Frozen (not the movie)

It is 20F/-7C, clear and dark, with a frozen moon and some icy stars. I left Diana and her sleeping bag, duffel, and backpack, an hour after dark, at a bank where she could sit indoors for an hour before closing. She planned to spend an hour walking across town to the emergency warming shelter that would give her space on a tile floor from 7 pm until 7 am. We have been to every agency that would see us, and there is literally nowhere for her. Her choices are to line up for space in a tent or to line up for space on the floor in an office building. I took her to a meeting of other Transgender people, and they said their community is stretched past capacity. They’re already sleeping on each other’s floors. They are sympathetic, but they hear stories like this every day. 

Here is how it is for a homeless person in Portland.

Line up at 5:30 pm for a space in a tent for a maximum of ten hours. If that’s full, walk 12 blocks to line up at 7 pm for a space on an office building floor for twelve hours. Hope that the person next to you does not have lice, fleas, bedbugs, or crabs. On being dismissed from either of those places, walk twenty blocks to line up for a chance to get a storage locker for your sleeping bag, if you have one. Don’t be late; storage is only open for an hour. If you want free coffee, forget storing your sleeping bag, because by the time you’ve stored your bag, the coffee is gone. Walk ten blocks to line up to the use toilet. No sitting or lying on the pavement; if you sit, the police will come tell you to move along. If you have a sleeping bag with you, coffee shop owners will not let you sit in their facility, even if you have the money for coffee. Forget about asking to use the toilet in a business. If the public library is open and you are not too exhausted to walk to it, you can use the toilet there and wash your face, drink water from the tap.

If you are within twenty blocks of Sisters of the Road Café, line up at 11 am for a good lunch and a chance to sit down for half an hour and charge your phone. If you sign up with Transition Projects, you can get your mail delivered there. But you can only pick up mail between 3pm and 5pm. Take a number and wait till your number is called. If you are late getting a number to check for mail, you will be too late to line up to sleep in a tent. If, in the morning, you stored your sleeping bag, you must line up to collect it at 6 pm. The door to the storage will only be open for an hour, which means you lose the chance to line up for tent-space. Once the weather warms up, the option of staying in the office building will disappear. Then it will be either a tent (if you can get there), or a place of your own on the sidewalk or in a doorway. There are currently between 5000 and 6000 people living in these conditions.