Securing legal rights to place: mobilizing around moral claims for a houseless rest space in Portland, Oregon

ABSTRACT

Recent critical scholarship regarding the right to the city suggests that the concept inadequately addresses the function of rights within urban socio-legal processes. This paper draws from various rights literatures to bring rights to the forefront of urban analyses. Empirically, the paper details the political struggles of Right 2 Dream Too (R2DT), a self-governed houseless encampment in Portland, Oregon, drawing from interviews with encampment residents and government officials as well as from analysis of media, government, and legal documents. The paper articulates how R2DT organized around a foundational set of moral claims for rights to a place of its own. While the paper admonishes that rights are ever contingent, and thus always unsettled, R2DT’s struggle over rights more broadly reflects how marginalized groups struggling over a right to exist within contemporary cities may be realized.

KEYWORDS:

• Rights
• right to the city
• homelessness
• encampments
• Portland
• Oregon

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers for very thorough comments which helped me to clarify my arguments. I also want to thank all interview participants who gave their time and insights to my research, particularly to all the resident and board members of Right 2 Dream Too who were always willing to give me their time. I would also like to thank those who read drafts of this paper: Rachelle Berry read one of the first versions, motivating me to go further; on a later draft, Kafui Attoh offered wonderful insights and asked provocative if not impossible-to-answer questions; and, finally, to Don Mitchell, who offered his usual critical attention on more than one draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Oregon Revised Statue (ORS 446.265) allows for each municipality in the state to designate two sites as a “transitional housing accommodation” (Oregon Laws, 2017). At the time of the lawsuit, only one such site was designated in the City of Portland: Dignity Village.

2. For the City, the site needed to work. The City spent nearly all of the funds awarded to R2DT from the “Lot 7” settlement on this relocation process, including the $254,000 property (Wasserstrom, 2016).

3. The 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals recent opinion was a major turning point for houseless people’s rights. The court argued that criminalizing the act of sleeping outside when there is no place for individuals to secure shelter constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eight Amendment (Zaveri, 2018).

4. Valverde (2005) argues that urban scholars ought to focus on how urban governments create and uphold land use ordinances to “govern” groups. Her point is that we may more effectively contest land “uses” that govern marginalized groups therefore as a broader political strategy. While this was central to R2DT’s approach in getting the City to recognize their rights to use property somewhere, as this paper shows, land use ordinance language became less important for R2DT and the City during their relocation negotiations.

5. Since 1913, the City of Portland Government has operated as a “commission” form of government. Commission governments first became popular in the United States during the progressive era (Gibson & Abbott, 2002), but today are uncommon. Portland is the last large city in the U.S. whose governing body operates as a commission (Abbott, 2018). Portland’s city commission-form of government has four commissioners, a mayor, and an auditor who are elected by voters in nonpartisan, at-large elections, and do not represent unique districts within cities. The mayor is first among equals in this system, with no veto power over the other commissioners. In addition, commissioners function not only as the legislative branch of government but are endowed with the executive tasks of city administration. This provides city council members several powers not traditionally held by weak or strong mayor forms of city government.