Bamboozle, Redux

The Joint Office of Homeless Services herds 'em up and moves 'em out.

The apparatchiks of the Joint Office of Homeless Services returned to meet the Montavilla neighborhood for a second time a few days ago. They weren’t there voluntarily; their bosses at the Multnomah county commission had mandated two meetups with local citizens before they drop yet another bum-magnet—this time for car-campers—onto troubled 82d Avenue.

We wrote about Meeting #1 here, in case you missed it.

Meeting #2 was a formality, since the car-camp is clearly gonna happen—unless three county commissioners choose to buck the reigning Big Girl, Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, and vote against authorizing the project on April 11.

Fat chance.

The project may (or may not; we’ll get to that in a minute) offer free lodging, at least one free daily meal, air conditioned pods for around 40 people who live in their cars. Plus a patch of astroturf for the campers’ pets’ doo-doo.

For this, the county — assuming no price-creep — will spend somewhere around $4.5-million. Do the arithmetic.

Some of those dollars will have to come from the insane property taxes of six very, very unlucky homeowners who have the misfortune to live on the backside of the car camp.

Which is where we’ll begin our visit.

It’s the home of Kat Moss and her partner, Steve Bayliss. She’s a graphic designer; he works for Freddie’s; she’s also the chair of the Montavilla Neighborhood Association.

If all goes according to plan, just to complete the project’s concentration camp motif, there will be an eight-foot wooden wall wrapped around their backyard. Which Moss has spent many dollars reviving from bare dirt after the pair bought the place seven years ago. It now has grass so lush, even after a tough winter, that I was tempted to take off my shoes and run around in it.

Seven years ago Pine St. wasn’t the sociological disaster that the people who run this town subsequently created. There was a picturesque old church, Sts. Peter and Paul, across the street; how could Moss and Bayliss know that the church would help turn Ash and Pine Sts into one of the town’s most infamous bum-magnets as the progressive machine turned a blind eye to the city’s “hands off” non-policy toward the feral, who duly arrived from across the nation.

Moss began keeping an extraordinary record of the street’s descent into hellscape. Right in front of their porch. (You can see it yourself on Google Photos; it’s titled “Drugs, Trash & Jesus.”)

A few moments…

…and one poignant screen-capture as the church’s pastor, Rev. Sara Fischer (right—she doesn’t live in Montavilla, although she had the stones to run for a seat on the Montavilla Neighborhood Association), awards a big check to city council candidate (and one of the authors of the radical new city charter) Candace Avalos…

Alas, the Moss/Bayliss household won’t be around to enjoy the 1921 house’s vintage charm, or its woodwork from an era when lumber was virgin and craftsmen built things to last.

Moss and Bayliss attended the first meeting with the Joint two weeks ago, then promptly put their house on the market.

She got these responses…

…which should surprise no one.

No telling how much of a haircut Moss and Bayliss will have to take; just check the comps and you’ll find this virtual duplicate on a busy commercial street…

…as we say, do the arithmetic.

Moss and Bayliss vow that they’ll move, not just from the city but Multnomah County as well. Chalk up another hit on the middle class (who pay taxes—and how!). Not to mention a potentially valuable chunk of commercial land that will be wiped off the tax rolls.

Hasn’t anyone in the county heard of a basic rule of land use called “highest and best use?”¹ If you can make a case for 333 SE 82d Ave.’s use as a drop-in place for auto-campers to the exclusion of any other uses that might actually benefit the neighborhood, please drop us a line.

We emerged from the Moss house and onto Pine Street. To our right was an immobilized minivan, black plastic flapping in the back window, rear tires flat; a drug crew had pushed it into place in front of Moss’s house a day before a potential buyer arrived...

…while across the street the church has been reborn as a daily drop-in site where nonprofits will do whatever they do to “service” the feral.

There was a tent next to the church…

…despite the latest charities’ vow to follow a “Good Neighbor Agreement” and not allow camping and drug dealing…which promise had lasted perhaps 24-hours.

Not a very good prelude to the Joint’s meeting...

You knew the bamboozle was full-tilt upon arrival at the church. The friendly lady at the front counter was handing out little squares of paper with numbers 1-to-3; and notecards and pens.

Oops. We were going to be “facilitated.” Having been through my share of city-run community meetings, I knew what that meant.

It would involve breaking the citizens into more easily controlled “breakouts” (with special attention to separating people arriving together), and asking for questions to be written down on the notecards that, later, would be dumped in a big box. To be opened sometime by someone…we guess.

Word about the previous meeting—which, in Portland Polite terms had been borderline raucous—had evidently gotten around the beleaguered neighborhood. The church was filling. The Joint crew, huddled in a corner of the front pew, wore the nervous smiles of wallflowers at a senior prom.

Sitting right behind them was a neighborhood guy who looked like…well, trouble…

…he was. At one point, the Methodist church’s pastor, Rev. Heather Riggs lectured him with her mantra, “You’re in my house,” with an addendum, “…and I make the rules,” when he began reading a prepared statement.

There were a few muffled groans when the Joint MC announced “breakout rooms” and the questions-on-cards thingy; but the citizens fell into line (as they always do) and trooped off to various rooms…

…where group one, where I was assigned, featured two Joint people, who introduced themselves and their personal pronouns (isn’t that just a bit long in the tooth?),² and conducted the usual tennis game with the citizens.

The group featured, in addition to the Joint bureaucrats, the Rev. Dwight Merriweather and a couple of staffers from Straightway Services, a nonprofit based in the Northeast part of the city, which won the contract to run the lot. (It was a de facto victory since no other nonprofit made a bid. Which tells you something.)

An audience member asked about Straightway’s experience in running this sort of project; the Rev mentioned regularly meeting homeless people along 33d Avenue—”You know where that is, right?”—and other stuff in the “services” area, which a close listener might conclude doesn’t involve staffing 24/7. Or screening entrants. Or policing the inmates. Or getting rid of the outliers. Or managing the 150-foot cordon sanitaire that had been mentioned at Meeting #1, let alone any “Good Neighbor” agreements.

Time up! Move ‘em out!

The herd shuffled off to a location where the Joint’s director, Dan Field, was joined by lame-duck Mayor Wheeler’s Policy and Communications staffer, Hank Smith, who was doing make-up service for the absence of anyone from the city at the first meeting.

As citizens asked about who was actually going to police the periphery of the car-camp, Smith retreated to lengthy perorations about “the data” and how tents get removed and then alleged that, golly, some of the neighbors at the city’s Clinton Triangle Village have gotten used to the massive camp and learned to live with it and actually have written letters praising the city.

Someone in the audience muttered that there are no houses across the Triangle’s back fence.³ Take a look for yourself…

Joint director Field took the field and once again trotted out the “we’ll be getting the car-campers off your neighborhood streets” trope. When I butted in and asked just how many car-campers are actually cluttering up the neighborhood (after all, the feds count them every January on one of the darkest, coldest nights of the year), Field’s eyes skittered off to another questioner.

Just a coincidence: on the day of the meeting WillyWeek’s Nigel Jaquiss dropped this little item…

…which told a different story…

In simple terms, the JOHS, which has a budget of $277-million this year, does not know how many people need services, what their issues are, who has contacted them, or whether current remedies for homelessness work.

Time to move!

Where we met Donald Green, Joint’s Facilities Development manager. While the citizens persisted with more questions about who would be admitted and who would be kicked out and who would police the area, Green explained that policy stuff was above his pay-grade. He just runs the nuts-n-bolts stuff.

Almost as an aside, Green pointed out that the 40 tiny pods are being stored in a warehouse, and—not to worry—they haven’t been “exposed to the weather” (raising the question of how they’ll hold up when they are). And, also in the “not to worry” category, the site won’t be up and running until December. Subtext: your house should sell by then.

And then…it was over. (If you could capture the Joints’ collective sigh of relief, you might ameliorate climate warming.)

Interestingly, the east side’s representative on the county commission, the peripatetic Julia Brim-Edwards, didn’t attend the meeting. (She doubles down as a member of the dysfunctional Portland Public Schools Board). I asked her representative at the meeting, Policy and Budget Advisor Michelle Rogelstad, where Brim-Edwards was this evening.

“At another meeting,” she replied.

Where?

“I don’t know.”

Nor did she know how Ms. Brim-Edwards might vote on April 11. One wonders about communications in that office.

Brim-Edwards got into office after beating a mediocre opponent; she exudes (at least the times I’ve been around her) a ton of ambition, just as you would expect of a former Nike executive. (Funny, I can’t actually see her in a pair of fuchsia Air Jordan XXXVIII Chinese New Year high-tops.)

My bet is that Brim-Edwards knows that county council Chair Vega Pederson’s memory is more dangerous to her plans to double-jump across the checkerboard of machine politics than the memories of Montavilla citizens—most of whom didn’t attend the church meeting. She’s up for re-election in November and local media thinks she’ll win. Why mess that up?

Of course, a No vote could send a message that scraping the more compliant bums off the streets and into the arms of Straightway Services, while leaving the hard cases out on the streets in a sort of reverse-Darwinian sort…well, that’s not such a good idea.

Maybe “service”—for free, no questions asked, playing to the bums’ universal blame of others for their plight—might not be compassionate but more like classic co-dependence.

Or maybe not.

As for one citizen who showed up and offered a critique of the “move ‘em out” meetings…

…you get a sense he understands the Joint’s message, which is, essentially, “Like it or leave it.” The fact that the Moss/Bayliss household is bailing out is—perversely—a plus for the progressive machine, especially if there’s a twofer in her leaving a pesky neighborhood association leaderless as well.

The machine will roll merrily along, creating social disaster and then vowing to fix it. And getting re-elected.

Sayonara, Moss and Bayliss.

They won’t be the last.

1. I encountered this years ago when I was trapped on a jury deciding an eminent domain case of a landowner whose modest ranch-style house was gobbled up by a freeway project. His property was zoned to allow for commercial use — he could have built a hotel or strip mall — and so, applying “best and highest” we gave the guy around $4-million. He nearly fainted when the decision was announced in court.

2. Personally, I’d be happier if they disclosed their salary figures. My guess is that, along with Joint honcho Daniel Field’s $220K, there must have been around a $-half-million on the hoof in the various Joints and other officials in attendance. Which is one reason the homeless will continue to be “served” until approximately forever.

3. And the city says that one out of three guests makes it into housing. Do the arithmetic.