A representative of Rogue Retreat, which serves the region’s unsheltered individuals, said Thursday that the nonprofit had finished relocating Medford’s Urban Campground guests to a new shelter site on West McAndrews Road.

Guests started migrating with their belongings to the new site Dec. 8, according to Joe Powell, Rogue Retreat’s development director.

Now all that’s left to do at the former campground on Biddle Road is to clean up the area and prepare to return it to Cearley Enterprises, Powell said. The city plans to stop leasing the old site from the landowner in January.

The original urban campground was born during the pandemic in summer 2020 as a temporary solution to the dilemma of helping houseless individuals shelter in place without exposing them to the elements or to COVID-19.

The campground became a vital resource of emergency and transitional housing for the homeless population, which grew 132% in Jackson County between 2017 and 2022, according to continuum of care data.

“As things moved along, we understood that this program’s going to need to be a permanent fixture within our community, at least for the time being,” Powell said.

In March, the agency announced it would rename the urban campground “Rogue Retreat Crossings,” a place where people can end one path and begin another.

At full capacity, the new Crossings — which takes up almost 4 acres near the Santo Community Center — will shelter a little more than 150 people, Powell said.

It is divided into phases, each its own mini-development.

In phase 1, guests stay in traditional nylon camping tents, enjoy meals and perhaps start accessing case management while looking for permanent housing or moving toward sobriety. It’s a low-barrier phase, though no alcohol or drug use is permitted on site.

Once guests have been clean at least 30 days, they move to phase 2, where they live in sturdier, Foldum-brand duplexes.

By phase 3 — a new phase for the new site — guests have taken significant steps toward sobriety and stability. They’ve gained life skills, maybe found a job, and they can move to the village section of Crossings. These are the pallet shelters and stick-built tiny-house duplexes akin to the structures Rogue Retreat offers at Hope Village less than a mile away.

When completed, Crossings will offer power, internet, running water, toilets, shower and laundry facilities, a shared kitchen and a communal space. Guests have access to mental and medical health care, drug treatment and job training and other wraparound supports offered through the nonprofit’s agency partners.

In a Rogue Retreat survey ahead of the move, immediate neighbors said they most worried about increases in foot and car traffic, declines in property values, property damage, safety issues — especially for single women and children — and more people in the area actively using drugs.

However, about half of respondents said they believed a project like Crossings could have positive impacts on the neighborhood, and more than half said they favored living near the site.

The survey results were “overwhelmingly positive,” Powell said. “Like, when we looked at it — when we finally got the data — we were very, very excited about what we saw.”

Rogue Retreat will manage the campground, but the land is owned by the city, which paid for it with a million and a half dollars from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act. An additional $2,648,342 for the project came through Gov. Tina Kotek’s emergency declaration in January around homelessness.

Meanwhile, Rogue Retreat is selling off scores of rigid, one-person tents, made with plastic and metal, that the nonprofit once used at the original campground but had less and less use for as the program evolved. A handful of rigid tents will remain at Crossings, allowing Rogue Retreat to shelter people for a short period while working to transition them to phase 1’s nylon tents.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Rogue Retreat Crossings’ amenities are not yet fully operational. An earlier version implied that they were.