Bike racks have also been deployed in Seattle to prevent tent encampments after that city’s campaign of police sweeps, which have been mirrored recently by its smaller Pacific Northwest neighbor. The owner of the vacant property adjacent to the racks is himself the developer of an adaptive reuse scheme that transformed a disused former city jail into a private shelter called Bybee Lakes and has lobbied in the past for the removal of encampments downtown, according to the Mercury. 

Portland’s growing number of unhoused citizens has been victimized recently by the city’s installation of more common forms of hostile architecture as part of a $44 million public safety spending initiative passed in late November. Three months later, a damning report revealed that Portland’s former mayor Sam Adams (now one of Mayor Ted Wheeler’s top advisors) had been floating an eight-page proposal to warehouse the unsheltered population into three massive semi-temporary facilities operated using soldiers from the Oregon National Guard.