By Bentley Freeman and Emily Rogers
Brett Rogers bends down to pick strawberries from the garden he’s tended since the spring. He points to lettuce, raspberries and grapevines on a rustic trellis. A towering sunflower bows its head. A bulging scarecrow made of a stuffed yellow shirt and red pants crouches next to his garden.
“We had birds come in before I made this scarecrow,” says Rogers, wearing a gray muscle tank that reads “rural and proud.” He says, “I change up his clothes and move him around the garden, because birds don’t get used to it. They don’t come in the garden at all.”
Rogers is most proud of his pumpkin patch. Four small pumpkins — one that’s grown the size of a beach ball — peek out from beneath the vines. He marvels at it and flashes a toothless, gummy smile.
Rogers has lived in a tent along North Douglas Avenue in Cottage Grove for the past year and half along with 60 other unhoused people on a city-owned lot. It’s August 22, and he knows that the next morning, Cottage Grove Police and Cottage Grove Public Works crews will arrive and sweep the lot clean.
It’s the latest strike in a political battle this city of 10,713 has waged over its estimated 150 unhoused residents. Each turn in the fight — which included seeing three City Council members recalled from office on July 30 — has moved closer to this moment. Police and work crews are set to clear another lot a half mile away where another 60 unhoused people are camped.
Cottage Grove officials issued the order to clear the sites on August 8, but had no plan for where the unhoused residents could go. A grant-funded homeless shelter that has the capacity for 40 people sits empty, the result of the chaos at City Hall over the city’s unhoused.
Officials have improvised a desperate proposal: Unhoused people evicted from the two lots can camp overnight in a nearby dog park, but they need to clear out by 7 am each day.
“It doesn’t make sense to make a tent up at night, just to break it down in the morning,” Rogers says. “They’re pretty much looking down on us like we’re dog shit.”
Towns across Oregon have sought to toughen their treatment of the unhoused since the June U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a Grants Pass case allowing cities to ticket and jail anybody for sleeping or camping outside, even when municipalities fail to provide enough shelter.
Rogers, 44, has been dismantling his camp over the past few days. He shakes dirt out of a patch of gray rug that had once been white. Rogers has lived in Cottage Grove for 18 years, 10 of them unhoused.
“I don’t want to leave the city. I don’t want to leave here, but there’s no options,” Rogers says. “I can’t go anywhere.”
Cottage Grove once had a humane strategy to help its unhoused residents. In October 2022, the city opened what locals call the Highway 99 shelter, a robin’s egg blue building near the Cottage Grove Riding Club and Rodeo. The city signed a contract to manage the shelter with Carry It Forward, a social services nonprofit serving Eugene, Springfield and rural areas.
The Highway 99 shelter reached capacity within three months. The Cottage Grove City Council then approved overflow sites. One on 12th Street opened in December 2022 behind the Dari Mart and U.S. Post Office, while the other on North Douglas Avenue opened in February 2023 next to the city’s public works building. Neither location had an on-site manager.
Councilor Greg Ervin says the city needed to take harsher action with the camps sooner. “My thought all along was we just got to double down on code violation,” he says, “That shouldn’t all fall on public safety officers.”
Eugene Weekly reached out to Mayor Candace Solesbee about her efforts to lead Cottage Grove through this turbulent time. She declined to comment.
Then the money ran out for the shelter. Cottage Grove had covered Carry It Forward’s contract using money from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, a federal program that Congress passed to help communities recover economically following the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We ran out of money as a city, so we had lobbied the governor and the Legislature to help keep that funded,” Fleck says. Their efforts failed.
If Cottage Grove didn’t figure out how to house its homeless, the Highway 99 shelter would close and the 30 people who stayed there would have no choice but to pitch tents on the two overflow sites.
Meanwhile, opposition from city residents to the two overflow sites grew. Ervin says neighbors of the sites were “most of all fearful. Some can’t even have their grandkids over anymore, due to witnessing really disturbing things.”
Cottage Grove needed its leaders to come up with a plan.
On eviction day, Thursday, August 22, clouds roll in as four Cottage Grove police cars and a bright red tow truck arrive at the 12th Street campsite.
Ashlie Armstrong, a resident of the 12th Street site, stands next to her truck harnessing tarps over a pop-up trailer.
Armstrong wipes her brow with her dirt-stained blue tank top. In white letters, her top reads, “I’m not responsible for what my face does when you talk.”
It’s 8 am, and Armstrong has been busy all night. She’s been unhoused and living at the 12th Street site for one year. Originally from Ohio, Armstrong says she’s been living in Cottage Grove for 15 years. She’s been loading her silver-striped black ’93 Chevrolet Z71 off road flatbed with carts, tents, sleeping bags and other belongings to help other campers.
She’s one of the few campers with a vehicle. The city has set a 10 am deadline for people to clear out. Police and city work crews have gathered, ready to clear the site. Armstrong keeps helping everyone but herself.
Armstrong, 42, still has to pack her own belongings. She also needs to move her Jayco popup trailer. First, though, she decides to help Curtis Miller, one of her neighbors, who also has a popup camping trailer. He had no way to move his trailer, until Armstrong stepped up.
Miller had placed potted plants and purple flowers outside the trailer to give it a homey feel. Miller is out on the hunt, trying to find a new place to stay. Armstrong hitches the trailer. During this, she’s taking care of Miller’s dog, Moomoo.
She figures she still has time to get Miller’s trailer off the site and get back to save her own. Cottage Grove officials have other ideas. The moment Armstrong pulls away, the red tow truck swoops in, hooks Armstrong’s trailer and drives off.
She was only gone for 30 minutes. After dropping off Miller’s trailer, Armstrong returned to find her trailer had disappeared. “I really didn’t expect them to actually take it, because it hadn’t been tagged. It was still an hour before the deadline,” she says.
She then approached Cottage Grove Police officer Ryan Blalack, who she says “blew her off” and told her “he had no idea” about it. “These are the people that are supposed to be there to help us, and these are the people that are there helping destroy us,” she says.
The Cottage Grove Police Department did not respond to EW’s request for comment before deadline.
Armstrong says she was angry, but couldn’t let that distract her from packing up her belongings. Then, another camper at the North Douglas site came up to Armstrong asking for help with larger items that would be lost if they weren’t moved.
That took another half hour before she could return to 12th Street.
The prospects for rescuing the Highway 99 shelter looked bleak for Cottage Grove — until another social service agency, St. Vincent de Paul of Lane County, offered the city an extraordinary plan.
The nonprofit offered to operate the shelter and provide on-site management of the two overflow sites, where more than 100 unhoused people now lived. St. Vincent de Paul proposed moving everyone camping on the overflow sites into other shelters that it operated. The plan included constructing a new site where the agency could connect unhoused people with substance abuse and mental health treatment.
The plan’s price? $2.3 million for the services center and operating the shelter and camping sites.
The cost to Cottage Grove? Zero.
St. Vincent proposed covering the costs with state and federal grants. The nonprofit reported that it already had $900,000 on hand to go forward.
“There’s so many of those folks who became unhoused in that community,” St. Vincent de Paul of Lane County’s Executive Director Bethany Cartledge says. “Our goal is to really support vulnerable populations. That’s in our mission statement. That’s how we operate. And so we’re not going in expecting the city to do something for us. We’re looking at, how do we partner with the city to help the vulnerable in their community?”
Former City Councilor Mike Fleck says the St. Vincent de Paul plan was the solution that took care of Cottage Grove’s needs. All the City Council had to do was say yes. “What a blessing that this agency was stepping up and wanting to come in,” Fleck says. “I bet 90 percent or more of our issues would have just completely been resolved.”
But the plan soon unraveled.
On Feb. 23, Cottage Grove resident Michael Borke, a project manager for a local drywall company, filed a recall petition against city councilors Fleck, Chalice Savage and Alex Dreher.
In the recall filing, Borke said he was seeking to remove the councilors because they had done nothing to clean up the two homeless campsites. Borke had tried a recall months earlier but failed to gather enough signatures. This time, Borke collected more than the 654 signatures he needed. In late June, elections officials set the recall vote for the end of July.
The councilors now under threat of recall — Fleck, Savage and Dreher — all favored the St. Vincent de Paul plan. The recall put their political futures in doubt. But the council was supposed to vote on the St. Vincent de Paul plan on July 8, before the recall election. The city still had time to act.
Then more events undermined the plan.
The first was the June 28 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Grants Pass case. That took pressure off local governments to add shelter spaces. The City Council held the July 8 meeting to review the St. Vincent de Paul plan, but city officials told the nonprofit some city councilors were not yet ready to vote. It’s unclear what role Mayor Solesbee played in delaying the vote, as she declined to comment.
To people who disliked the existing campsites, the St. Vincent de Paul plan seemed an unnecessary step for the city. Councilor Ervin did not favor continuing the two campsites, which would have continued for a while under the plan.
“We should do the minimum,” Ervin tells EW, “and leave the space open for groups, organizations, churches, that have this in their mission.”
Ervin played a direct role in souring the St. Vincent de Paul plan.
On July 16, Ervin showed up unannounced at the St. Vincent de Paul’s Eugene Service Station, which provides emergency services during the day while nearby dusk-to-dawn sites are closed.
Now, Ervin says he simply wanted a firsthand look at how the nonprofit operated.
“I wanted to be able to answer ‘Yes, I talked to people. And this is what I’m basing my decision on,’” he says. “What’s the impact here? What might that look like when it comes to Cottage Grove?”
St. Vincent de Paul officials tell a different story. They say Ervin knocked on the doors of people living near the Eugene Service Station. Neighbors complained that Ervin quizzed them about living close to a St. Vincent de Paul homeless shelter.
With the threat of the recall and Ervin’s behavior, St. Vincent De Paul officials had seen enough. The nonprofit sent Cottage Grove officials a letter on July 25 announcing that it was withdrawing the plan.
“We were not able to move forward in Cottage Grove, largely because there was not a uniform community interest,” Cartledge says. She says the looming recall event and Ervin’s actions helped drive the nonprofit’s decision.
Five days later, Cottage Grove voters recalled Fleck, Savage and Dreher with 61 percent of the vote.
It’s 11:30 in the morning on August 22, the eviction day. The deadline passed 30 minutes ago.
Employees of Cottage Grove Public Works, wearing neon green shirts, had moved in right on time and assembled a make-shift fence, its sections linked with padlocks and zipties.
A dozen 12th Street camp residents sit slumped with their belongings, watching the workers.
Armstrong is among them. She’d returned from helping move her neighbor’s trailer to find hers had been towed away. Not even a warning ahead of time.
“When I got back, I was angry. I was very,” she pauses, “angry.”
She had only 15 minutes to pack her own belongings. She now stands watching the workers while holding Cowlick, her neighbor’s gray and white kitten. Cowlick stretches and looks up at Armstrong’s dejected face.
Amid the sadness, Armstrong finds that the former camp residents still look to her for help. A woman asks Armstrong if it’d be safe to store her belongings along the outside of the fence. “I imagine so,” she says.
A Cottage Grove resident who came to see the site clearance asks what she could do to help. “I think once you come back, if you got some food for us, you’ll probably do well,” Armstrong says.
The requests for Armstrong’s help continue.
Armstrong says she’s strong, but she’s disappointed she’s had to leave her own property behind again after being evicted from her previous two homes. This time, she got out with some of her belongings but had to leave something invaluable.
In the mad scramble to get out in the nick of time, Armstrong forgot to grab a picture her grandmother had given her and the other grandkids, with a special handwritten note on each. She says her grandmother passed away earlier this year, in April.
Remembering that item and what it meant, she pleaded with Cottage Grove Police to let her retrieve it because they said — per the eviction notices — they would hold onto items for 30 days.
“They told me that they were not going to let anybody in, and they weren’t letting anybody get anything, because we’d had plenty of time by then to get it,” she says. “And so it was at that point I knew that it was a complete loss.”
Armstrong says she doesn’t know what the future holds. “I am so upset about it,” she says, “and I don’t even know what to do.”
She still has no place to live.
After the recall vote, Cottage Grove officials wasted little time ordering that the two overflow camps, North Douglas and 12th Street, be cleared.
The city posted a notice in both camps that residents needed to be out by August 22. Officials say they will continue to keep the dog park open for overnight camping through September. Cottage Grove officials plan to re-open the 12th Street site for a limited number of campers.
According to Rogers, only three people stayed at the dusk-to-dawn dog park the day after it opened.
City officials say they have no idea where the 100-plus unhoused people who lived at the two camps have gone.
Armstrong says she still doesn’t have anywhere permanent to stay. She’s been bouncing around between truck stops and camping grounds — hoping she can find a more permanent solution. “It’s just really unfortunate, because it really, truly feels like it’s now illegal to be homeless,” she says.
In the days following the August 22 eviction, city crews piled abandoned propane tanks, tents, mattresses and other debris at both sites. On Monday, August 26, bulldozers arrived.
That morning, Brett Rogers sat under a tree near the North Douglas site with other former residents. A sign in front of him read, “Poor, homeless n hungry please help!!!!!” handwritten in black ink across cardboard.
Rogers had left on eviction day to camp under the Swinging Bridge off of River Road. A city worker spotted him, and moments later the police ordered him to leave.
Rogers then tried Trailhead Park, next to what used to be the 12th Street campsite, where he was met by the chief of police. “The chief of police says the only option I have is outside of the city or Eugene,” Rogers says.
But, Rogers says he doesn’t want to leave the town he’s been a part of for 18 years.
Now he was back at North Douglas. Rogers had walked back onto the site that morning and harvested what he could from his garden. The bucket in front of him held green peppers, one tomato, one squash, and a few of the smaller pumpkins. The giant pumpkin he was so proud of, Rogers couldn’t remove it before the chief of police chased him off.
Rogers had been watering his garden from his bucket when he’d been spotted by a public works employee.
“Why are you watering your garden if we’re just going to bulldoze them down?” the worker asked him.
“Because I cared for this for six months,” Rogers said he replied. “I nurtured the soil, I worked hard, I enriched the soil. I spent a lot of time on this garden. ‘Why am I doing it? Because I don’t want you guys to bulldoze it down.’”
When the bulldozers rumbled toward his garden, Rogers looked away. “As long as you see the sunflower up,” Rogers says, “the garden is still there. You see the sunflower down, and the garden’s gone.”
Every few minutes he stood and looked back. During one glance he spotted the sunflower, ripped from the ground and sitting on a dirt pile. Then he saw a bulldozer’s blade approach his garden, drop its blade and crush his giant pumpkin.
“They’ve torn my world down,” Rogers says. “It’s not gonna be normal tonight, it’s not gonna be normal tomorrow, because it’s all gone.”