served on the faculty at San Jose State University from 2007 to 2020. Ted’s research on social movements, activist use of technology, media law and policy, and online pedagogy has been published and presented internationally and he taught classes ranging from research methodology to global media systems.

He and his spouse live in Jefferson Westside with an energetic coltriever and some very demanding and prolific fruit trees.