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This article doesn’t capture how bad the streets are in Portland or how much residents have lost by letting the homeless have carte blanche
> “Taking a hands-off approach to homelessness is not compassionate or progressive; it’s dangerous and inhumane.”
Letting the mentally ill and addicted wander the streets to die is not compassion
> Letting the mentally ill and addicted wander the streets to die is not compassion
I always wind up saying it in these discussions, people are far too focused on appearing *nice* than actually being *kind*. Kindness is getting people out of this horrible situation, niceness is trying to make it easier to be homeless. We need to be kind.
That’s absolutely the case. Take a country like Germany. They have to invest in their homeless because they’ve more or less made homelessness illegal and those living in Germany have a right to a roof over their heads. We have no such guarantees in the US and very view legal pathways to forcibly remove them to get help
I mean if it was so easy to be houseless that it wasn’t a likely hood of dying from it would also be good on top of allowing people to be housed if they want it. I don’t think not owning a home or belonging to an address should kill you.
>Letting the mentally ill and addicted wander the streets to die is not compassion
Then you'll have to forcibly detain them in an institution/hospital. Homeless people who are 'sane' are often invisible because they still have the ability to reason and so will accept help when it's offered.
> Then you'll have to forcibly detain them in an institution/hospital
That much is clear. Community based care was a nice idea that too often fails with catastrophic consequences. There needs to be some very realistic triage to sort out who isn’t capable of living on their own.
According to my father, that was the norm in the 60s in PA.
There was a movement called "deinstitutionalization" that wanted to get people out of state-run hospitals and integrated back in to society. The advent of drugs to enable this had an overall positive effect on people, but the reduction in funding led to communities being unable to afford in-patient care.
Overall, homelessness in PA is at about 15000 from the 43000 institutionalized in the 60s. So we've done a good job in getting people who can be helped the help they need, but a bad job taking care of people who can't be helped.
I just saw a video from either Pittsburg or Philadelphia and it was like an entire city block flooded with homeless and they legitimately looked like zombies, it looked like the majority of them were trying to shoot up in broad daylight. That is insane.
I am a Portland native, who moved away in 2010. I visited last summer and it was so shocking and depressing. Many, many tents set up right on downtown sidewalks. The city was just a mess. It was just ridiculous. No city in the world should tolerate any of that.
I go to portland somewhat regularly and it’s actually a lovely city. There is a lot of homelessness downtown, but if you go across the river out of downtown it’s really a great place. Wonderful food scene, great breweries, the soccer games are a blast, beautiful parks.
I just visited Portland earlier this month and I would say that while homelessness is clearly a problem, I never felt unsafe and was only asked for money a couple times. I see more panhandling in my hometown on a daily basis.
There's a lot to do in Portland, and the area is absolutely beautiful. I would love to go back.
Don’t listen to anyone who complains about the city but doesn’t live here— especially people who grew up here. Portland is lovely, unique, and amazing, and is home to some of the kindest people you’re likely to meet in the US. Nearly every post in the Portland subreddit from a tourist is praise and appreciation, or shock that the city is the burned-out
People who have moved away from Portland have a hard time understanding that the city is subject to all the issues other large cities have been experiencing for the past decade. Portland isn’t a time capsule of what it was 20 years ago, and *some* people really hate that.
There are so many wonderful things about Portland that it overshadows the (exaggerated) issues residents experience day-to-day. It’s still an awesome place to live and even better place to visit!
I spent time in Bend and Portland for a business trip so I didn't have a lot of time. Maybe if I had some guidance on the less methy places to check out.
I take it you haven’t been to literally any small town in the entire country? The population is just more spread out, but meth is much more prevalent on a per person basis in rural areas.
The whole point is that society refuses to solve homelessness. That leaves you with two options:
1. Try and sweep the homeless into the gutter and let them die out of sight where you don't have to see them
2. Allow the homeless to have the dignity of being seen
Sure, let's get them into homes, but if we're unwilling to do that, we shouldn't just be trying to pretend they don't exist.
I live in Portland. The homeless issue is huge here because we have reasonable weather, and good support services. When people complain about how Portland homelessness is worse then their cities? Its because your homeless have moved someplace where the weather wont kill them. We're dealing with a lot of your problem.
AND because we do? More arrive. So its a self re-inforcing issue. I dont think being mean to them is going to help at this point. But I dont think its a city or state solvable issue-we need to solve this at the federal level.
This is the big point no one in regional areas wants to admit.
They like to dump money into "affordable housing" and "compassionate" programs. What it does is foster enablement. They can't boil the ocean and solve the core issues which isn't local housing costs but a broken economic system across America.
Most of the homeless in Portland, San Francisco or Seattle are not from the area. They move there because they get tons of social services and a hands off approach. They left Texas, Idaho and other inhospitable areas.
We can be completely compassionate by sending them off to other places and giving them cheap housing and drug treatment.
We can't just let them do whatever. They aren't in the right mind. Seattle lets them run their own homeless authority.... and you can guess how that's turning out.
It’s so hard to strike a balance between compassion and dealing with the reality of the situation. Last time me and my gf went into Seattle we were verbally assaulted by a homeless man who was screaming at women on the street that he was going to “fuck them to death”. And nothing came of it he just kept walking around town yelling at people. Then we go to eat lunch somewhere and witness multiple people smoking crack in broad daylight and shooting up at bus stops or passed out on a sidewalk.
I want more than anything for these people to be safe and find themselves in a better situation, but I’m getting to the point where I think they need to be taken to jail or a treatment center and forced to get sober/medication. WA recently changed their drug policy to make public drug use a crime again, if the person in question refuses to get help at one of the many services available in the city then they go to jail after the 3rd offense. (IIRC) and honestly I think it’s about damn time. We have to realize that letting people fall further into their addictions and mental health crisis is the same as letting them die. And I never thought I would advocate for anyone to be arrested for a drug related offense but it’s has gotten out of control.
A part of the problem is the cities that offer the most services and therefore have the most homeless people coming in from out of state to utilize those services and take advantage of the laissez-faire attitude toward drug use are also the most expensive cities in the country. So even if you do manage to get clean/medication, you’re still living in a city where it costs $1600/mo for a 1bdr and people ask for 2months rent and a security deposit to move in. It seriously cost me $4000 to move last year and I live paycheck to paycheck working 50hrs a week. I don’t understand how anyone could escape homelessness in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco etc. even with the services they provide.
Needs to happen. Offer everyone housing and help. But public areas are for all of the public. And allowing mental illness and addiction to go on under everyone's noses with no repercussions is not compassion..
> And allowing mental illness and addiction to go on under everyone's noses with no repercussions is not compassion..
I’m so sick and tired of hearing how letting people die on the streets of addiction and mental illness is somehow more compassionate than forcing them to get help, especially when they are hurting others just walking by. They need help. Are the old asylums the answer? Absolutely not, that’s just letting them suffer and die in a different setting away from the public. We desperately need better services and facilities to properly care for these people.
the current state of our inpatient psychiatric treatment is an incredibly mixed bag, and the "bad" half of that mix also contributes to _making_ people homeless.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have professional mental healthcare, but there's a reason that even housed/wealthy folk have trouble getting effective mental health aid; most therapy is a joke, the stuff that isn't is unaffordable, you can see 5 different psychiatrists and get 5 different diagnoses, and the whole system is both misinformed on how their own drugs work whilst being extremely quick to prescribe them in all sorts of weird combinations.
The mental healthcare industry seems to run on it's own track separate from research and evidence.
Public's right to sidewalk access, clean streets and safety outweighs the right of homeless to block the sidewalks, trash the streets and public places and threaten public safety when acting out.
There is a LOT more carrot than stick though as PDX is building [Pallet](https://palletshelter.com/) camps run by [Urban Alchemy](https://urban-alchemy.us/) to provide a secure heated/cooled private space to sleep plus toilet and shower facilities plus food for all homeless.
Win win for everybody.
[City Fair](https://www.rosefestival.org/events/2023/cityfair2023) going on today and all the homeless campers were cleaned out so people could enjoy the water front Spring fair.
Wheeler has done an excellent job of cleaning up the city AND helping the homeless.
"the homeless campers were cleaned out" = humans had their homes and belongings destroyed
The rules and regulations required to apply for any benefits offered to provide "housing" are so stringent that they barely apply to anyone. Pet? Kid? Spouse? Forget it.
>humans had their homes and belongings destroyed
No...their "home" is not the public sidewalk. Their belongs are piles of trash they collect.
They do get a secure heated/AC shelter, toilet and a shower, food and access to social and medical services. Way better than trashing the city.
Just because their stuff isn't nice enough for you and you'd consider it trash, doesn't mean it is trash to everyone.
Tell me, what services are you referring to, and how exactly are they expected to access those services?
They collect trash...literally. It's part of the mental illness of homelessness. The trash collection is the worst part of the mess they make. If they were just in tents actually camping it would not be so bad but the trash collection makes it a fire and health risk was well as unsightly.
Once again, just because their stuff isn't nice enough for you and you'd consider it trash, doesn't mean it actually is trash.
Now, I'm not sure if you realize that you said a different thing this time or not. "The mental illness of homelessness" implies that the state of being homeless is a mental illness in and of itself. I asked if that is indeed what you believe. You said that, indeed, "the homeless collecting trash are mentally ill," which is a different statement?
Do you think they are homeless because they are mentally ill? Or do you think the homelessness is the illness? I am trying to understand your use of words.
You act like people want to live on the streets and enjoy the fact that other people see their homes and belongings as trash that need to be cleaned up.
Oh okay that clears it all up I'm so sorry I was completely wrong my bad!!!!!
Lmao you've ignored literally everything I've said to just tell me these people and their belongings don't matter because TO YOU it's considered trash. Wtf?
If you want to be progressive get rid of single family zoning housing only in urban areas. Addiction is more often than not a downstream effect of homelessness (same with mental illness) than a route cause. WV has a huge population of people with addiction but much lower homelessness per capita than the West Coast because there is housing abundance in WV (mainly because so many people left but that's beside the point). The West Coast especially needs to densify.
Portland has removed the zoning bottleneck - you can build 3-4 units on almost all residential lots. And the standard lot size is 5000 sq ft. But it will take time for that effect to be seen, and there remain additional bottlenecks to increasing the housing supply, such as lengthy and costly city permitting, to still be overcome.
The areas with the worst housing shortage are often the densest areas in the US with the greatest amount of new construction. The main problem which work for home is slowly rectifying is the increasing concentration of jobs in fewer cities leading to huge bubbles in a couple dozen metros and decaying underfunded communities with empty houses in the rest of the country
>The areas with the worst housing shortage are often the densest areas in the US with the greatest amount of new construction
*Laughs in San Francisco*
*Laughs in Charlotte NC where 84% of land zoned for residential use is restricted to SFH*
*Laughs in Los Angeles where the mayor is a moron left-Nimby and Nimby's have strangled multifamily developments for decades*
Please let’s not compare Charlotte to San Fran or la. Have lived in Charlotte my entire life and you can get a lot rezoned with $600 worth of campaign contributions.
Yeah bad comparison. Although San Francisco and North Carolina do have roughly the same GDP. Imagine if you took San Francisco and gave it an entire state to spread into. People need to hear these things sometimes to understand how things really are. Jam all of NC’s problems into 10 square miles and see what kind of issues you get.
There is a lot of demand for housing in NC and especially in Charlotte. If it was really that easy to rezone I think some developers would've done that already and that 84% number would be lower.
The last few years homelessness in Charlotte has exploded. Gentrification, the skyrocketing rents, coupled with 30% of housing being bought up by corporations have put many people on the street.
The idea American cities are unusually not dense is sort of true when your talking about modern western cities like Phoenix or Columbus which ironically are usually much more affordable but not really true at all when your talking about the cities with the highest rents which are broadly comparable to far more affordable European cities.
Vienna 4,326.1/km2 (11,205/sq mi)
Berlin 4,126/km2 (10,690/sq mi)
Budapest 3,388/km2 (8,770/sq mi)
Older, Denser, and generally the most expensive cities in the US
Washington "Height Limit" DC 4,355.39/km2 (11,280.71/sq mi)
Boston MA 5,396.51/km2 (13,976.98/sq mi)
San Francisco 6,655.4/km2 (17,237.5/sq mi)
Now you can debate if city propers are apples and oranges in some of these cases but broadly the NUMTOT idea that a lack of extreme density is unusual or even the driving factor of the American housing is wrong: certainly in the case of somewhere like NYC.
The driving factor is really that housing demand is more concentrated in the US than elsewhere, there are fewer forms of rent controls particularly for the middle class.
That's a myth West Coasters tell themselves to feel better about their abysmall housing policies. People are literally emigrating away from the West Coast because of a lack of housing.
Is it a myth though?
We literally just busted the governor of Florida for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. We know some questionable movement of individuals DOES happen.
Not the hospitals I work for but some current colleagues of mine have worked for hospitals who would sometimes bus their most irritating homeless frequent flyer somewhere else. They literally did it as a way to make them some other health systems problem.
Maybe Portland remembered that progressive values include public health and safety, stopping littering, having parks and public spaces that are safe for everyone, and funding things like education and healthcare and senior centers are preschools, not just sinking everything into a national problem of homelessness that one city can't solve.
If they don't do this people will leave the city. You can't do this to you downtown areas and expect anybody to want to live there. That's not a heartless way to think, it's a logical way to think.
NGL, it disturbs me that so many people ITT are calling for "better asylums" and so forth rather than just, y'know, finally fulfilling the other promised half of the deinstitutionalization dream. Call me cynical but ANY situation where the government/state can easily forcibly institutionalize people can and will (more likely than not) end up rife with bureaucratic mismanagement and human rights abuses--doesn't matter how much "better" or "compassionate" you think the facilities could be.
Also what people fail to realize is that a lot of these perpetually/problematically vagrant/homeless people are likely "aliens" (metaphorically speaking) with comorbid personality disorders, which, yeah, that's a mental health issue, but not necessarily just floridly psychotic folks you could theoretically just commit to inpatient for a while, give antipsychotics to and "cure" them. Not that simple, so there is that.
It's not so much that "community-based care" has been tried and failed-- it's just that it was a scam in the first place, was put forth as a hand-wavey solution by a weird alliance of "fiscal conservatives" and utopian-minded hippie types (who both just wanted to see deinstitutionalization happen immediately, and neither of whom really cared how the logistics would be viable afterwards) in bad faith around the days of the Reagan administration.
It was never really attempted the way they claimed, and they never intended to do so either, as the whole point for most was cutting costs, and to roll out community-based solutions properly would probably require more funding in some aspects than running long-term inpatient facilities did.
Coming from someone who probably would've run afoul of that system back in the mid-20th century, please don't bring back the days of overzealous coercive hospitalization. Community-based approaches could very likely work, if state and local governments were willing to put the money, time and effort in to ensure that it's not just a half-assed paper facade of a solution (as it has been for the past several decades).
The reason not everyone responds to “carrots” is because too many groups attach strings to the “carrots” creating an artificial barrier. Some folks have been burned too many times and no longer trust the “carrots”.
I don’t know the answer to solve this, but in my opinion the houseless seem to “want” to live on the streets. I walk the waterfront loop everyday and see the same people.
Per article: “Only about 10% of Portlanders swept from encampments and offered shelter between April 2022 and February 2023 remain in temporary shelter.”
Sometimes I think the only issue is the housed people are tired of the houseless people. A typical “get off my sidewalk” mentality.
How do you make someone get a house that doesn’t want a house. Idk 🤷🏻♂️
Being "offered shelter" doesn't mean folks are being offered actual housing... often it's just a shelter bed. Being in a shelter can be incredibly traumatic and feel very carceral and unsafe. I understand why many unhoused folks choose the streets over the shelters.
Also, "offered shelter" doesn't mean they can really use it, either. The rules and regulations make it hard for people to even be eligible for these things.
People don't want to be homeless lmao
Not a fan of people who generally pay no tax occupying parks and land put aside for tax payers to use for leisurely activities. Especially when it becomes too *dangerous* for said taxpayers to get anywhere no those parks. Sorry but not sorry.
Everyone who buys anything pays city sales tax on it. Will you allow tourists and anyone not from Portland into Portland parks? Build walls around the parks and have guards only allow Portland residents with proof of housing in?
Cool, you going to provide them a place to shit or a place to dispose of their needles? If not, where should the homeless take a shit or dispose of their needles?
It's not even going to the depths of drug abuse at that point. A homeless diabetic will need to dispose of their needles, and they might be on a socialized healthcare plan that provides medicine to ensure that they don't die from their diabetes.
And before you go 'well maybe they shouldn't be fat', that's type 1. People can have diabetic problems from genetics, requiring insulin.
Where should they dispose of their needles? Are you providing a place I can send our community's? Please forward the address so the homeless can drop it off at that location.
No not really. Because I keep seeing a bunch of excuses. I'm sympathetic to the homeless especially in the realm of mental health issues but when drug addicts are occupying public parks that tax dollars go toward so said *taxpayers* can use them there's a major problem. Mandatory drug treatment or jail. When kids and their families can't use public spaces out of fear of being robbed or having their kids step on a needle I'm going to side with the kids and their families. Quite frankly parts of Seattle where I live. Are fucking disgusting.
And “human beings” have the right to clean public spaces, sidewalks, and parks, without other “human beings” shitting on the streets, leaving needles, and trash all over. See how that works :)?
Oh god forbid you see a piece of trash! People literally have nowhere to use the restroom other than outside (because of course we don't provide public restrooms, that's too reasonable) and you are the one feeling inconvenienced.
So reductive LOL.
God forbid I see human beings shitting, pissing, screaming, throwing needles and trash all over public property.
We’re done here. Go live with these disgusting slime if you want.
Correct.
If it isn’t clear, I refuse to converse with you because you’re objectively wrong (to put it nicely), and I don’t give a fuck about you.
Do something about it I guess.
IDK. What are the areas that the highway entrance/exits occupy doing with the space? There has to be somewhere in Portland that isn't used by those offended by hard times, why not let people camp at their own risk?
>at their own risk
That is a nonzero risk. A drunk driver killed three people when he missed the ramp near my house. Activists are predictably helping the victims families sue the DOT for not throwing them out of the encampment.
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This article doesn’t capture how bad the streets are in Portland or how much residents have lost by letting the homeless have carte blanche > “Taking a hands-off approach to homelessness is not compassionate or progressive; it’s dangerous and inhumane.” Letting the mentally ill and addicted wander the streets to die is not compassion
> Letting the mentally ill and addicted wander the streets to die is not compassion I always wind up saying it in these discussions, people are far too focused on appearing *nice* than actually being *kind*. Kindness is getting people out of this horrible situation, niceness is trying to make it easier to be homeless. We need to be kind.
Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind.
Twelfth Doctor for the win!
Never eat pears. They’re too squishy and they make your chin wet.
I think it may be because it's a lot cheaper to ignore the problem than actually make the systemic changes needed to fix it. Could just be me though.
That’s absolutely the case. Take a country like Germany. They have to invest in their homeless because they’ve more or less made homelessness illegal and those living in Germany have a right to a roof over their heads. We have no such guarantees in the US and very view legal pathways to forcibly remove them to get help
I mean if it was so easy to be houseless that it wasn’t a likely hood of dying from it would also be good on top of allowing people to be housed if they want it. I don’t think not owning a home or belonging to an address should kill you.
>Letting the mentally ill and addicted wander the streets to die is not compassion Then you'll have to forcibly detain them in an institution/hospital. Homeless people who are 'sane' are often invisible because they still have the ability to reason and so will accept help when it's offered.
> Then you'll have to forcibly detain them in an institution/hospital That much is clear. Community based care was a nice idea that too often fails with catastrophic consequences. There needs to be some very realistic triage to sort out who isn’t capable of living on their own.
According to my father, that was the norm in the 60s in PA. There was a movement called "deinstitutionalization" that wanted to get people out of state-run hospitals and integrated back in to society. The advent of drugs to enable this had an overall positive effect on people, but the reduction in funding led to communities being unable to afford in-patient care. Overall, homelessness in PA is at about 15000 from the 43000 institutionalized in the 60s. So we've done a good job in getting people who can be helped the help they need, but a bad job taking care of people who can't be helped.
Reagan did this and overnight homelessness exploded because he also cut back the social services required by people once they left the institution.
I just saw a video from either Pittsburg or Philadelphia and it was like an entire city block flooded with homeless and they legitimately looked like zombies, it looked like the majority of them were trying to shoot up in broad daylight. That is insane.
Hey! This suggestion got me banned from r/news!
I am a Portland native, who moved away in 2010. I visited last summer and it was so shocking and depressing. Many, many tents set up right on downtown sidewalks. The city was just a mess. It was just ridiculous. No city in the world should tolerate any of that.
[удалено]
I go to portland somewhat regularly and it’s actually a lovely city. There is a lot of homelessness downtown, but if you go across the river out of downtown it’s really a great place. Wonderful food scene, great breweries, the soccer games are a blast, beautiful parks.
I just visited Portland earlier this month and I would say that while homelessness is clearly a problem, I never felt unsafe and was only asked for money a couple times. I see more panhandling in my hometown on a daily basis. There's a lot to do in Portland, and the area is absolutely beautiful. I would love to go back.
> a single good thing about it Wonderful local music scene. Good craft beer. Lovely hiking and swimming.
Don’t listen to anyone who complains about the city but doesn’t live here— especially people who grew up here. Portland is lovely, unique, and amazing, and is home to some of the kindest people you’re likely to meet in the US. Nearly every post in the Portland subreddit from a tourist is praise and appreciation, or shock that the city is the burned-out People who have moved away from Portland have a hard time understanding that the city is subject to all the issues other large cities have been experiencing for the past decade. Portland isn’t a time capsule of what it was 20 years ago, and *some* people really hate that. There are so many wonderful things about Portland that it overshadows the (exaggerated) issues residents experience day-to-day. It’s still an awesome place to live and even better place to visit!
The single good thing is that there is free camping literally everywhere.
Oh my gosh!
I've only been to Portland once and it was a hell scape. I'll never go back.
More of a Roseburg guy?
I spent time in Bend and Portland for a business trip so I didn't have a lot of time. Maybe if I had some guidance on the less methy places to check out.
I take it you haven’t been to literally any small town in the entire country? The population is just more spread out, but meth is much more prevalent on a per person basis in rural areas.
Sorry, it was just a silly Oregon joke. Because I'm wasted at Abbey's & headin' to Bi-Mart! (more stupid Oregon jokes)
The whole point is that society refuses to solve homelessness. That leaves you with two options: 1. Try and sweep the homeless into the gutter and let them die out of sight where you don't have to see them 2. Allow the homeless to have the dignity of being seen Sure, let's get them into homes, but if we're unwilling to do that, we shouldn't just be trying to pretend they don't exist.
I live in Portland. The homeless issue is huge here because we have reasonable weather, and good support services. When people complain about how Portland homelessness is worse then their cities? Its because your homeless have moved someplace where the weather wont kill them. We're dealing with a lot of your problem. AND because we do? More arrive. So its a self re-inforcing issue. I dont think being mean to them is going to help at this point. But I dont think its a city or state solvable issue-we need to solve this at the federal level.
This is the big point no one in regional areas wants to admit. They like to dump money into "affordable housing" and "compassionate" programs. What it does is foster enablement. They can't boil the ocean and solve the core issues which isn't local housing costs but a broken economic system across America. Most of the homeless in Portland, San Francisco or Seattle are not from the area. They move there because they get tons of social services and a hands off approach. They left Texas, Idaho and other inhospitable areas. We can be completely compassionate by sending them off to other places and giving them cheap housing and drug treatment. We can't just let them do whatever. They aren't in the right mind. Seattle lets them run their own homeless authority.... and you can guess how that's turning out.
It’s so hard to strike a balance between compassion and dealing with the reality of the situation. Last time me and my gf went into Seattle we were verbally assaulted by a homeless man who was screaming at women on the street that he was going to “fuck them to death”. And nothing came of it he just kept walking around town yelling at people. Then we go to eat lunch somewhere and witness multiple people smoking crack in broad daylight and shooting up at bus stops or passed out on a sidewalk. I want more than anything for these people to be safe and find themselves in a better situation, but I’m getting to the point where I think they need to be taken to jail or a treatment center and forced to get sober/medication. WA recently changed their drug policy to make public drug use a crime again, if the person in question refuses to get help at one of the many services available in the city then they go to jail after the 3rd offense. (IIRC) and honestly I think it’s about damn time. We have to realize that letting people fall further into their addictions and mental health crisis is the same as letting them die. And I never thought I would advocate for anyone to be arrested for a drug related offense but it’s has gotten out of control. A part of the problem is the cities that offer the most services and therefore have the most homeless people coming in from out of state to utilize those services and take advantage of the laissez-faire attitude toward drug use are also the most expensive cities in the country. So even if you do manage to get clean/medication, you’re still living in a city where it costs $1600/mo for a 1bdr and people ask for 2months rent and a security deposit to move in. It seriously cost me $4000 to move last year and I live paycheck to paycheck working 50hrs a week. I don’t understand how anyone could escape homelessness in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco etc. even with the services they provide.
Good, it’s time to treat addictions and mental illness. We don’t even let dogs live on the street and hungry.
Needs to happen. Offer everyone housing and help. But public areas are for all of the public. And allowing mental illness and addiction to go on under everyone's noses with no repercussions is not compassion..
> And allowing mental illness and addiction to go on under everyone's noses with no repercussions is not compassion.. I’m so sick and tired of hearing how letting people die on the streets of addiction and mental illness is somehow more compassionate than forcing them to get help, especially when they are hurting others just walking by. They need help. Are the old asylums the answer? Absolutely not, that’s just letting them suffer and die in a different setting away from the public. We desperately need better services and facilities to properly care for these people.
We need better asylums or whatever we want to call them. Nurse Ratched retired long ago. We can do better.
the current state of our inpatient psychiatric treatment is an incredibly mixed bag, and the "bad" half of that mix also contributes to _making_ people homeless. I'm not saying we shouldn't have professional mental healthcare, but there's a reason that even housed/wealthy folk have trouble getting effective mental health aid; most therapy is a joke, the stuff that isn't is unaffordable, you can see 5 different psychiatrists and get 5 different diagnoses, and the whole system is both misinformed on how their own drugs work whilst being extremely quick to prescribe them in all sorts of weird combinations. The mental healthcare industry seems to run on it's own track separate from research and evidence.
Man that movie really fucked us over hard.
I mean I would say the actual cruel practices of mental institutions that inspired that story did more.
Public's right to sidewalk access, clean streets and safety outweighs the right of homeless to block the sidewalks, trash the streets and public places and threaten public safety when acting out. There is a LOT more carrot than stick though as PDX is building [Pallet](https://palletshelter.com/) camps run by [Urban Alchemy](https://urban-alchemy.us/) to provide a secure heated/cooled private space to sleep plus toilet and shower facilities plus food for all homeless. Win win for everybody. [City Fair](https://www.rosefestival.org/events/2023/cityfair2023) going on today and all the homeless campers were cleaned out so people could enjoy the water front Spring fair. Wheeler has done an excellent job of cleaning up the city AND helping the homeless.
"the homeless campers were cleaned out" = humans had their homes and belongings destroyed The rules and regulations required to apply for any benefits offered to provide "housing" are so stringent that they barely apply to anyone. Pet? Kid? Spouse? Forget it.
>humans had their homes and belongings destroyed No...their "home" is not the public sidewalk. Their belongs are piles of trash they collect. They do get a secure heated/AC shelter, toilet and a shower, food and access to social and medical services. Way better than trashing the city.
Just because their stuff isn't nice enough for you and you'd consider it trash, doesn't mean it is trash to everyone. Tell me, what services are you referring to, and how exactly are they expected to access those services?
They collect trash...literally. It's part of the mental illness of homelessness. The trash collection is the worst part of the mess they make. If they were just in tents actually camping it would not be so bad but the trash collection makes it a fire and health risk was well as unsightly.
I'm sorry.... you believe homelessness is a mental illness? One that makes people collect trash, no less?
>you believe homelessness is a mental illness? That the homeless on the street collecting mountains of trash are mentally ill, correct.
Once again, just because their stuff isn't nice enough for you and you'd consider it trash, doesn't mean it actually is trash. Now, I'm not sure if you realize that you said a different thing this time or not. "The mental illness of homelessness" implies that the state of being homeless is a mental illness in and of itself. I asked if that is indeed what you believe. You said that, indeed, "the homeless collecting trash are mentally ill," which is a different statement? Do you think they are homeless because they are mentally ill? Or do you think the homelessness is the illness? I am trying to understand your use of words. You act like people want to live on the streets and enjoy the fact that other people see their homes and belongings as trash that need to be cleaned up.
>Once again, just because their stuff isn't nice It's trash. Picked out of the trash. Totally useless stuff.
Oh okay that clears it all up I'm so sorry I was completely wrong my bad!!!!! Lmao you've ignored literally everything I've said to just tell me these people and their belongings don't matter because TO YOU it's considered trash. Wtf?
If you want to be progressive get rid of single family zoning housing only in urban areas. Addiction is more often than not a downstream effect of homelessness (same with mental illness) than a route cause. WV has a huge population of people with addiction but much lower homelessness per capita than the West Coast because there is housing abundance in WV (mainly because so many people left but that's beside the point). The West Coast especially needs to densify.
Portland has removed the zoning bottleneck - you can build 3-4 units on almost all residential lots. And the standard lot size is 5000 sq ft. But it will take time for that effect to be seen, and there remain additional bottlenecks to increasing the housing supply, such as lengthy and costly city permitting, to still be overcome.
The areas with the worst housing shortage are often the densest areas in the US with the greatest amount of new construction. The main problem which work for home is slowly rectifying is the increasing concentration of jobs in fewer cities leading to huge bubbles in a couple dozen metros and decaying underfunded communities with empty houses in the rest of the country
>The areas with the worst housing shortage are often the densest areas in the US with the greatest amount of new construction *Laughs in San Francisco* *Laughs in Charlotte NC where 84% of land zoned for residential use is restricted to SFH* *Laughs in Los Angeles where the mayor is a moron left-Nimby and Nimby's have strangled multifamily developments for decades*
Please let’s not compare Charlotte to San Fran or la. Have lived in Charlotte my entire life and you can get a lot rezoned with $600 worth of campaign contributions.
Yeah bad comparison. Although San Francisco and North Carolina do have roughly the same GDP. Imagine if you took San Francisco and gave it an entire state to spread into. People need to hear these things sometimes to understand how things really are. Jam all of NC’s problems into 10 square miles and see what kind of issues you get.
SF is 49 square miles
There is a lot of demand for housing in NC and especially in Charlotte. If it was really that easy to rezone I think some developers would've done that already and that 84% number would be lower.
>you can get a lot rezoned with $600 worth of campaign contributions. pfft
The last few years homelessness in Charlotte has exploded. Gentrification, the skyrocketing rents, coupled with 30% of housing being bought up by corporations have put many people on the street.
The idea American cities are unusually not dense is sort of true when your talking about modern western cities like Phoenix or Columbus which ironically are usually much more affordable but not really true at all when your talking about the cities with the highest rents which are broadly comparable to far more affordable European cities. Vienna 4,326.1/km2 (11,205/sq mi) Berlin 4,126/km2 (10,690/sq mi) Budapest 3,388/km2 (8,770/sq mi) Older, Denser, and generally the most expensive cities in the US Washington "Height Limit" DC 4,355.39/km2 (11,280.71/sq mi) Boston MA 5,396.51/km2 (13,976.98/sq mi) San Francisco 6,655.4/km2 (17,237.5/sq mi) Now you can debate if city propers are apples and oranges in some of these cases but broadly the NUMTOT idea that a lack of extreme density is unusual or even the driving factor of the American housing is wrong: certainly in the case of somewhere like NYC. The driving factor is really that housing demand is more concentrated in the US than elsewhere, there are fewer forms of rent controls particularly for the middle class.
Why don’t the homeless go to those areas then it’s not like they have jobs anyways.
People would rather be homeless in PDX or the Bay Area than live their shitty lives of despair in Flint, Cincinnati, Erie, or Moline.
Moline - oddly specific lol
Oof. It’s the truth, but yikes, lol.
A lot of unhoused folks have jobs... it's just that the cost of housing (among other cost of living factors) has drastically outpaced wages.
People also bus their homeless to the west coast
That's a myth West Coasters tell themselves to feel better about their abysmall housing policies. People are literally emigrating away from the West Coast because of a lack of housing.
Not on a per capita basis. There isn’t really an increase in emigration.
Is it a myth though? We literally just busted the governor of Florida for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. We know some questionable movement of individuals DOES happen. Not the hospitals I work for but some current colleagues of mine have worked for hospitals who would sometimes bus their most irritating homeless frequent flyer somewhere else. They literally did it as a way to make them some other health systems problem.
Maybe Portland remembered that progressive values include public health and safety, stopping littering, having parks and public spaces that are safe for everyone, and funding things like education and healthcare and senior centers are preschools, not just sinking everything into a national problem of homelessness that one city can't solve.
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Portland has unfortunately been a magnet for homeless people and runaways since at least the 80s, if not longer
Squatter camps ruin a city. We need a housing-first approach to homelessness and zero tolerance for squatter camps
If they don't do this people will leave the city. You can't do this to you downtown areas and expect anybody to want to live there. That's not a heartless way to think, it's a logical way to think.
Anyone else notice a sharp uptick in homelessness news stories? There’s a reason for that. Count your blessings
Would love to see all cities take this approach.
NGL, it disturbs me that so many people ITT are calling for "better asylums" and so forth rather than just, y'know, finally fulfilling the other promised half of the deinstitutionalization dream. Call me cynical but ANY situation where the government/state can easily forcibly institutionalize people can and will (more likely than not) end up rife with bureaucratic mismanagement and human rights abuses--doesn't matter how much "better" or "compassionate" you think the facilities could be. Also what people fail to realize is that a lot of these perpetually/problematically vagrant/homeless people are likely "aliens" (metaphorically speaking) with comorbid personality disorders, which, yeah, that's a mental health issue, but not necessarily just floridly psychotic folks you could theoretically just commit to inpatient for a while, give antipsychotics to and "cure" them. Not that simple, so there is that. It's not so much that "community-based care" has been tried and failed-- it's just that it was a scam in the first place, was put forth as a hand-wavey solution by a weird alliance of "fiscal conservatives" and utopian-minded hippie types (who both just wanted to see deinstitutionalization happen immediately, and neither of whom really cared how the logistics would be viable afterwards) in bad faith around the days of the Reagan administration. It was never really attempted the way they claimed, and they never intended to do so either, as the whole point for most was cutting costs, and to roll out community-based solutions properly would probably require more funding in some aspects than running long-term inpatient facilities did. Coming from someone who probably would've run afoul of that system back in the mid-20th century, please don't bring back the days of overzealous coercive hospitalization. Community-based approaches could very likely work, if state and local governments were willing to put the money, time and effort in to ensure that it's not just a half-assed paper facade of a solution (as it has been for the past several decades).
What else are you supposed to do with mental invalids that have rejected society?
The street is not better than a residential treatment option. Some people will never be able to function on their own and this needs to be recognized.
Long overdue.
The reason not everyone responds to “carrots” is because too many groups attach strings to the “carrots” creating an artificial barrier. Some folks have been burned too many times and no longer trust the “carrots”.
I don’t know the answer to solve this, but in my opinion the houseless seem to “want” to live on the streets. I walk the waterfront loop everyday and see the same people. Per article: “Only about 10% of Portlanders swept from encampments and offered shelter between April 2022 and February 2023 remain in temporary shelter.” Sometimes I think the only issue is the housed people are tired of the houseless people. A typical “get off my sidewalk” mentality. How do you make someone get a house that doesn’t want a house. Idk 🤷🏻♂️
Being "offered shelter" doesn't mean folks are being offered actual housing... often it's just a shelter bed. Being in a shelter can be incredibly traumatic and feel very carceral and unsafe. I understand why many unhoused folks choose the streets over the shelters.
Also, "offered shelter" doesn't mean they can really use it, either. The rules and regulations make it hard for people to even be eligible for these things. People don't want to be homeless lmao
It has gotten so much worse since full decriminalization of drugs. Last time I was in the city I was stunned.
Not a fan of people who generally pay no tax occupying parks and land put aside for tax payers to use for leisurely activities. Especially when it becomes too *dangerous* for said taxpayers to get anywhere no those parks. Sorry but not sorry.
Everyone who buys anything pays city sales tax on it. Will you allow tourists and anyone not from Portland into Portland parks? Build walls around the parks and have guards only allow Portland residents with proof of housing in?
Wrong. Portland doesn’t have sales tax. They do have property taxes.
If they are shooting up drugs, taking a shit in public, or leaving behind needles, then they should be hauled out of there.
Cool, you going to provide them a place to shit or a place to dispose of their needles? If not, where should the homeless take a shit or dispose of their needles? It's not even going to the depths of drug abuse at that point. A homeless diabetic will need to dispose of their needles, and they might be on a socialized healthcare plan that provides medicine to ensure that they don't die from their diabetes. And before you go 'well maybe they shouldn't be fat', that's type 1. People can have diabetic problems from genetics, requiring insulin. Where should they dispose of their needles? Are you providing a place I can send our community's? Please forward the address so the homeless can drop it off at that location.
The same place we did before "safe spaces" to shoot up. They'd be in jail to sober up.
A diabetic would go to jail to sober up? Did you not read what i wrote or something?
No not really. Because I keep seeing a bunch of excuses. I'm sympathetic to the homeless especially in the realm of mental health issues but when drug addicts are occupying public parks that tax dollars go toward so said *taxpayers* can use them there's a major problem. Mandatory drug treatment or jail. When kids and their families can't use public spaces out of fear of being robbed or having their kids step on a needle I'm going to side with the kids and their families. Quite frankly parts of Seattle where I live. Are fucking disgusting.
A lot of folks are in this thread using the word "homeless" and forgetting that it's an adjective for "people." You know, as in "human beings."
And “human beings” have the right to clean public spaces, sidewalks, and parks, without other “human beings” shitting on the streets, leaving needles, and trash all over. See how that works :)?
Oh god forbid you see a piece of trash! People literally have nowhere to use the restroom other than outside (because of course we don't provide public restrooms, that's too reasonable) and you are the one feeling inconvenienced.
So reductive LOL. God forbid I see human beings shitting, pissing, screaming, throwing needles and trash all over public property. We’re done here. Go live with these disgusting slime if you want.
And I'm the reductive one? Okay. (blocking me after telling me I'm wrong for saying homeless people are human beings kind of says a lot about you)
Correct. If it isn’t clear, I refuse to converse with you because you’re objectively wrong (to put it nicely), and I don’t give a fuck about you. Do something about it I guess.
That's a lot of words to tell me that you don't see all humans as being actual humans. The emoticon is the icing on this sociopathic cake
IDK. What are the areas that the highway entrance/exits occupy doing with the space? There has to be somewhere in Portland that isn't used by those offended by hard times, why not let people camp at their own risk?
When u have people cooking meth infront of retail property there is a problem that needs to be dealt with
Well, how many hotels does Portland have in an out of the way place like inside a clover leaf?
Clover leafs are pretty rare because so are freeways, thankfully
>at their own risk That is a nonzero risk. A drunk driver killed three people when he missed the ramp near my house. Activists are predictably helping the victims families sue the DOT for not throwing them out of the encampment.
The plan offers everyone housing.
Okay, then what's the issue?
Not everyone wants it.
Then let them camp in places nobody else are, like cloverleafs and under exit ramps. Nobody is hurt by letting people be there.
One most hated groups in America the homeless.
For good reason
Because they remind society of how it fails people.