Becky Lange had spent months building and maintaining the community vegetable garden at NE Dekum and 33rd Ave. Neighbors had donated planting containers and vegetable starts at the beginning of spring, and the late-June heatwave meant the garden was finally producing enough bounty to share. That’s why, on June 27, Lange held back tears as she surveyed the garden plot. Plants lay uprooted and wilting in the hot afternoon sun in a garden bed dimpled.
Art Rios has never seen the sidewalks of Portland‘s Old Town neighborhood this empty. “Yesterday, there were nine tents on this block,” said Rios Thursday morning, looking out from Do Good Multnomah’s Downtown Shelter onto NW 6th Ave by NW Hoyt. “Now there’s just one. They rest—gone.” Rios is a program manager of the downtown shelter, which operates inside a former Greyhound Station in Old Town. In his past year working for the nonprofit, Rios.