Sean Davis for Astoria

Astoria is at a breaking point on unsheltered homelessness. You can feel it in the daily frustrations: tents on street corners, blocked sidewalks, trash, drug paraphernalia, and business owners who are tired of starting their mornings cleaning up human waste. People are angry. People are also scared. And the truth is, we’re stuck in a loop.

Here’s what needs to be said plainly: in Oregon, we don’t get to solve this with slogans. House Bill 3115 requires that any city rules about sleeping, sitting, lying down, or “keeping warm and dry” on public property must be “objectively reasonable” as to time, place, and manner. And for good reason. Sometimes people can’t see past their anger and may forget that the people on the streets are just that, people. No, more than that, they are vulnerable people in need of help. 

Our city ordinances and comprehension plan say that we will work on this problem by coupling resources with accountability. Today, we need more accountability. 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2024 Grants Pass decision changed the federal baseline for Eighth Amendment claims, but it didn’t erase Oregon’s state-law requirements, and it didn’t change the basic reality on the ground: enforcement without real alternatives doesn’t solve the problem. It just moves it. And the mess pops up somewhere else.

Clatsop County’s numbers are being described as extreme. Whether you’re looking at the Point-in-Time count or you’re just walking through town, it’s obvious this is bigger than a handful of bad decisions. But it’s also obvious that doing nothing isn’t compassionate. It leaves our houseless neighbors in an unhealthy and unsafe situation, and it hurts our businesses. 

So what do we do?

We stop pretending there’s one magic facility that fixes everything, and we build a straightforward pipeline: street → safe place tonight → stable place next → housing or treatment after that. And we enforce rules only when we can honestly offer a viable alternative.

That looks like three layers:

First: a safe place every night. Not “maybe,” not “weather permitting,” not “if beds are available.” If our priority is fewer tents on corners, then shelter has to be predictable, staffed, and open with consistent intake and hours. Treat it like an emergency service, because right now the street is functioning as our default shelter system. That’s expensive, unsafe, and humiliating for everyone involved.

Second: managed alternative shelter that is not an unmanaged tent camp. If Astoria creates a designated camping area, it can’t be a patch of ground where we allow tents and hope things stay clean. Hope is not a management plan. A sanctioned site only works if it’s run like a program, with a single accountable operator, daily staff presence, sanitation infrastructure, clear storage and property rules, and strict cleanliness standards. If we can’t do those things, we shouldn’t build it, because it will become a dumping zone and we’ll be worse off than when we started.

Third: permanent supportive options for the hardest-to-house, tied to behavioral health. Some people on the street are in crisis because of untreated mental illness and addiction. If we don’t build a path for them into supportive housing and treatment, we’ll keep moving people around town without reducing the underlying chaos.

This is where “resources and accountability” becomes real. Our job as a community is to treat people as human beings and provide a safe alternative to sleeping in the gutter. Their job, once offered that alternative, is to follow baseline rules that keep the place safe and clean. That’s not cruelty. That’s the social deal.

Astoria can be compassionate and orderly at the same time. But we can’t get there with performative sweeps or policy theater. We need a predictable system, measurable outcomes, and a plan that doesn’t collapse the moment the headlines fade.