Just to the west of the Little House there's a City park, the Peninsula Crossing Trail, that runs along the east bank of what we call "The Cut", the immense railroad cut that runs through North Portland from the Willamette River side - where the vast Albina freight yards are located - to the Columbia.
The Bride and I discovered it soon after it was opened in 1996. Back then I could still ride a bike and we did, enjoying the quiet wooded trail between the busy and largely-bike-lane-free-at-the-time North Portland arterial streets.
That's actually a pretty good picture of how the trail would have looked for, oh, about a decade or so.
Then Portland's "homeless problem" metastasized.
Today the trail looks more like this:
Like most Portlanders, I'm frustrated and angry. Almost every public space is now inhabited, and nearly all the habitations are a sour sprawl of...well, everything; filthy clothes, bags of trash, broken bicycles and cars...they're trashpits. There's a reason nobody ever went for a walk in the city dump.
But, like most Portlanders, I'm also baffled by what to do about these camps.
I mean...I know the real answer. It means building a mass of cheap, low-cost rental and housing units. It means staffing organizations that will provide support and structure for the people moved out of the camps and into the housing - both in the form of "support" like addiction programs and medical and/or psychiatric care - and "structure", like nannying them to take their meds and go to the job training programs.
But...here's a good example of why even with all this - and I should note that "all this" is a fever dream; nobody in Portland will vote the taxation it would take to do all that - I despair of figuring out a way to deal with this homeless mess.
The link above takes you to the tale of one "Gary O'Connor", who lived and died - violently - along a similar trail in Southeast Portland.
"O’Connor couldn’t read or write and resorted to stealing...(h)e struggled with addiction...Court records show O’Connor had burglary convictions in Multnomah County and at the time of his death had a warrant out for his arrest in Clackamas County, where he was accused of giving police a false name and criminal trespassing."
So let's assume you get this guy into a subsidized house. You get him a into a drug addiction program. You get him back in school - at 45 years old, mind - to learn to freaking read and write and do simple math.
What then? Who's going to hire this guy? A former crook and tweaker who lived half his life illiterate? Frankly, I'm guessing you'd have to assign a sort of parole officer/social worker/nanny to the dude full time to keep him from deciding that stealing bikes was less difficult and demanding than his job stocking shelves at Kroger.
Multiply that by thousands or even tens of thousands; people with health issues who need medical help, people with drug issues, people with emotional issues or mental health issues. People who, honestly, prefer to steal rather than punch a clock.
I mean...to be brutal, if this guy was a pet you'd take him to the vet and have him put down. He'd just be too much trouble.
But he's not a pet, he's a person. A troubling, troublesome person, but a person. So you kind of have a moral dilemma on your hands. He's a huge sink of time, money, and trouble, and one who is very like to reward all that investment with...very little.
But if you don't make that investment, there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.
So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space.
5 comments:
Well, one thing about housing, taken as an isolated mitigation.
You simply get homeless people housed and a large chunk of the mental health issues get mitigated. Yeah, just from getting them housed.
I know, you're right, it's not going to happen. Same problem with every bit of infrastructure managed at the state level or below: the revenue isn't there.
That helped create the mental health care crisis that's been burning on since the early 80s: the Federal Mental Health program of the Kennedy/Johnson years relied on locally funded community mental health centers since Congress wouldn't approve the upkeep with Federal funds. So the whole thing collapsed very quickly.
I live in a city somewhat like Portland and we have somewhat the same problem, only much reduced in numbers.
In the last couple of years the city and provincial government bought a couple of hotels to put up the really hard-to-house, which was a step in the right direction but they did not follow it up with the kinds of other supports they needed to provide. It wasn't enough just to give them a roof and a warm dry place to sleep, although that is the immediate Maslow need... and the drug dealers who prey on them moved in, so these places are centres of violence and petty theft and filth as people sell, collect debts, threaten and steal to keep the cycle going.
The fact that O'Connors exist and will still be around doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to help other people on the street, because they are not all like them.
You know it's a lot cheaper to house someone and try to treat their deficiencies than it is to keep them in prison; each one you do straighten out and get to stock shelves at Kroger's is a net savings, and the success rate is not zero.
What would have been made of O'Connor a hundred years ago?
Illiterate thieves had different options then, if they weren't tramps at the mercy of other tramps (or Ernest Borgnine dressed as a road bull, haha funny but most homeless person violence is visited on other homeless people and doesn't make it into the paper) they'd probably be working itinerant labour on a farm... that's gone now (one terrible thing Corrections Canada did years ago was close down all the prison farms, on the orders of a vengeful lawnorder government which stuck around long enough to see the recidivism rate flip back up).
I don't have the definitive answer either, sorry.
They all need help; some a little, some a lot, some will never be able to do more than tie their shoes.
It would be a cold world where none of them got anything.
The frustrating part is, as I mentioned, that we pretty much know what we would have to do to change this. All it would take is about the annual cost of half an F-35, and the result would also probably work better as a high-altitude interceptor. But we won't be arsed to tax ourselves enough to find the funding.
The O'Connors don't mean that we shouldn't try to get the unhoused back into normie society, but, unfortunately, they mean that there's going to be a fairly significant number of people who just can't fit back in. What do we do? The notion of keeping them like pets is going to be unacceptable to lots of people...but right now they're feral, and as such destructive.
Yeah...the problem isn't that we can't. It's that we won't. And I don't know how you change that...
BT - "Illiterate thieves had different options then"
In olden times didn't they used to have brotherhoods in some countries, or maybe even here in our own distant past? Or fraternities, or guilds? Where hey policed themselves, had their own courts and juries? Or was that a literary fabrication by Dickens, Dumas, et al?
You can't "fix" Gary O'Connor.
He was broken "in the mold".
The guy has Fetal Alchohol Syndrom writ all over him.
The only way to deal with him is as a medical problem resulting
from a systemic failure to provide good health care to preggos.
Dhu
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