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Portland bureaucrats want you to clap for the Sunderland RV “safe park” being extended for three months and call the crisis solved, but anyone who lives or works in this city knows better. The City announced the Sunderland RV Safe Park lease was extended through June 2025, a temporary band-aid on a problem that keeps getting worse. One site, kept alive by handouts and short-term leases, does not reverse years of failed policy.
Even the mayor’s office seems conflicted — Mayor Keith Wilson has publicly argued that RVs shouldn’t replace shelter beds while simultaneously pushing much tougher towing policies that will displace vulnerable people. Officials have made clear they plan to ramp up towing and to close some of the modest safe-park capacity the city currently offers, showing there is no coherent, long-term plan to help people get indoors. Portland’s leadership is playing whack-a-mole with human beings instead of enforcing law and delivering durable solutions.
Local coverage shows the extension is being treated as a short-term victory by supporters, but even advocates say the model was always temporary and limited in reach. The Sunderland site was first created through a lease and managed by the Salvation Army, and critics pushed for its extension precisely because it works for some, but not nearly enough of those who need help. That’s the problem: officials trumpet a handful of beds or a single lot as a grand achievement while neighborhoods continue to decay.
City officials have offered selective statistics about crime and sheltering to justify their approach, and while there are reports of localized crime drops around some shelters, those numbers don’t erase the daily reality of tent camps, open drug use, and property destruction that Portlanders still endure. The mayor touts small improvements in narrow areas, but the overall message from residents is unmistakable: the streets are not safe and the city’s piecemeal solutions are failing. Voters shouldn’t be pacified by a press release; they deserve measurable, citywide improvements.
Meanwhile, city budget choices reveal priorities that many taxpayers will find unrecognizable: millions shuffled here and there while public safety and accountability get hollow promises. The council recently redirected funds and reshuffled budgets even as Portland’s broken streets and lawlessness remain unresolved, showing more interest in optics than outcomes. That’s not stewardship; it’s performative governance at the expense of hardworking residents who pay the bills.
Hardworking Portlanders deserve leaders who will secure neighborhoods, enforce laws, and build real shelter capacity — not city managers who hide behind a single “safe park” press conference and call it progress. If the city wants to fix this, it will stop treating homelessness as a public relations problem and start treating it as a public safety and housing crisis that requires enforcement, accountability, and honest budgeting. One safe lot is not reform; it’s a slogan. Portland needs real results, not feel-good tokenism.
