High Dudgeon at the Oregonian

The city's leading advocate for the homeless leaves out a few inconvenient calculations.

The Oregonian’s in-house homeless-rights advocate, Nicole Hayden, has a few things she’d like to get off her chest about these “sweeps” taking place downtown.

In two shrill articles in as many days, Ms. Hayden has let us mopes who are housed know that we are utterly failing the people getting kicked off the sidewalks and getting free housing in Commissioner Dan “Ten Feet” Ryan’s Safe Rest Villages.

Monday, for example, Ms. Hayden rummaged up a cooperative vagrant, one "Mama Kat," who would really love to bunk in one of those freebie itty-bitty houses but…

…the tiny home community, particularly its restrooms, are not wheelchair accessible so Mama Kat, who uses a wheelchair, can’t live there, she and her advocates said Monday.

Let’s set aside for the moment that a homeless person has her own “advocates;” and continue reading that…

The city’s “safe rest village team is currently working to build a ramp and make things more accessible,” Cody Bowman, a spokesperson for Mayor Wheeler, said Monday.

This would seem to contradict the story’s headline…

Portland’s newest homeless village is not ADA accessible

…which we’ll get back to in a moment. But this “Gotcha” was really just icing on the cake Ms. Hayden baked on Sunday—traditional day for newspapers to run their heavy-hitting exposes…

Mayor Ted Wheeler says Portland’s new homelessness strategy succeeds – but there’s no evidence it helps house the homeless

…which again featured “Mama Kat” looking sad in a traditional heart-rending photo. Ms. Hayden told the O’s readers, as they sipped their brunch lattes, that…

…the evidence to support that claim of success is all but non-existent, an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive shows. That is largely because city officials have failed to collect meaningful data or coordinate with outside groups or agencies it works with, the analysis found. The city has no evidence any individuals it rousted from sleeping on the streets got permanent housing or other needed services.

A few Oregonian readers might have read this and then turned to the news about the Blazers (bound to be auctioned soon to a mega-billionaire in some larger city) after asking:

• How come they get “permanent housing and other needed services?”

• What the heck is “meaningful data?”

• When’s the city going to pay my mortgage?

Good questions. We would be astonished if Ms. Hayden actually asked them.

The reason is obvious: it’s another example of the infamous journalistic “frame.” Space between BiMart ads is limited, and so a reporter must focus on certain “facts,”and leave a whole bunch of others out.

It’s the “narrative,” stupid. If Ms. Hayden says someone deserves something and they don’t get it, then it’s a scandal! It’s someone’s fault! It’s because I say so.

She gets to write whatever she wants; the editors (do they still have ‘em?) hit the “publish” button, and everyone’s happy.

But let’s suppose for a mad minute, that there were editors at the O who, y’know, might ask questions. Such as: what other legal and bureaucratic things are being ignored by the city in building Commish Ryan’s little empire of Villages?

Let’s do it for ‘em.

Let’s start with the itty-bitty houses being provided to Miss Kat and other street people.

They’re complete with locking doors, windows, electricity, heat and (at least in the propaganda handouts) are painted in cheerful, soul-uplifting colors. Each 8x8-foot shed is 64-square-feet and is designed for two people, although it’s probable that more will cram in, since the Villages will be “low-barrier,” meaning “anything goes.”

Oops! That’s a direct violation of Portland city code 29.30.210 :Sleeping Room Requirements, which says all habitations…

Shall have a minimum area of at least 70 square feet of floor area, except that where more than two persons occupy a room used for sleeping purposes, the required floor area shall be increased at the rate of 50 square feet for each person in excess of two.

Portland’s first “micro-apartment” complex (airlifted from Tokyo, probably) got noticed a while ago by KGW, which seemed bemused that…

The Footprint Northwest building opened this past April, on NW Thurman and 23rd Avenue in Portland. The developer…bought a run-down, single family home and replaced it with a 54-unit apartment building.

The smallest unit they offer is a new record for the city: 150 square feet of living space.

But then tenants at Fooptprint pay something known as “rent.” Ryan’s message to Villagers would seem to be: You get what you pay for.

Note also that these new Villages will have restrooms (thus the hasty ramps for “Miss Kat”), plus electric hookups and a big communal kitchen and showers.

If you want to build something of any size in Portland and hook it up to sewers, electricity, and water, you will pay something called a “System Development Fee” before you can move even a teaspoon of dirt.

It’s based (beyond civic greed) on the belief that more people in more houses and apartments equals the need for more, well…parks. For which the Parks Bureau will bill you, at a minimum, $6,768.

Parks isn’t the only city agency getting its beak wet. These are the bare-minimum charges…

• Sewers—$7,235

• Stormwater system—$1,167

• Transportation systems—$5,694

• Water meter—$3,699

That last figure is for the smallest, 5/8-inch water meter. If it’s a 2-inch meter (calculated via an involved form that includes “flushometers”), the fee could go easily to $29,592.

Given the many of the homeless aren’t using sewers—or, for that matter, much in the way of mitigating stormwater (parks are another matter)—and that many have come here from as far away as Utah and points east, they certainly will add to the burden on “the system.”

Want to bet that the Villages are paying the hated SDF’s?

Then there’s the matter of zoning. As the folks down in Multnomah Village, who are skeptical of Commissioner Ryan dropping 60-itty-bitties into the Sears site, have pointed out on their…

Dan Ryan is a malicious neighbor

web site…

… this SRV area is zoned EG2.

Here’s what the city says about EG2…

The General Employment zones…allow a wide range of employment opportunities without potential conflicts from interspersed residential uses.

To which Commish Ryan would no doubt respond: “It’s an emergency, stupid.”

And this doesn’t get us close to the real question posed by Ms. Hayden’s Gotcha pieces.

What do the homeless, houseless, whatever you want to call them (in lieu of the drugged, the crazy, the lazy, the “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose” subculture) really deserve?

None of this really interests Ms. Hayden. She’s really interested in “the advocates,” and the well-paid bureaucrats collecting all of that “meaningful data.” She dumps gallons of ink on their lobbying and griping. On their insistence to the rest of us that…

We owe them tons of free stuff.

The list of what we owe is long and grows as the government monetizes the social breakdown and the “advocates” push and shove at the trough.

I suppose it sells papers to the choir of the church of progressivism.

I’ll stick with the Blazers—who will probably end up, like everyone else, in Florida.