Smokey Jordan organizes his belongings as the city of Bend conducts a sweep of residents living on Hunnell Road in Bend Tuesday. 

A homeless encampment sweep along Hunnell, Clausen and Loco roads has been discussed for months, but that offered no real relief Tuesday when cleanup crews began towing cars and trailers and sorting the belongings of those who had called it home.

Some were stressed. Some were sorrowful. Some were calm.

Many who had been living on city streets on Bend’s northern edge received extra time to move through the city’s Americans with Disabilities Act program. But the majority of people had to leave Tuesday after a Deschutes County judge denied three homeless residents’ request for a 10-day delay.

A third of the people living in the Hunnell Road area were granted disability accommodations. The end result is the city taking a less efficient approach than officials originally intended. City staff and contracted cleanup crews had to identify who was staying another week and who had to leave Tuesday, leading to a more piecemeal approach than planned.

Jerry “Cowboy” Baker and Pat Baker, who are not related, live side by side on Clausen Road. They look out for one another amid the uncertainty of living on the side of the road. They both received extra time to move to account for their ailments.

“It’s not enough,” Pat Baker said.

She is a 77-year-old Oregon native who sleeps sitting up in her car while her dog, Comanche, lays in the passenger seat. She has a degenerative back disease and arthritis everywhere else, which qualified her for the extra time.

Pat Baker doesn’t do drugs or drink alcohol, she said. She drinks her coffee, her Gatorade and smokes her hand-rolled cigarettes.

She and Jerry Baker, a 62-year-old man who loves music and speaks with a southern drawl, became fast friends around three months ago when she first started parking on Clausen Road. The both live off of their monthly Social Security checks, which amount to $917 for her and $980 for him.

That’s not nearly enough for either of them to move into housing, Pat Baker said. It’s not quite enough for her to fill her Ford’s gas tank and move from Clausen Road either, she said.

“So here I sit,” she said.

Jerry Baker, who camps in his neatly organized tent, has stage 4 liver cancer and the same degenerative disease in his back that Pat Baker has. Less than a year ago, he was living in a three-bedroom house. He became homeless after his fiancé fell in love with a different man.

“It was a huge adjustment going from sleeping in a king-sized bed to this little cushion I sleep on now,” he said.

He’s surviving as best he can, he said. But he doesn’t know where he’ll go before July 24 arrives.

“I’m scrambling as it is,” he said.

The city of Bend’s efforts to remove people and their belongings from the area will continue over the next several days into next week, according to city spokesperson Anne Aurand.

The total cost of the sweep is unknown. Tuesday was too soon to provide an estimate, Aurand wrote in a text message, and the city likely won’t know for days, if not weeks.

The city plans to wash Hunnell Road once people are gone and paint center lines and bike lanes, Aurand said.

Tuesday marked the first day the city was enforcing the full extent of its camping code in the Hunnell Road area. The code, which was passed by a majority of the City Council in 2022 and implemented in March, dictates when, where and how people can live on public property, including streets.

“It is working to reduce the scale and size of camps around town,” she said, though she acknowledged that the code doesn’t do much to solve homelessness.

People can still camp on public rights of way under certain circumstances, Aurand said, but for now, the Hunnell Road area is out of the picture.