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   From: stillnumber1@foxnews.com   
      
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   On a recent Monday, Jessie Burke stepped out of the lobby of the Society   
   Hotel and into an unusual scene. The sprawling tent encampments that once   
   lined the sidewalks of Portland’s Old Town were mostly gone.   
      
   “This is what should be normal,” said Burke, who bought and renovated the   
   132-year-old Mariners Building in 2013 and transformed it into the chic   
   hotel on 3rd Avenue.   
      
   Related: Living in the Alaska rainforest with 1,000 bears: ‘Not the   
   easiest place to be homeless’   
      
   Burke owes this to a palpable and controversial shift in liberal Portland,   
   a city that had long opted for a mostly hands-off policy to the camps that   
   had come to dominate the hotel’s surrounding blocks. Now, at the urging of   
   residents like Burke, the city is clearing camps, sometimes daily, and   
   planning to encourage unhoused people to relocate to centralized   
   communities.   
      
   “The only policies I’ve seen are compassion on top of compassion,” Burke   
   said. “Anyone who works with these populations knows there are people who   
   respond to carrots and people who respond to sticks. Everyone who responds   
   to carrots, good work; you got them. Most of the people that are left   
   respond to enforcement.”   
      
   Advocates for unhoused people say they strongly disagree. This new   
   “normal” in Old Town represents a distinct turning point in one of the   
   country’s most progressive cities.   
      
   Unhoused Portlanders are feeling the increased pressure. Aistheta Gleason   
   built themself a home of pallets when they first arrived in Portland from   
   Colorado last summer. “I had a living room, a bedroom. It was all planned   
   out,” they said. “I had a queen-sized bed and a water filter.”   
      
   Last fall the cops showed up, and Gleason says they were arrested for   
   trespassing and resisting arrest, after a confrontation during which they   
   initially refused to drop a walking stick. In the patrol car, they watched   
   city workers dismantle the camp.   
      
   Now, they push their belongings, including at least two dozen books,   
   around Old Town, where social services are close. Gleason doesn’t bother   
   setting up a tent, knowing they’ll have to move it daily. Instead, they   
   sleep with their dog in a different spot every night, wrapping up in a   
   sleeping bag and a tarp.   
      
   The shift in city tactics is a product of changing political winds. Last   
   fall, the Portland city commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty – who had for some   
   residents come to represent a misguided and overly permissive approach to   
   a homelessness epidemic – failed in her re-election attempt. Hardesty   
   oversaw the Portland bureau of transportation, which is tasked with   
   enforcing sidewalk ordinances that might prevent people from camping   
   wherever they want. Hardesty ardently opposed enforcing those ordinances,   
   as her constituency of unhoused people gained political power and legal   
   clout.   
      
   Related: The US city where ‘desert palaces’ are sprouting as affordable   
   homes dwindle   
      
   Hardesty’s loss came at the hands of a more “law-and-order” Democrat in   
   Rene Gonzalez. His central argument, according to his campaign website:   
   “Taking a hands-off approach to homelessness is not compassionate or   
   progressive; it’s dangerous and inhumane.”   
      
   Gonzalez promised not only to work for increased shelter capacity and   
   access to mental health and addiction services, but also to relocate   
   illegally parked RVs and “clean up” parks and neighborhoods.   
      
   One of the commissioner’s first high-profile moves was to direct Portland   
   fire and rescue, an agency he oversees, to stop handing out tents in the   
   city. That move took effect just as a historic winter storm and a foot of   
   snow walloped the region, and just after a new report that 2021 was the   
   deadliest year of the last decade for homeless Portlanders, with 193 who   
   died on the streets, of more than 5,200 known unhoused people.   
      
   Gonzalez’s election also came as the embattled mayor, Ted Wheeler, and   
   other officials were hard at work on a new approach: both enforcing the   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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