Sweep of Homeless Camp in Oregon Said to Be ‘Largest in Recent History’

Federal forest officials began clearing thousands of acres of forest just outside of Bend, Ore., where more than 100 people live in R.V.s and cars — a move that one advocacy group called “the largest eviction of a homeless camp in recent history.”

At around 3:30 a.m., a phalanx of squad cars bearing the golden logo of the U.S. Forest Service arrived at the start of a logging road leading deep into a landscape of towering ponderosa pines and dusty green desert grasses in the Deschutes National Forest. The cars parked facing each other, in a formation blocking the entry. Law enforcement officers wearing green uniforms, stood sentinel. Campers and R.V.s were allowed to leave, but no one can return unescorted.

In the hours before the deadline to vacate went into effect at midnight on Thursday, the people who have lived in this forest worked frantically to fix the broken-down vehicles, trucks and R.V.s so that they could move them off federal land.

Law enforcement and forest officials have crisscrossed a miles-long logging road for weeks, taping fliers to the doors and windows of dusty cars and derelict R.V.s with a stark warning: Anyone caught trespassing after May 1 would face a $5,000 fine and may be charged with a Class B misdemeanor and up to one year in jail.

“It’s everything I own,” said Richard Owens, 40, waving toward an R.V. that he said is as old as he is. His assorted belongings — a shopping basket filled with dishes, a jerrycan of fuel, a bike, a ladder, drying laundry and a dog cage were spilling out.

Minutes before the looming eviction was scheduled to begin he was still struggling to fix his aging Subaru Outback, using a YouTube video to figure out how to repair a broken wheel hub — if he could just get the wheel back on, and roll it out of the forest, he could keep some of his belongings, and still have a shelter of some kind, he said.

Overnight, an aid group attempting to help the homeless sent out a volunteer mechanic. They have raised thousands of dollars to buy new batteries, replace busted tires and send out tow trucks in an effort to help those stranded inside, said Chuck Hemingway, a retired lawyer and one of the volunteers.

But by morning, Mr. Owens’ Subaru was still stranded inside, visible from the asphalt and behind the police line.

The sweep comes months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors in Grants Pass, a city located 200 miles south of the current encampment in Bend. The court held that cities like Grants Pass could prohibit camping in public places, even if there are no shelter beds available.

“They’ve told us that if we are not out, we will all go to jail,” said Mr. Owens of his interaction with forest officials. “When I said, ‘Where are we supposed to go?’ They said, ‘It’s not our problem,’” said Mr. Owens, who said that he ended up in the woods in part because he was previously incarcerated, making it difficult to find employment — records show that in 2022, he was charged for unauthorized use of a vehicle and giving false information to a police officer.

The National Homelessness Law Center, which filed the amicus brief in the unsuccessful case against Grants Pass, has tallied at least 150 new ordinances in cities across the country that fine or penalize people for sleeping in their cars or camping outdoors, said Jesse Rabinowitz, a spokesman for the nonprofit. In Elmira, N.Y., for example, a measure passed late last year calls for up to 90 days in jail for illegal camping, including sleeping in one’s car.

Homelessness has hit record levels as the country grapples with a severe housing affordability crisis.

Housing has become out of reach for many in Bend, a former logging town that fell on hard times and later reinvented itself as a destination for outdoor sports, as well as hub of boutique manufacturing, including the maker of the Hydro Flask water bottle. The timber town became a playground for wealthy newcomers in the age of work from home, attracting families who came for the opportunity to enjoy a city that offers skiing in the winter and river rafting in the summer, as well as hot yoga studios, wineries, breweries — and even its own locally made brand of kombucha.

Million-dollar homes surround the homeless encampment. The average list price for a home is now over $800,000, yet the minimum wage there has yet to hit $15 an hour.

As rent became unaffordable to longtime residents, the city scrambled to address the problem: In 2021, the city had no more than 240 shelter beds; now it has more than twice that, 517. And like other cities that are wrestling with homelessness, Bend has set aside five parking lots for the so-called “mobile homeless,” people with no roof over their heads but who still have a car and a windshield protecting them from the elements.

The efforts have made a difference, said Bend’s Mayor Pro Tem Megan Perkins. The most recent data shows that the city’s homeless population dropped 5 percent last year — “which doesn’t sound like a lot,” she explained, until you consider that before these measures, the number was growing by up to 20 percent per year.

Still, these measures are a drop in the bucket, considering that as many as 100 to 200 more people will now have nowhere to go. As the forest service was taping warning signs to the windshields of R.V.s, shelters were already at capacity, said Ms. Perkins.

Many of the encampment residents said that they were headed to another encampment north of Bend called Dirt World, which is expected to be shut down this month, resulting in a situation where the homeless are “in perpetual displacement,” said Eric Garrity, a local law student who filed an unsuccessful lawsuit attempting to halt the sweep.

“What I don’t understand, and what is keeping me up at night right now, is where everybody is going to go?” said Ms. Perkins. “I know that our service providers are doing absolutely everything that they can to find places for people, but it would be ridiculous to assume that out of 200 people living there, that all of them are going to find a place,” she said. “It’s a societal failure — and I think to call it anything else but that, would be a mistake,” she said.

The U.S. Forest Service has been planning for years to close down the homeless encampment in an effort to thin out the trees and remove desert grasses — a fire mitigation measure that has become more acute in light of recent wildfires. The area that is being shut down stretches over nearly 35,000 acres adjacent to Bend’s southern edge, terrain that acts as an interface between the urban and the wild, explained U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Kaitlyn Webb in an email. “The closure does not target any specific user group and will restrict all access,” she wrote. “It’s not safe for the public to be in the area while heavy machinery is operating, trees are being felled, mowing operations are active, and prescribed burning is occurring.”

The encampment in the forest of ponderosa pines on the outskirts of the city was a last refuge for many.

“Due to lack of options is why we are out here,” said Mandy Bryant, 38, who said that she has been living out of a camper shell deep inside the woods alongside her boyfriend for years.

Ms. Bryant said she has acute anxiety following a violent attack by a former boyfriend. (Records show that she took out a restraining order against the man in 2017 and he was charged with fourth-degree assault.)

She said that she and her current boyfriend have subsisted on SNAP benefits of $290 each. He makes wood furniture and was recently completing an order of picnic tables for a local business, which was expected to bring in another $1,000. She helps him by advertising his wooden creations — made of shaved blond wood — on social media. Surviving in the woods is difficult, she said: “It’s demanding on you physically and financially and emotionally and it doesn’t leave you really much to spare to try and pull yourself out of it.”

Her neighbors in the forest survive on odd jobs, including house cleaning, and many depend on government assistance, such as disability and social security. Some struggle with addiction, including fentanyl, or with challenging mental health disorders.

The forest stretches as far as the eye can see, over multiple buttes that rise dome-like out of the ground. The ground is thick with pine needles and crunchy with cones. The air smells like the pine air freshener sold at carwashes. The R.V.s are spaced out, many tucked away under the boughs of the trees or behind escarpments and down sandy paths.

Behind the walls of each R.V. is often not just one setback but several, a compounding series of blows that knocked the person off course. In one R.V., Andrew Tomlinson, 41, was recovering from a heart attack. His shins are now bandaged — covering up the edema left by bad circulation.

Walking is painful. He wiped away tears in the hours before the deadline, as his partner tried to pack up their things.

A few miles away in a different stretch of the forest, a former arborist Patrick Walston, 50, said he still has his own business, but lost his way after a stroke during the pandemic. One corner of his mouth still drags to one side. He was unable to work for weeks, he said, got behind on rent, a tumbling downfall that he said was compounded by the closures caused by the pandemic.

Now he was deep inside the forest of sagebrush and pine trees, hoping that the man he had called might come help him tow his R.V.

He said he didn’t think he would be out by the deadline. “I ain’t trying to buck the system,” said Mr. Walston. “But the system got me here.”

Among the people who has nowhere to go is 29-year-old Chris Dake, who said that he has been camping in different locations on the federal land since he was 24 — he was employed, he says, as a cashier at a grocery store, and injured his knee. His shelter has been a broken down Chevy Winnebago.

The radiator is broken — he said that unless he can fix it, he has no way to drive it out.

His hair was matted and his eyes were bloodshot. There was a cut across his nose. “There’s nowhere for us to go,” he said. “They’re pushing us out.”