A terrified Portland, Oregon, woman who claims she received multiple arson threats from a homeless man encamped behind her house, in a tent apparently donated to him by a Marxist group, says police are refusing to help.

Vivica Elliot found a large tent set up just over her fence on Monday morning, the local Fox affiliate reported. 

When Ms. Elliot approached the tent and asked the man sitting inside to move, she says he threatened to burn her house down multiple times. “He said, ‘I’m gonna burn your house down.’ He said it four times,” Ms. Elliot told Fox12.

Decidedly liberal Portland is currently grappling with a major homelessness crisis — with more than 6,000 homeless individuals in its metropolitan area. This comes as the city, which was at the forefront of the 2020 movement to “defund the police,” is reeling from since-overturned cuts to its law enforcement.

Frightened by the homeless man’s repeated threats, Ms. Elliot called 911, but the officer who came on the scene said he found no evidence of a crime. Ms. Elliot says this isn’t the first time she’s dealt with homeless individuals in her neighborhood.

“It makes me nervous. It makes me really nervous. They’ve been in my yard. They throw needles in my yard. They throw trash in my yard,” Ms. Elliot said. “I don’t know what to do.”

Ms. Elliot says the tent did not come from the local government — which was previously issuing them as temporary shelter measures — but from a group calling itself “The People’s Housing Project.”

The organization appears to be a Marxist group whose mission is “fundamentally incompatible with capitalism.” Its first defining principle is that “all written history of previously existing society is the history of class struggle.” 

Homelessness, the organization posits, “is caused by private property itself.” The group commits itself to providing shelters — including the tent that showed up behind Ms. Elliot’s house — “regardless of the so-called ‘legality.’”

As of May 2022, more than 6,000 persons were counted as homeless in the Portland metropolitan area, according to records from Multnomah County. That’s in an area where the population is just north of 2.2 million.

By September 2022, the situation on the streets of Portland was so dire that disabilities activists sued the city, claiming that the number of tents on the sidewalks had rendered them inaccessible to wheelchair users and other disabled individuals. 

The city is in the midst of implementing Mayor Wheeler’s proposal to tackle the crisis — by creating more affordable housing and banning “unsanctioned” encampments, among other measures. 

The incident in Ms. Elliot’s neighborhood raises questions not only about the homelessness problem in Portland but also the effectiveness of the post-Black Lives Matter police department in the city.

Portland was the site of major anti-police activities during the 2020 summer of Black Lives Matter — protests that outlasted those of nearly every other city in America, with Portlanders demonstrating well into 2021. Rioting from the protests caused more than $20 million in damages in the city.

In the face of calls to defund the police, the city slashed its law enforcement budget by $15 million — diverting $5 million to create the Portland Street Response, a non-police initiative that sends social workers to deal with non-violent urgent issues. 

The Portland Street Response recently halted a policy of handing out tents to homeless individuals.

The city eventually wheeled on police budget cuts, starting in 2021, restoring lost funds.

“Many Portlanders no longer feel safe,” the city’s mayor said at a 2021 press conference. “And it is our duty, as leaders of this city, to take action and deliver better results within our crisis response system.”