Tweet about homelessness in Portland goes viral: 'They are loving us to death'

PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — If you're on Twitter, there's a good chance you've seen it. A tweet about homelessness in Portland has touched a nerve around the world, viewed nearly 8 million times and with thousands of likes and retweets.

It features a woman named Wendy who lives in a tent in Old Town. A man asks her what it's like being homeless in Portland, and she replies, "It's a piece of cake, really. I mean, that's why we've got so many out here. They feed you three meals a day. You don't have to do (expletive) but stay in your tent or party. If you smoke a lot of dope, you can do that."

KATU talked with Wendy and the man who shared that candid conversation, Kevin Dahlgren. We met them five days after he posted it to Twitter, in the same spot where he interviewed Wendy. It wasn't hard to peel back the layers of her message.

Wendy told us it had been misinterpreted as her personal experience rather than her hyperbolic observation of what's happening all around her: people are doing whatever they want, whenever they want, and no one is stopping them. Wendy said she doesn't get high all day and have fun, and of course, homelessness is hard.

"You get to the point where you're tired of being outside. You're tired of being cold," said Wendy. "Last night, I couldn't get this tent up for nothing. I couldn't get it to sit up. So I finally went back into this piece of crap and covered up and just prayed to God I'd wake up in the morning because it was really cold last night."

The viral tweet of Wendy describing what it is like to live on the streets of Portland:

Dahlgren works for the City of Gresham doing homeless outreach, but spends most of his free time in Portland, representing the non-profit "We Heart Portland." It's an arm of "We Heart Seattle," a movement that organizes trash cleanups and offers resources to people in need. He records much of it with his cell phone, from people living in caves on Rocky Butte to a man stuck in a snow and ice-covered tent in downtown Portland. Dahlgren says he started sharing it all on Twitter about a year ago, because people pay attention to this kind of content, and he says that's the best way to get his message out there.

"Not just Wendy, but multiple homeless have said that the system is 'loving us to death," said Dahlgren. "They hate the idea that they're being enabled. They may not say no to it, but they still don't like it. What they want is to be empowered. They want responsibility. They want accountability."

Dahlgren says the homeless people he meets are sick of trail mix, toothbrushes and disaster blankets; they want real help.

"Just before you got here, I went in a two-block radius. I counted 84 camps within two blocks. Completely unacceptable," said Dahlgren. "This is a humanitarian crisis. Why aren't outreach workers out here 24/7, seven days a week, solving this? Where are they? That's what I'm asking."

As we interviewed Dahlgren and Wendy, we had to pause several times. There were people in crisis all around us: a man throwing a soda bottle at us, another man screaming in the background and slamming a skateboard into the street. A woman sat in a nearby doorway, coughing violently and pulling clumps of hair from her head. One of Wendy's friends walked up and asked her for a cigarette. He had open and possibly infected wounds covering his face.

I don't think anybody could look around our community and say we don't need more.

Scott Kerman is the Executive Director of Blanchet House, the non-profit often surrounded by chaos in Old Town. It's the place where Wendy and so many other hungry people get their meals six days a week. Wendy mentioned in one of the tweets Dahlgren shared.

"You wake up; you got to eat at Blanchet, get high. You eat at Blanchet for lunch and get high. You eat dinner and get high. That's all you do, all day long, every day."

We asked Kerman about the video clips. He said she's entitled to her story, but the homeless community is not a monolith.

"We're going to speak for a lot of other voices who aren't going viral right now," said Kerman. "Women who come to us for a meal, and we see the fresh bruises and black eyes because they've been beaten up overnight. Or maybe worse. I don't think any of them would say that being homeless is a piece of cake. Or the people who show up at our door and they're covered in their own feces because they've lost control of their bowels, and they're desperate because there's no place to clean up outside."

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Kerman says the tweet only provides fodder for those looking to blame houseless people or non-profits for the crisis, and it's a far more nuanced situation. He says Blanchet House does more than just hand out peanut butter sandwiches. It has a network of peer support specialists who team up with other agencies to do outreach in Old Town, connecting people with services and housing and, in some cases, literally saving lives. Last week one of the peer specialists used Narcan to revive someone who'd overdosed outside. But Kerman says they can't keep up, and things are not getting better.

"It feels sometimes like an open-air psych ward," said Kerman. "We're not necessarily equipped to serve that, right? We do the best we can, trying to serve meals and provide compassion and clothing and other things to people who are often in psychotic breaks. And that's not easy."

We contacted Mayor Ted Wheeler's office to ask about outreach in Old Town. They sent us some numbers showing us what navigation teams have been doing since May. A spokesperson says they've been able to engage approximately 413 people in the area, and every one of them was offered an assessment for housing, but only 13 accepted. The navigation teams also:

• Helped 61 people into shelter
• Helped 50 individuals receive IDs
• Helped 25 people receive birth certificates
• Signed 10 people up for the Oregon Health Plan
• Helped 10 people enter substance abuse treatment
• Gave 14 people housing referrals

The spokesperson told us the numbers don't include the work being done by the city's newly formed Street Services Coordination Center. She said more help is on the way after the City Council recently approved a $3.5M investment for a 50-person city employee Navigation Team to increase connection with individuals experiencing homelessness and available services, as proposed by Mayor Wheeler.

Kevin Dahlgren and Wendy say they don't see it. She told us Dahlgren is the first person who's offered to help her in the six months she's been living in this spot. He got her a phone and is raising money to get her new dentures after someone stole her teeth.

"You see that they're slowly killing themselves, and you intervene," said Dahlgren. "You try in a very assertive way to find a way to help them. You don't wait for them to ask. That's inhumane, in my opinion."

That approach is one of the reasons Dahlgren has a lot of critics who accuse him of exploiting the homeless. He told us he's invited those critics to shadow him or help with outreach, but they've all refused.

"I think it really just is uncovering the truth of what's really going on out here, " said Dahlgren.

Hopefully, this video and others will finally get policy makers to make better decisions about where the money should go.

Dahlgren's plan is to keep ruffling feathers by challenging the status quo and tweeting about it. He says it's worth it when so many lives are on the line.

"There is nothing compassionate with allowing people to live on the streets."