Three downtown city blocks tell the story of how homelessness is shaping the Pendleton City Council race.

On one block, the Salvation Army building’s large parking lot fills with hungry people who show up every day for free hot meals. But a rise in visible homelessness has drawn a local backlash to services like these, and now some residents want to ban new social services in the downtown area altogether.

“They’ve closed their doors to the homeless,” said Dane Lyle Scholl as he was waiting for lunch at the Salvation Army recently. He sleeps in a tent most nights and has been cited by city police multiple times for illegal camping.

Across the street sat the Jr. Jam Dance Studio, which hosts youth dance classes.

Its founder and owner, Debbie Kishpaugh, is running for the city council.

She has spoken about her own negative experiences with homeless residents during a campaign backed by a community group that wants Pendleton to take a harder line approach to policing them.

“I’m angry at the situation, and we can do better. What exactly that is, I’m not sure,” Kishpaugh said after giving a tour of the area around her dance studio, highlighting the spots where she said unhoused people have left trash and human waste.

And one block west is the Great Pacific Wine & Coffee Co., a popular Main Street restaurant co-owned by an incumbent city councilor, Addison Schulberg.

He has tried to find a middle ground. He said he has the experience to lead the Eastern Oregon city as it navigates demands to cite or remove unhoused residents, ideas he thinks are unrealistic and lack compassion.

“​​They are people, and they need to exist in places,” Schulberg said. “They are Pendletonians.”

How to address the Eastern Oregon city’s growing homeless crisis has supercharged next week’s city council race in a place that sometimes has struggled to attract candidates at all.

Five seats – a controlling portion of the council – all have multiple candidates in an election season where homelessness policy has become a core issue.

Since city council candidates have to receive a majority of votes to win their seats, the local campaign season could extend past the May 19 primary and into November’s general election.

Whoever wins will have to deal with dueling pressures in a city with about 17,000 residents.

Across the country, said University of Washington housing researcher Gregg Colburn, frustrated residents and politicians tend to think homelessness is a local problem.

But subject matter experts like Colburn say one main factor ties every community grappling with homelessness, from Portland to Pendleton, together: a lack of affordable housing.

‘We can do better.’

Kishpaugh, 64, is running with the endorsement of Neighbors for a Better Pendleton. Led by local business owners and prominent residents, the group is also supporting candidates in every other city council race.

Last year, the group put out a host of policy recommendations to the city council, including a prohibition on new social services in the downtown area.

This transportation program sends “transient offenders” to their community of origin and harsher criminal penalties for repeat offenders. The council has yet to implement those policies.

The roots of Kishpaugh’s campaign go back to last August, when she was among dozens of people who rallied behind Neighbors for a Better Pendleton’s agenda at a city council meeting.

As one of the first people to the microphone, Kishpaugh, a longtime youth dance coach, set the tone for the evening.

She spoke about the people she said bathed in her home’s sprinklers or charged cell phones on her outdoor outlets. She described Pendleton as a community without “law or order.”

“I’ve invested 40 years in my home, my business, and my community,” she said at the meeting. “Why am I to tolerate it being destroyed and ruined? Why aren’t the laws that are written to protect me being applied?”

In an interview, Kishpaugh said the problems she has at home are worse at her dance studio due to its downtown location across the street from the Salvation Army.

She blames homeless residents for intimidating her dance students and damaging her property.

“I not only see it here, I live it,” she said.

Kishpaugh grew up in Salem and moved to Pendleton in 1983 after a local gym recruited her as a fitness instructor.

She quickly gained recognition in the community by starting a dance team at Pendleton High School that went on to win state titles. At her downtown studio, the walls are lined with awards and a framed mayoral proclamation naming April 13, 2011, as “Debbie Kishpaugh Day.”

She said homelessness in Pendleton got worse when a methadone clinic opened in 2018. She believes it attracted people from outside the community who were seeking the medication used to treat opioid addiction.

Kishpaugh said she would aim to serve the entire community as a city councilor, but unhoused residents might require a different approach.

“I might not be serving them the way I would serve my neighbor, but they’re in two different places in their life,” she said. “I think it is our job to take care of everybody. It may not be the same, and I don’t think it should be.”

‘What we’re dealing with.’

Kishpaugh hopes to unseat Schulberg, who was elected without any competition in 2022.

He is leaning on his experience during this campaign. He recalled a recent city council forum where various candidates shared their solutions to homelessness.

“I just wanted to raise a little paddle, like, ‘That’s illegal,’ or ‘That’s currently being litigated,’ or ‘We’re already doing that,’” Schulberg, 34, said in an interview. “Not to say the ideas are bad. It’s just that if you’re not there at every single meeting, you don’t have the understanding of what we’re dealing with.”

Pendleton’s approach to homelessness spurred five unhoused residents to sue the city last October, alleging that city policies made it difficult to find a legal place to rest or sleep. Legal documents show both sides are currently negotiating a settlement.

A Southern Oregon city set a national legal precedent in 2024, when the Supreme Court ruled that the City of Grants Pass could rightly enforce anti-camping ordinances without running afoul of constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Schulberg said there’s a threshold for humane treatment that he doesn’t want Pendleton’s homelessness enforcement to cross.

He understands the frustrations, he said, but he wants to continue working toward the city’s goals of reducing homelessness and building more housing.

Schulberg grew up in his parents’ restaurant, the Great Pacific, a mainstay on Main Street that’s just one block from Kishpaugh’s dance studio. He left town to attend college and returned in 2014.

“Something about the pace of life in Pendleton and the community here drew me here, kept me here, and I don’t see myself ever leaving,” he said.

He’s been in office as the city got involved in several projects to bring more housing to Pendleton, but Schulberg is frustrated that the state and federal standards for affordability aren’t more realistic.

Without more affordable housing, Schulberg said the city has to rely on the slow trickle of increasing vacancy rates to stabilize the market.

Schulberg said some of his constituents misunderstand the forces causing homelessness.

“They think we’re becoming a little Portland, or we’re becoming a little San Francisco or a little New York, and it’s just simply not that way,” he said. “It is occurring everywhere, in every city, in every town.”

‘Brothers and sisters’

What ties together every community with high levels of homelessness, University of Washington professor and author Gregg Colburn has found, is not drug use, mental health, criminality, generosity of public services, or even poverty: it’s a lack of affordable housing.

A 2025 Pendleton housing study estimated that the city needed 468 additional housing units to meet the needs of residents making less than $20,000 per year.

“We don’t see the women and children in shelters,” Colburn said. “We don’t see the people living in their cars, showering at the YMCA, and going to work. There are all these other people who are kind of below the surface of the water that are not visible.”

In his book, “Homelessness is a Housing Problem,” he argues that the most effective solutions are building more housing and supporting programs that help people stay housed.

It’s a common misconception, he said in an interview, that social services attract unhoused people from out of town.

“Seattle thinks they’re a magnet. California thinks they’re a magnet. Middletown, Ohio, thinks they’re a magnet,” Colburn said. “I always kind of joke and say, ‘That’s not how magnets work.’ Everyone can’t be the recipient.”

Kat Kunzler, 47, moved to Pendleton in the fourth grade.

As a resident, she doesn’t like it either when she sees property vandalized or dirtied.

But if the community wants to make more progress, she said, it will have to work with unhoused people like her. Kunzler said she spends an occasional night at a friend’s house, but a more long-term shelter has been harder to come by.

In 2022, a local nonprofit turned a vacant motel into a transitional housing complex called the Promise Inn. The facility is meant to provide temporary shelter for residents looking for permanent housing.

But Kunzler said she couldn’t make it work for her. Her small dog was considered too aggressive, so she now sleeps unsheltered most nights.

She tries to avoid encounters with police by finding camping spots hidden from public view.

Pendleton City Councilor Carol Innes represents an area where the public debate over visible homelessness has become unavoidable: downtown.

She was busy volunteering there on a recent Sunday, helping serve a free Sunday meal at the Salvation Army.

“I have had people in my family who have been homeless,” she said. “I understand this.”

At 81, the two-term councilor is not running again, and three candidates are hoping to replace her. She said some of them are “one-issue candidates,” focusing mostly on homelessness when the job of running the city requires so much more.

Before she spent countless hours hopping on video calls and analyzing budgets as a city councilor, Innes said one of her motivations for running for office was solving the community’s homelessness issues.

“I learned very quickly that there is no easy answer to that, but I also learned that homeless people are more like my brothers and my sisters than they are my opponents.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/14/homelessness-becomes-focal-point-in-pendleton-city-council-race/