The continued increase in homelessness in Portland, Oregon is in part a result of the systemic restructuring of the welfare state as well as a shift in local governance purviews. Primarily this has eradicated the affordable housing stock in the city which is compounded by the limited availability of emergency shelter spaces. These and other financial constraints have left a depleted service support system to cover a rising homelessness problem. In response to this, contemporary social movements have been focusing attention on economically marginalized groups such as the homeless, calling for rights to access resources in cities such as housing. This approach critiques the neoliberal policies that have bolstered entrepreneurial approaches to urban growth. Neoliberal policies result in a failure to maintain financial support for the well-being of the homeless and connected support services. This research examines one alternative to the traditional approach to sheltering the homeless. It focuses on a self-organized homeless tent city in downtown Portland, Right 2 Dream Too, which has become a critical resource in homeless emergency service provisioning. The rest site's success as an emergency service is primarily predicated on its geographic proximity to a nexus of social services in the Old Town neighborhood. Drawing on ethnographic work and archival data, I analyze the multiple spatialities of this self-managed site to better understand homeless individuals' experience with this place and other related spaces, as a means to understand its value as an emergency service for the homeless in Portland, and other cities with similar constraints. I argue this perspective is essential for mitigating homelessness in Portland and informing the decision-making surrounding its relocation.

Many researchers argue the increasing reliance on sit/lie ordinances to regulate homeless people's use of public space is one in a suite of neoliberal policies that shape the geographies of public space in cities to serve the needs of global capital. However, these policies are developed at the local, not global, level as specific actors make claims in the public sphere that communicatively shape policy formation. Through comparative case study, this research asks, how do different actors, situated in specific local and global contexts, influence the adoption of sit/lie ordinances? I examine two cases of policymaking in Portland and San Francisco. I use discourse analytic strategies and thematic coding of newspapers, archival documents, and key informant interviews to look at policy-making processes as they occur in their political, social, and economic contexts. I focus especially on the role of language in policy-making, policy-making arenas, and actions of grassroots actors, drawing from three interdisciplinary literatures to develop an explanatory theory of policy-making. I find the four interrelated explanatory factors in policy-making were: the actors (neoliberal and right-to-the-city); the tactics they use; the policy talk they use; and the policy arenas. First, political processes provide windows of opportunity and determine arenas for political activities. The different policy arenas (citizen election, committee, council led, litigation, etc.) influence the audience that the actors care about, and thus the policy talk. Additionally, elected officials have a determining effect on which arenas they use, which in turns structures the opportunities for policy talk. Second, the arena influences the depth to which resisters can discuss the issues with the wider public and decision-makers. This may explain why the right-to-the-city frame may not have been used as much as the academic literature might suggest. Resisters find it much harder to use this framing with the general public or elected officials because it takes too much time to explain to those unfamiliar. Instead, they rely more on concepts that may be more familiar like the dependent poor and unequal impact of the law on minority groups. Third, I find local actors have different positions in the global economy, however on the local level their different avenues and strategies of involvement are due to local conditions rather than global ones. The location in the global political economy seems to be less important than local political decision making contexts and the actions of individuals who are locally powerful due to their economic status and political connections. This suggests room for resisters to use local politics to resist these ordinances, without having to take on the entire global economy. Finally, actors use different narratives to influence decision makers and each other, responding and shifting to competing frames over time. The change over time is important, as it shows how policy debates change based on influences from different actors. My findings suggest the framing of the original necessity for the policy can influence the policy trajectory, but actors can and do respond and successfully shift policy talks over time. The dissertation concludes with additional implications for grassroots practice based on these theoretical findings.