Bamboozle Redux, Again…

Homelessness Inc.™ revisits their favorite neighborhood.

The shoe on the heavy foot of the Joint Office of Homeless Services dropped on my little neighborhood. Again.

We last visited JOHS’s plans for my Montavilla neighborhood here and here and here back in April, all headlined with variations on the term Bamboozle.¹

That first series dealt with one of JOHS’s brainstorms: a bum-dump² in the form of a glorified parking lot for car-campers on an old used-RV lot, at 1818 SE 82d Ave. The county (very quietly) paid the prior-owner $2,250,000 for, essentially, asphalt and a building where prospective buyers were hot-boxed. After that asphalt gets scraped, the county will have spent around $4-million. The owner was about to decamp to the suburbs—his inventory was being stolen regularly—but no matter.

The community meetings were held in a local church (itself famed for allowing bums to tent on surrounding sidewalks) and drew a stellar cast of characters from JOHS…

…headlined by Dan Field, the guy in the down vest, the $-quarter-million-a-year head of the agency, along with well-paid minions, happy-talk, and personal pronouns.

Also sitting quietly in the audience was the county commissioner for the East Side, Julia Brim-Edwards, who scribbled copious notes and was inscrutable when asked if she would vote to approve the project.³

On Thursday, JOHS came back for another dog-n-pony show for yet another bum-dump on yet another busted-out used car lot, this one at 333 SE 82d. They’re about a quarter-mile apart. The county paid $2,015,000 for the property on the corner of Mill Street. Again, the county will dig up the asphalt and rip down the office, although the lead architect on the project, Șermin Yeșilada (she/her/they/them), of Sosyal Architecture, said there were some nice old timbers from the sales office that could be recycled.⁴

Short version of the 90-minute meeting: The county is going to—putting it bluntly—ram yet another Homelessness Inc.™ project down the neighborhood’s throat. Like it or lump it. Done deal. No appeal. Tough luck.

But, by golly, and just to be nice, the county will solicit “input” (keep it polite!) from the community on really important stuff such as how to paint the fences surrounding the “village.” Of course, it will have to “reflect community interests and values,” as defined by….someone.

We can happily predict that none of those interests will include, “Stick the bums in Alameda.”

Nevertheless, that Berlin-style fence will offer a pretty big canvas…

Odd, don’t you think, that all of this taxpayer-funded largess will be hidden behind 7-foot walls and that admission will be strictly regulated by the bums’ custodians. It begs the question: Who’s being kept in…or out?

The cast of characters at this latest meeting was pretty much the same as before, with the addition of the site’s architect, plus a couple of contractors for landscaping and graphics peering at the audience over n95s.⁵ Neighborhood scribe Jacob Loeb was scribbling in a reporter’s notebook—he covers the neighborhood “like a blanket,” as they used to say, before journalism went south, although skepticism about official pronouncements isn’t his metier.

Brim-Edwards was, again, perched in a back row like a bird of prey, but her vote (still secret!) is a foregone conclusion. The county is rush-rushing the vote on Dec. 14, before any “provider” has been hired or before the so-called “architecture” has been finalized. Note remarks above about “ramming.”

JOHS chief Field had other things to do.

The audience (maybe 50 neighbors turned out) was repeatedly cautioned that the conversation was only about the project’s design…

…but the neighbors clearly wanted to talk more about the “why” of the project.

As in “Why us?”

It’s an interesting question. After all, besides the car-camp, the county has dumped a neighborhood-busting clot of taxpayer-supported apartments in Montavilla (“Aldea at Glisan Landing,” with 96 apartments; plus another 41 studio apartments, “Beacon at Glisan Landing,” for hard-core homeless) at 74th Avenue and Glisan Street. Which we’ve written about in the “Whale” series, here, and here, and here. The county, Metro, and the feds have poured around $75-million into the project. Only officially poor people will live there. ⁶

Meanwhile, Volunteers of America has big plans for a property (the famous “bunker” at 90th and Glisan) that will host more unfortunates. Plus the neighborhood has halfway houses, a motel conversion for mentally ill charity patients, along with the more visible fast-food, used-car, massage parlors, head shops—stuff that makes Portland great.

We needn’t go into the back ‘n’ forth of the meeting—beyond observing that if you give some people a live microphone, you’ll be in for a long oration (leaving you to wonder why progressives have that weird, upturned diphthong at the end of every sentence). There was some yelling when a few neighbors tried to hog the questions, and a couple of grumpy guys in the front row who had the misfortune to live adjacent to JOHS’s big plans, kept wondering. “Why me?”

There was a fumbling attempt by the JOHS minions to define the term “low-barrier,” applied universally to projects of this sort. By some opaque process, the villagers will be admitted even if they’re doing drugs—but not to worry. Whoever runs the place won’t allow drug use on-site, which begs the question: Where will the addicts go to score their blues?

The project’s promoters say there will be a 50-yard cordon sanitaire around the camps, but—hey! This isn’t a prison! So the periphery will get some sort of promised extra attention. From…the cops?

The best question of the evening, in my view, was asked—almost apologetically—by one neighbor who wondered if, just maybe, those lots couldn’t have been used for, say, affordable housing for “the janitors and bartenders” and working stiffs who keep the neighborhood running. (And who probably make too much for cheap rent over on the Glisan whale, which cuts off at $49,560 for one person; a family of four’s limit is $67,680.)

It won’t surprise you that the PR master of ceremonies had no idea—such decisions are far above his pay-grade (or, for that matter, Field’s); nor did he offer an answer to the oft-repeated question, “How did these properties get purchased, anyway?”

For that, you would have to go back to the tyrannical reign of county chair Deborah Kafoury, of the politics-and-shoppiing-while-black lawsuit dynasty. She cut the deals in a binge of crummy-property purchases at the end of her term, topped by the ill-fated downtown R&R Center for bums in Old Town—the one that got closed for regrouping after the staff got a little too frisky on the upstairs beds.

To answer that, you would have to peer into the darkest, dodgiest corners of Portland politics and the nexus of property, political contributions, nonprofits, race-hustlers, union barons…places that local dinosaur media dare not go.

And even if someone told you why Kafoury cut those deals—then what? There are no refunds in the Kafoury business.

It was also pointed out that the city is now spending a ton of money on street-candy and medians, flashing lights, and shade trees (including on Mill Street) to turn 82d into a sort of Parisian boulevard with wide sidewalks, people strolling—at least in the architectural drawings. Isn’t a couple of homeless camps sorta working at cross-purposes?

Well, it’s a big government and one hand doesn’t know much about the pockets that the other is digging into …but slap enough paint on the villages’ forbidding walls, and it might just blend in.

As for the “villagers”—it’s a great deal. Heat, AC, showers, a little grass, pets, a gazebo to hang out in, hovering caretakers eager to do that “wrap-around” thing, lots of people to exchange tales of the open road and life’s little bumps on same…and little planters of your very own.

Free! No one would dream of asking the inmates to do a spot of work here and there, tidy up homeless messes here and there, slap some paint (on the fence!), offer some small payback for the $-million lifted out of the pockets of the people who go to a meeting on a dark winter night and who realize that they’re just chumps.

The deal’s done. Suck it up.

1. Bamboozle: | bamˈbo͞oz(ə)l | verb [with object] informal fool or cheat (someone): Tom Sawyer bamboozled the neighborhood boys into doing it for him. • confound or perplex: they were bamboozled by the number of savings plans being offered.

2. JOHS likes to call these places “villages.” I doubt that even Mrs. Clinton could warp that benevolent-sounding term more promiscuously.

3. Given the progressive (indeed, socialist) sweep of Portland politics, and the fact that chair Vega Pederson’s allies dominate the council, Brim-Edwards’s vote is mostly irrelevant.

4. Ms. Yeșilada estimates that her firm will be paid $322,000 for their work on the project.

5. They’re probably prepping for bird flu.

6. You will search in vain on the county’s self-congratulating websites for the only crucial question: what is the project’s per-square-foot cost (a widely used rule-of-thumb in the construction game)? Nor will you get an answer to: what’s in it for the project’s builder, Reliant Corp., the nation’s largest privately-owned developer, which usually deals with New York or LA mega-projects in the billion-dollar league.