Bums Rule
And so Mayor Whatshisname finally manned-up and announced a plan—there’s always “a plan”—to do something, anything, about the plague that has now crept into almost every corner (absent the fashionable enclaves) of this city.
Local media ticked off the plan’s items, with the usual infusions of editorial comment in the “news” stories. Our old friend, the Oregonian’s Shane Dixon Kavanaugh led the pack, with this…
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler will unveil an ambitious — and far from certain — proposal that attempts to lay the groundwork to ban unsanctioned homeless encampments months from now, push more unsheltered people to seek addiction or mental health treatment and create thousands of new affordable housing units over the next decade.
As usual, there was something for everyone on the Mayor’s standard progressive shopping list: developers, non-profits, the non-pros prosecutor, and all sorts of other ill-defined “stakeholders.” The City Council, having no other ideas about ending the self-imposed plague, promptly climbed on board.
It was all very complex and loaded with inexact time-frames and, down deep, a whole bunch of hopey-feeleyness. If the mayor can get even ten-percent of this actually kick-started it will be a miracle.
And, please remember, if the proposed city charter is enacted, all bets will be off. Think twelve people (most elected as 25-percenters and representatives of the more strident racist non-profits) will agree on anything?
As for the new mayor—that hapless person will have no power to vote on anything.
It goes without saying that most local media made it sound like the long-awaited ban on camping would happen, well…right away. Oregon Public Broadcasting summarized…
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and several of his colleagues want to force people living on the streets into large city-sanctioned camps where they can more easily access services to help stabilize their lives.
…but, if they bothered to read the fine print, this “ban” will be phased-in, as they say, over 18 months. Which, if nothing else, offers ample time for the various, self-selected homeless “advocates” to sue the bejesus out of the city. And—back to the charter—if it passes (god help us), the city will be in the midst of a drawn-out transitional period and the mayor will be looking for a new job.
Short version: anyone who thinks that the city, county, and the DA will collaborate on anything is living in dreamland.
And then there are the forgotten people—the actual “homeless.”
Try floating the idea of a 500-space “campus” where the campers can erect their county-provided tents, likely in some city-owned lot out in nowheresville…and your semi-sober camper will likely conclude—golly! Not much to steal out there, as this local camper made plain…
…and which drug gang will get the franchise for the camper’s mind-alteration needs?
Let’s just say piling 500 feral into a big lot will create a scene straight out of “Escape from New York.”
As for those 20,000 units of affordable housing by the year 2033…well, the mayor will be long gone by then and—that charter thingy again—there will be new hands on the tiller of state and city. The magic 20K number—where’d that come from? And just where will this massive public-housing be located (easy guess: not in Sellwood, Alameda, Laurelhurst, West Hills, Ladd’s, Grant Park, Beaumont-Wilshire, Concordia, the Pearl…which leaves…)?
Of course, these will be units slammed-together for non-profit fronts by the big construction outfits (as is the case with the new “whales” going up in St. Johns, Montavilla and Cully), so kiss property-taxes (not to mention architectural decency) bye-bye. And then there’s the problem with these poor-folks ghettoes in other towns that tried the build-it approach with socially disastrous effects. Anyone remember Pratt-Igoe or Cabrini-Green? Things got so bad they were torn down—but word travels slowly to Portland’s pols.
The plan floats, like a desert mirage, above one hard reality, which WillyWeek alluded to in its report…
Because of the Martin v. Boise ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court, cities cannot arrest homeless campers if there is not adequate shelter to offer them.
One can only marvel at the irony of the jurists of the 9th Circuit—who can see one of San Francisco’s worst urban homeless disaster zones from their office windows—who found that, somehow, the nation’s founders had camping on sidewalks on their minds when they banned “cruel and unusual” punishments. (Those punishments included disemboweling and drawing-and-quartering, but who knows?) Nevertheless the 9th Circuit (which the Supreme Court has traditionally used as a punching bag) found it—originalism, anyone?—and here we are.
Every city that would like to “get tough” with the various psychopaths, drug zombies, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” types…people who used to be called, accurately, “bums,” now faces legal harassment from every non-profit legal advocate.
Which means the bums now run the show.
In just about every story about the bums’ misdeeds, you’ll read that the person being interviewed (or charged with murder) came from far, far away. The Oregonian has a sad little story, headlined…
Fights, drug use, harassment marked life along a dead-end block in NE Portland. Then someone was killed.
…oddly enough written, not by the paper’s homeless-beat/advocate, Nicole Hayden, but by their grizzled cop-shop reporter, Maxine Bernstein. It was about an argument between homeless campers, in which one bum knifed a couple of others. The camper was from Minneapolis. (How’d he get here if he’s penniless?)
Does anyone really think this fellow is really just looking for a little bitty studio apartment (minimum rent $550) in an “affordable” ghetto down in, say, the St. Johns industrial district? Or even one of Commish Dan Ryan’s “villages?”
Get real.
That’s implicit in those “campuses” that the mayor thinks will be located…somewhere, in some neighborhood (that will promptly scream bloody murder). All of those $-multi-million social programs will enrich the graduates from the PSU school of social work, but the hard core will never fall for them.
The social-compassion programs will attract a few of the feral, but that will simply leave the most hard-core, tenacious out of the streets—a nice bit of unintentional social engineering.
Tickets? A diversion program overseen by a DA who won’t prosecute low-level crime?
Who’s kidding who?
The truth—known to everyone except the terminally compassionate—is that the vast majority of people in tents aren’t going anywhere as long as they can cling to this city’s welcome mat.
The grim truth—buried underneath all the plans—is that they must be…how shall we put it? Encouraged to live their lifestyle dreams somewhere else. The feral will stay here—indeed, travel from across the entire US to get in on the bennies—until we make it unattractive. Untenable. Until it gets around that the trip from Salt Lake City or West Palm Beach or Minneapolis isn’t worth the effort.
Bluntly: They will stay until they are pushed out.
Fudge it any way that’s politically expedient, hornswoggle local media, ignore the boo-hoo crowd (which, oddly enough, doesn’t live next to any tenters) and you might—just might—get away with it. If you had the guts to do it.
After all, it’s a big country. And there’s always Lake Oswego.
Isn’t there?
“A diversion program overseen by a DA who won’t prosecute low-level crime?”
There is another option: The governor can remove the authority of a District Attorney if he refuses to prosecute certain cases or carry out the duties of his office in keeping with his oath.
The governor can then designate an acting District Attorney to properly prosecute certain cases. The elected DA would still hold office, still collect a pay check. He simply wouldn’t be able to continue violating the oath of his office.
This alternative is not as obscure as you might think. It has even been done before.
Obviously, the current governor is not likely to pursue this option to help Portland. Whether any of the current candidates for governor would be willing to do so is unknown.
The musthing elephant in the room is discipline: carrot and stick. Activists will not let "reward and punishment" take place. I think that a paradox exists in there somewhere.
A strong philosophical element in that refusal to punish or even remonstrate is born in anti-capitalism. The system is evil therefore any demands it makes in exchange for its largesse are evil. You wouldn't make a raped woman marry her rapist would you? It would be a cruel absurdity to make succor for the raped contingent upon hoops and rules her rapist constructs. Or something like that.
Years and years ago I was with a woman who applied for a program director position in public broadcasting. Among the many city stations that interviewed her was that of Madison, Wisconsin. We lived abroad so the interview was conducted via conference call.
She allowed me to listen in. Those people were goddam maniacs. A dozen or so progressive interviewers questioned her and each woman had her own axe to grind or constituency to champion. All were church militant, and each understood herself to be the primary reason for the earth to wander around the sun. During the interview they occasionally paused the very bitter attacks on one another to ask the interviewee a question. The answer, of course, served as a springboard for renewed . . .Those disembodied and envenomed voices shrilling through the speaker shall always be with me.
So, let's do that and toss in ranked choice voting. Oh yes, elect Tina by all means.
The recent unanticipated candor within the L.A. City Council was satisfying if you were resigned to the collapse on the nation. Hey, why kid ourselves? It was fun.