At Whit’s End

The appearance of tents on narrow strips of public land and planting strips up and down the West Coast has become commonplace and surprises no one these days, at least no more than does the omnipresence of shanties in Dharavi. The problem – and I stand with those who regard it as a problem, both for the people themselves exposed to the elements and for those in communities facing health and sanitation risks posed by impromptu camping – is not getting better. A few years ago, Bill Maher offered the common sense solution: “There is a solution to homelessness: building affordable housing, possibly in your neighborhood.” Yet, for reasons Maher and others have identified, this solution has not been effectively implemented. Principally, few desire affordable housing in their neighborhood.

Like other cities up and down the I-5 corridor, Eugene has been “trying” to address the issue – and by that, I mean the City Council engages in a lot of handwringing – but the wound has not been staunched. A few years ago, Federal data revealed that Eugene had the worst per capita houselessness rate in the nation: over 430 per 100,000 people.

The Council’s good intentions could possibly yet produce improvement for the unhoused, but the ridiculous expense of even the most basic attempts hamstrings efforts. When care for others is professionalized and moves out of the zone of volunteers, expenses soar. This happened with health care in the late nineteenth century, and today we see it occurring with society’s efforts to help those living in the shadow of the American dream. It should be shocking but ends up being no surprise to learn that the cleanup of Washington-Jefferson Park cost over $800,000. This is what happens when the city must employ professionals like Northwest Hazmat, who charges $45/hour for a crew to remove trash. Eugene had to allocate $3.6 million to respond to and clean up camps in 2022 alone.

The neighborhood that is most disproportionately affected by these camps happens to be my favorite neighborhood south of Portland and north of Ashland (despite my affection for some parts of Cottage Grove and Roseburg to be sure): the Whiteaker Neighborhood, which is Eugene’s oldest neighborhood. Bounded by the Willamette River on the north, Chambers St. on the west, and 7^th Ave. on the south, the Whit stretches from the Washington-Jefferson Park to include Skinner Butte on its eastern most border, making it the oldest neighborhood in Eugene, as it includes the location of Eugene Skinner’s first settlement and the many nineteenth-century homes at the southeast base of the Butte. Such are the boundaries marking where the Whit ends.

For me, where the Whit begins has always been its main north-south boulevard, Blair, once part of a thoroughfare connecting farm country to the city. Being a mixed-zoned neighborhood with most of it being zoned for residential, commercial, and industrial purposes, the neighborhood makes for lively neighbors. If you live there, you can likely walk out your door and quickly find a neighborhood shop, local restaurant, or lively watering hole. Living there frees one up from having to jump on a bus or drive a car or ride a bicycle across town for life’s little necessitates. Living there also habituates residents to the sounds of life: of commerce and neighbors…the kinds of sounds and smells and sights that are typical daily experiences for people living in big cities, but which are unusual for most Eugene neighborhoods.

I first moved to the Whit in January of 1998. It was quite different than it is today, but what isn’t? In the 1990s, the Eugene Weekly ran a front-page feature on the neighborhood where it quoted some residents who were so concerned with the possibility of gentrification that they advocated walking about the neighborhood and dropping hypodermic needles in people’s garden beds in order to maintain the perception of the neighborhood as a dangerous place, and thereby to keep real estate values (and therefore rent) down. A real classy suggestion that I’m sure was appreciated by hardworking parents with toddlers tottering through their gardens to smell the flowers.

Living in the Whit is always an adventure. Across the street is a row of artists’ studios, painters and leaded glass artists; down the street is a brewery with a music recording studio inside, the historic district features some of the oldest and most storied buildings in the city. Murals can be found throughout the neighborhood, which includes a lovely stretch of the Willamette River before it makes its bend north up toward the Columbia. Buskers will still perform on corners – although this happens less frequently now – filling the air with song. Breakfast is still served at New Day Bakery; food carts can be found throughout.

The neighborhood has a rich history of community activism…I remember Heather Flores’s Food Not Lawns initiative in the 1990s, movie nights where films were projected onto the side of the old New Day location (presently Izakaya Meiji), Last Friday Art Walks, St. John the Wonderworker’s First Saturday Community Breakfasts, the Block Party that started in 2008 and continued until COVID. There is always something happening, whether it be an outdoor concert, a family day at Scobert Gardens, a talk on theology at the Pilgrim’s Way Bookstore, a Whiteaker Community Council meeting, or groups meeting to discuss anarcho-syndicalism. It is no surprise that Occupy Eugene originated in the Whit in 2011. The University District may house the area’s professional thinkers, but the Whit has long been the site for the most dynamic intellectual and artistic life of Eugene.

But then there is the visible – even in-your-face – presence of addiction, untreated mental health issues, and psychosis. The advantage of living in the Whit, though, is that people living here can learn to live with and alongside this aspect of American life. It is one of the reasons I chose to go to schools that were in urban areas like Detroit and New York City: they do not insulate one from this reality like rural campuses do (even though I would eventually have the rural campus experience two decades on). Many of Eugene’s neighborhoods are a series of subdivisions, divorced from industry and commerce, let alone the Eugene Mission, the Buckley House, or 50% of the city’s safe sleep sites.

Just sitting here taking a few minutes to recollect, a flood of bizarre and sometimes potentially violent encounters during my years living in the Whit come to mind.

• A friend and I once performed CPR on a poor person who had overdosed and died from heroin. His name was Roy and he had gone clean but later found a bag of heroin and made the fateful decision to oblige himself. A passerby alerted us to him when they saw him lying in a field; we rushed to help, but he had been too long without oxygen.
• A roommate once made the mistake of leaving the front door unlocked. I woke up at 3 am with an unknown man walking into my bedroom, uttering nonsense. I sat him down and made a pot of coffee and talked to him for an hour-and-a-half before he started coming down and could walk out the door without endangering himself or others.
• A friend of mine bicycling home from work at the hospital found a man stabbed in the neck lying in the middle of Blair…he survived.
• I have spent two decades cleaning hypodermic needles out of my front lawn (thank you, Eugene Weekly).
• I have driven off kids shooting up on private property – both in broad daylight and secretly at night…but also provided a place to sleep for people who did not qualify for a bed at the Eugene Mission a few blocks away and were cast off and exhausted and looking for nothing more than a place to rest.
• I coordinated – spontaneously in the moment – with neighbors to escort a very aggressive squatter off private property when a Eugene police officer who was called for assistance left the scene before stepping out of his vehicle because a more important call came through the radio.
• I have caught a would-be bike thief attempting to steal a locked bike. Confronted, he violently tore off his jacket and bared his breast primatelike. I was able to draw him out into the street and lead him away from the residence for a block-and-a-half before his adrenaline rush dyed down and he stomped off never to return.
• I have helped secure sites for multiple families to park their RVs overnight, providing a respite from being shoed away.
• I coordinated with others to close down a meth house. When it was finally torn down, I kid you not (and I have the video to prove it), scores of crows appeared out of nowhere and circled above the building getting demolished, cawing as if an exorcism of evil spirits was driving them out of an ancient land.
• I had a 300 lb. man – convinced that he was possessed – throw his head back and howl, and then, in one motion, pivot 360 degrees, executing a head-high spinning kick three inches from my nose…exhibiting such dexterity that he had me convinced that he was possessed.
• I once had to break into our own apartment that had been trespassed and barricaded by a hallucinating meth addict. Forcing the door open, I found this unknown man stripped naked with a skirt that he found in the place halfway up his knees.
• I have passed scores upon scores of muttering, snarling, drooling persons. I always look them in the eye, as if to say “hello.” Usually, the experience is akin to viewing a fellow human from a telescope: faraway eyes indicating a soul trapped deep within, trying to claw free.
• I have had to pick up human feces so frequently that I have a technique for it.
• I came upon a homeless woman one morning who had been raped in the middle of the night by the man from whom she scored her meth a mere half-block from our home; I assisted her with reporting it to the police.
• I once came home to discover the child of former acquaintances slumped in the doorway of the building next door, high out of his mind on meth and hallucinating worse than I have seen anyone hallucinate before. I called CAHOOTS (the local mobile crisis intervention team) and we were only able to get him in the van and driven to Buckley House by me entering first and riding with him.
• In 2008, Thomas Egan froze to death sleeping on the streets a mere block from where we lived. I observed the people of Eugene and the Whit respond by creating warming centers to help prevent this from ever happening again.
• I have observed a church community rehabilitate a condemned property; a dozen people locking arms and marching together through the backyard to safely pick up and dispose of discarded needles (is this gentrification?).
• I have seen people in the most difficult times of their lives treated with compassion by people in the Whit – whether it be getting someone without a home a motel room or merely getting them a cup of coffee – because in the Whit, these are your neighbors. It is easy to demonize people when they are an abstraction. It is much harder to hate the person who stands before you in need.

Whiteaker: Eventful? For sure. Colorful? Check. Filled with people who in the past made life choices they most certainly regret in 2024 (if they lived this long)? Most assuredly. But is this not true for us all to one degree or another? The problems and issues exposed to the public in others can become representative for obstacles and tendencies that we all must overcome. We share a humanity, such that our issues – however dramatic – often amount to like in kind, only different in degree.

Between 2004 or so and 2014, the Whit experienced an exciting revitalization. Yes, the addiction and mental health issues were still visible, but the residents, business owners, and sometimes even the city collaborated to make it beautiful, to reveal the dignity of the people who live there that was sometimes too hidden. When this revitalization is discussed, it is often described with an emphasis – sometimes total – on the exciting restaurants and unique businesses that flourished in the neighborhood: Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen, Sweet Life Patisserie, Grit, Wandering Goat Coffee Company, Hop Valley Brewing Company, Laughing Planet. Articles on the neighborhood would usually mention that the only chain in the neighborhood was 7-Eleven in order to emphasize the uniqueness of each business. Everything else was locally owned and operated with love and care. I even mentioned the businesses in my description of the neighborhood above.

Since 2015 or so, the neighborhood has fallen upon hard times again. In 2022, the crime rate in Whiteaker was 4557 incidents per 100,000 people – twice the national average and about 900 incidents/100,000 people more than the rest of Eugene. Of those crimes, 454 were violent – about 100 incidents per 100,000 people greater than Eugene’s average. The property crime rate is more than twice the national average. The picture that emerges is not merely drawn with statistics, though. To the eye, the neighborhood simply looks uglier than it did a decade ago. Graffiti mars murals and building surfaces, abandoned camps are strewn a few feet from sidewalks, and, yes, hypodermic needles in the flowerbeds remain. The Whit will bounce back; I have no doubt. But, for the last decade, the neighborhood has returned to how it was, in some ways, in the 1990s…not all the way, but much of the beauty has been tarnished.

With all the talk of Ninkasi moving in (2006) and investing in the neighborhood – and it most certainly did – the success of the Whiteaker Block Party, and so forth, the presence and influence of St. John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church is usually not mentioned. Despite – to anyone familiar with the neighborhood – the visibility of the transformation it wrought after moving into the condemned property that was once Icky’s Tea House at 3^rd Ave and Blair, right in Whiteaker’s heart.