People's belongings in front of the city of Ashland's police department parking lot on Aug. 2, 2024.
Jane Vaughan / JPR
Ashland, Oregon, formed a subcommittee earlier this year to create the plan to address homelessness. On Monday night, the plan will be presented to the city council for review before the city decides what to do next.
JPR’s Jane Vaughan recently spoke with Echo Fields, a member of the subcommittee and one of the plan’s authors.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Jane Vaughan: Ashland created this subcommittee back in January to address the issue of homelessness in the city. How did the committee approach such a complex problem?
Echo Fields: The mandate, the assignment from the city council was that we try to include as many different perspectives as we could in a completely volunteer citizen committee. Essentially what we ended up doing was having like a graduate-level class, a project-based learning on housing and homelessness. So we started out just kind of getting acquainted and then figuring out sort of the main topics that we wanted to follow up on. And we created community surveys, surveys with service providers. We also surveyed front-line staff. We had a group of Oregon Health & Science University student nurses who did surveys and outreach to folks living on the street. And then we did additional surveys, online mostly, to business folks throughout the city. A community survey, there was a big SurveyMonkey survey. So we got a lot of survey data, interview data, archival data. So we have lots of archival data, government sources, state level, federal level, big picture. So we know a lot about what the systems are. We know a lot about what capacity those systems have and the capacity they don’t have.
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Vaughan: I’ve reviewed the draft of this plan, and it includes a lot of different recommendations, things like maximizing government funds and creating additional support services, all sorts of things. How do you see this plan changing the situation in Ashland?
Fields: It’s an advisory document to the city council. And so change will be local government led. In the light of the recent Supreme Court ruling in the Grants Pass case, what that decision made possible or made necessary is that local governments will have to make choices. And so we’ll see what elected officials in the city of Ashland decide.
Vaughan: The U.S. Supreme Court decision that you just mentioned, just to clarify, was a ruling that came down at the end of June. It was part of this longstanding homelessness case from Grants Pass. And the court upheld the city’s ban on homeless people camping in public. So the plan, as you said, has results from a survey that was conducted of hundreds of Ashland residents. And one thing that really stuck out to me was the two camps that people seem to fall into when we’re talking about homelessness. So, one includes anger towards the homeless, fear of them, not feeling responsible for them. And the other includes concern for the homeless and sympathy. What did those survey responses tell you about the problem in Ashland and how we might fix it?
Fields: I think what it shows is folks in Ashland, for the most part, I think, a majority of those responses, were sort of compassionate, we want to help people. But also recognizing that living on the street is not a great solution. Tents are not a solution. Housing is a solution. But it has to be housing with wraparound services and support for people who are ready to engage with that, and not everybody will be. And there’s frustration, and that results in some compassion fatigue. And then there are folks that are just really scared. Sometimes folks living on the street have behaviors that seem scary to folks. There are some people who expressed concern about having their children see homeless people at the public library, for example. But it’s had an impact on how people feel about using all sorts of public facilities, parks and public libraries.
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Vaughan: Right. So you’ve been working on this draft master plan for months, and on Monday, it’s being presented to the Ashland City Council for review. What are you hoping to hear from the councilors?
Fields: I want to hear, first and foremost, that they’ve read all 180 pages. It’s about 100 pages of main text, and then a whole bunch of more appendices. So there’s lots of data rabbit holes, lots of nerdy stuff that we hope people will look at so that they’re making really informed decisions and choices. It’s going to be a challenge for any local government because there’s only so much we can afford to do or that we have the capacity to do.