Homeless Hissy-Fit

Sam Adams gets it (approximately) right

I was driving home from a quick run to the local Freddie’s (dingy, overcrowded, underserved, expensive) and happened to be passing what is known locally as “The Elks Club.” It’s a big open field, usually surrounded by a scrum of auto-strippers and RV campers. And I wondered: why doesn’t the city create a “put up or shut up” homeless refuge in that vast vacant lot? The National Guard could erect big tents in about 48 hours. Call it a training exercise for an apocalyptic movement of the Cascadia Subduction. And if the tents are OK for our fighting men and women, why not the feral homeless?

The “houseless” would then be offered a choice: leave your tent-favelas and move to our sanctuary (what the hell, call it a “Safe Rest Village,” just to keep Commish Dan “Ten Feet”* Ryan happy). Or stop living in a tent or broken-down SUV on the city streets.

And then I looked at the Oregonian’s web site (and the other progressive media mouthpieces in town) and discovered that the Bad Boy of Portland politics, Sam Adams, had had the same idea a month ago.

It was an inter-office memo, supposedly some sort of state-secret, but it’s reasonable to expect that Adams leaked it himself. Read it and you’ll understand why he’s on Mayor Whatshisname’s staff: he’s the guy who follows Hizzoner around with a long, black box.. It doesn’t contain an Uzi but a spine that the mayor can use…occasionally.

Sam’s document makes perfect sense. Build “shelters,” quickly and without the usual cream-offs to the very good friends of our progressive machine (non-profits, developers, building trade unions); move every “homeless” camper into the tents. Run them with, as the mayor once said, “tough love,” also known as “don’t break any laws the rest of us are expected to abide by,” and, just to prove that Sam has a piquant sense of humor, staff it with PSU students in the various do-gooder/DIE/Urban Affairs courses.

Predictably, the O hyperventilated:

Portland mayor’s top adviser proposed massive, militarized group shelters as step in ending homeless camping, records show

(Correction: Adams wasn’t interested in a “step” in ending camping; he wanted to end it totally. Soon.)

And so did the hapless city Homeless Czar, Commish Dan “Ten Feet” Ryan, who hasn’t been able to get his cute, plywood-boxed Safe Rest Villages off the ground. If you wanted an agenda for inaction, this might be it:

"I have grave concerns with the concept of creating high-population outdoor camping zones, along with corresponding zones in which no camping is allowed. I believe that the creation of these zones would quickly lead to extremely detrimental outcomes for people experiencing houselessness. These are our most vulnerable community members, and requiring them to move out of certain parts of the city and into large encampments with little to no social services is a recipe for disaster. Instances of human trafficking, widespread drug distribution and various other illicit and highly harmful activities would almost certainly occur at much greater rates among such a large, concentrated population…”

Which, if you spend a moment in reflection, is both sheer insanity, and a political suicide note. (Ryan’s polling as he faces next November’s bloodletting, is in the tank.)

As usual, some of the most trenchant commentary in Portland media came under the Tribune story, in the Disqus comments bolt-on, which is one of the last refuges of open, public comment left open to non-members of the journalism cult. (WillyWeek also has Disqus but trolls rule and mentioning the word “Rosenblum” will get you banned for life.) Tanar1 summed it up admirably:

This may be the only solution. Ryan makes no sense, human trafficking, widespread drug use are all going on now but dispersed and uncontrollable while damaging neighborhoods. Consolidate them, put the services in them, have a strong law enforcement presence and the people that want help will get help and the others will move to other cities.

Every other homeless scheme is based on a fundamental unreality: that the homeless will leap at the offer of an 8-foot plywood box or being jammed into decrepit and otherwise bankrupt motels or, at the extreme of fantasy, an “affordable” apartment (which actually will be filled by people making up to $60K a year).

The key to all of these patronage-rich schemes is that the homeless get to say “No.” And keep on camping while the city plays whack-a-mole with their tendency to group together in fellowships of meth, fentanyl, insanity, disease, theft, and the freedom that has nothing left to lose. Encampments that, no matter what the progressive machine claims, are tolerated and encouraged and, best of all, monetized by a raft of non-profits that are loaded with earnest young social warriors who pay their own rentals and mortgages because thousands of people need their “advocacy” and “services.” Not that anyone has bothered to ask the homeless to, y’know, vote.

It’s the Benjamins, baby! A scam. Which the people of Portland are paying for, to the tune of…well, who knows how much has gone down that rathole and into the pockets of Homelessness Inc? The number, $2.5-billion has been mentioned; it’s probably a gross underestimate.

That’s the point of the Adams Solution: the homeless will be presented with something other adults are acquainted with: a choice. Accept free housing—not luxurious (like the county’s daycare center for dopers and psychotics downtown) but basic and liveable; or pull stakes and practice your lifestyle somewhere else. Just as long as it’s not on our streets.

Where will they go? shriek the Homeless advocates. Perhaps where they came from. Every vagrant who has appeared in our media with their tales of woe moved here, voluntarily, from somewhere else. Example: the maniac couple who stand in the middle of the Glisan/205 interchange, spotlighted by the Tribune, came here from West Palm Beach, which is in sunny Florida. And now, they are, in the eyes of folks like Commish Ryan, our “responsibility.”

The hard fact is that they can move somewhere else. It’s a free country (sorta).

And you can bet that this got the attention of the nice people in, say, Lake Oswego and every contiguous suburb, who are happy to look down their noses at the boobs in Portland. It’s no coincidence that the roadside tents stop at the border of Happy Valley—how come, you might wonder. Might be time for the ‘burbs to play Whack a Mole.

It’s a sure bet that the progressive media will try to deep-six Adam’s proposal. Sam is not above somed triangulation himself, so he may offer a semi-walkback. There are powerful, self-interested forces behind the compassion scam—for example We the People, the creation of a couple of political players who advocate:

Shelter — Provide safe, clean shelter with access to life-saving services for anyone and everyone who needs it.

Safety — Phase-out unsafe, inhumane camping in public places. In 2020, more than 125 Portlanders died on the streets.

Housing — Fast-track and cut the cost of permanent housing. Right now, it takes too long and costs too much to build housing solutions.

Nowhere does PFP state that the homeless will be required to get off the streets. And the gauzy “solutions” all fail to answer the essential question: when will we reach the promised land?

Commish Ryan vowed that there would be six Safe Rest Villages in 2021, and if even if all are built (you should live so long) it will cream off a tiny fraction of the homeless, and certainly none of the hard-core feral.

The Adams Solution sounds extreme, but if any of our compassionate media types had spent as much effort interviewing people in the neighborhoods affected by the feral (and who load NextDoor with frustrated screams), they might arrive at a point reached by, say, Austin, Texas. In 2021 the voters, by a margin of 57 percent, approved a measure to, effectively, ban public camping in the most liberal town in Texas. They’d had enough.

Portland’s threshold of pain is higher, but there’s always a limit.

If Ryan or Commish Jo Ann Hardesty are defeated by a “get rid of the camps” candidate**, the scurry of Portland pols will resemble rodents exiting a sinking ship.

Portland’s neighborhoods have had enough. Just take a glance at the “What’s Up Dan” web site by the future neighbors of one of Ryan’s Villages. This is just one of the political tectonic plates moving in this town. As always, the people in office will be the last to know.

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* Ryan decreed, without a City Council vote, that tent-camping was OK if located ten-feet from a doorway. By coincidence, the standard street setback for an R5 residential lot is 10.5-feet. See how that works?

** Here’s lookin’ at yah, Rene Gonzalez.