Leaves and trash blow in gusts of wind early in the morning along the streets of Eugene. The roads are empty and the city is peaceful, quiet, with no one in sight.
On the sidewalk, Alika Leatherberry, 50, sits in his clothes protecting him from the weather but remains alert of his surroundings in case situations suddenly turn physical. After experiencing homelessness for over six years, he said he assumes the worst out of most people after seeing individuals often steal from one another and treat each other poorly.
“It’s hard because I never thought I’d see myself in this situation that I’m at,” Leatherberry said. “I never was the type of person to allow myself to be ‘one of them,’ so to speak, where I feel like I’m just as incapable and incompetent as the people that don’t want to do anything.”
Experts on homelessness say the state of homeless encampments and shelters is detrimental to those living in them, drawing attention to the need for long-term affordable housing and an increased use of temporary, short-term housing programs to mitigate housing issues.
Leatherberry said he grew up in Hawaii before moving to California. He later moved to Arizona to spend time with his father, and then he worked in Tucson before they shut down his job site with the Microsoft escalation team and relocated.
His father got sick, forcing him to eventually sell his house in Tucson, and Leatherberry has been homeless ever since his father died in 2019. He said he bounced around to different states before finally ending up in the streets of Eugene.
“All day, every day, is the same day”
Leatherberry said that he’s noticed that some unhoused people’s priority is to sit and guard their stuff while making sure they don’t get attacked or plundered by others around them.
“I’ve never experienced anything this vicious before,” Leatherberry said. “There was a lot of violence where I grew up (in Oahu), but nothing to this point where there’s homeless people stealing from other homeless people. There’s no love whatsoever.”
Claire Herbert, an associate professor at the University of Oregon who researches housing and homelessness, said she believes the narrative of unhoused people wishing the worst on each other aligns with her own research and one done by the University of California, San Francisco, showing unhoused people are often victimized by other unhoused people.
She said this is evidence of the intense trauma, scarcity and violence that circulates through vulnerable communities.
“I think that the worst thing we can do is take an individual approach and blame the people in that encampment for treating each other poorly,” Herbert said. “It calls attention to the need to create more safe places for unhoused people so that they are not feeling like the only option they have for a place to live is somewhere where they feel like everyone is against them.”
The struggles with encampments and homeless shelters
One of the biggest reasons homeless encampments exist is that there aren’t enough shelters to get into, according to Herbert. At least 17 emergency shelters are available throughout Lane County, but specific regulations and restrictions may limit their eligibility to live in certain shelters.
According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a lack of affordable housing is one of the primary causes of homelessness. Additionally, the 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress recorded 771,480 people experiencing homelessness on a single given night in January 2024, 255,667 of whom were unsheltered.
In Lane County’s Point-in-Time Count on Jan. 31, 2024, 3,085 people were homeless, with 2,096 unsheltered people and 920 individuals in emergency shelters.
A conflict the city faces is that homeless people need help, but on the other hand, communities complain about their presence. Additionally, they often drive the need to limit how many resources the city puts towards homelessness.
Herbert said that Oregon House Bill 3115, a bill that passed in the 2021 Oregon legislative session, was meant to protect unhoused people from being “penalized” for camping in public spaces when shelter beds are unavailable. However, homeless people aren’t experiencing the necessary protection because they’re largely unaware of where they can legally be or are in unsafe places.
“I would say that in most instances, probably the authorities have the law on their side in terms of when they can move people along or not,” Herbert said. “But that doesn’t mean that that’s what’s most ethical, moral, and it certainly doesn’t mean that that’s the best approach to resolving the problem of encampments.”
Homeless sweeps have been a topic of controversy and frustration in Eugene over the last year, rife with ethical and moral dilemmas. Controversies arise regarding the potential inhumane treatment of homeless people and a lack of support for those displaced by the sweeps.
Herbert said that her research shows the more often people are moved, the harder it is for them to gain potential stability or traction. “We’re perpetuating the problem by moving people around versus alleviating it in any way,” she said.
Lesley Jo Weaver, an associate professor at UO who researches health inequality in homelessness, has often seen the negative impact of forced relocation and believes homeless sweeps are “exceedingly unethical.”
“I have yet to hear about a single situation where someone was forced to move and at the same time given any kind of guidance or resources that led to an improvement in their situation,” Weaver said. “In every instance I’ve seen, a forced removal has led to a deterioration in their circumstances.”
The need for affordable housing
The number one frustration and complaint when Weaver talks to service providers is that they know the ultimate solution to homelessness is housing, but they don’t have any housing to hand out.
Herbert said the problem isn’t being solved if housing isn’t offered and that it’s cheaper to house people than to serve them on the streets since taxpayers pay a lot towards funds intended to address homelessness.
“If that money was put up front into housing, into preventing homelessness and into trying to rapidly rehouse folks who are currently on the streets, that would be a much better use of financial and personnel resources,” Herbert said.
Exploring the next steps to mitigating homelessness
Two homeless-focused housing models introduced by the NAEH have been demonstrated to effectively end homelessness: permanent supportive housing, which pairs long-term rental assistance with supportive services, and rapid re-housing, which provides quick and short-term rental assistance and services.
Public housing, where federally funded housing is rented at subsidized rates, and the Housing Choice Voucher Program, which helps support people to pay rent in a private market, both provide decent and safe affordable housing for low-income people. These are administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Lane County provides many homeless-focused housing models, including many emergency shelters and a variety of poverty and homeless programs.
Herbert wants to see the city take a harm-reduction approach to homelessness, which means reducing the harms of living outside while housing is being built. This may include creating different shelter options and more places to legally camp and park.
For Leatherberry, he said he’s not comfortable being in his situation and it drives him crazy sitting around, waiting for things to happen.
He said that he’s not here to give up or let himself quit. He has made it this far in life and is doing the best he can with what he has to make it out of his situation one day.
“There’s a lot of people I think that deserve a chance to do something with themselves and they shouldn’t be faulted for choices that they made before or things that have happened,” Leatherberry said. “Nothing they can do about changing the past, it’s only the future that they have access to, making differences.”
