Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler floats uncertain effort to ban homeless street camping, push unsheltered into drug treatment

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler will unveil an ambitious — and far from certain — proposal that attempts to lay the groundwork to ban unsanctioned homeless encampments months from now, push more unsheltered people to seek addiction or mental health treatment and create thousands of new affordable housing units over the next decade.

The moonshot effort to tame Portland’s deepening humanitarian crisis is contained within in a series of proposed resolutions that the mayor plans to announce at a press conference Friday, then bring before the City Council next week, according to draft copies of the documents and interviews with City Hall staffers.