It’s always fascinating to watch local media tap-dance past the graveyard of Portland’s homelessness disaster.
Both the Trib and Oregonian, as well as local TV, showed up at one of Mayor Whatshisname’s* press confabs, where the hapless mayor claimed that “sweeps” of the homeless tenters, tweekers, psychos and drifters from Old Town had been…well, a sweeping success.
Here’s the Trib’s Joe Gallivan’s take on the announcement…
Up 456%.
That's the increase in the number of camp removals (206) from Portland's Old Town Chinatown neighborhood in May 2022, compared to May in 2021. So said Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler Monday morning, June 13….
Victory over tent cities? Not if you read deep into Oregonian homeless-beat reporter Nicole Hayden’s story, which mentions, sotto voce, something that isn’t news to anyone who gives the homeless-narrative more than a moment’s thought…
Wheeler acknowledged that not everyone wants to accept a shelter bed and said that has caused some people who were pushed out of Old Town to now move to the downtown core or the Pearl District to pitch their tents.
Gallivan agreed…
He revealed that everyone swept out of Old Town was offered shelter space, but that many had moved to the downtown core and the Pearl District.
Lucky Pearl District!
Hayden let the kimono flash open—for a mad minute, when she wrote…
Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell said Monday that Old Town saw a 51% decrease in reported drug offenses, a 93% decrease in trespassing reports and a 13% decrease in vandalism from March 22 to May 20, as compared to the prior 60-day period. He credited that decrease to the city’s response in Old Town.
It goes without saying that Ms. Hayden did not…
Ask homeless advocates what these statistics might have to say about the fiction that the “unhoused” are merely victims of something-or-other and pose no threat to anyone else…
Or ask: what happened to crime stats in the areas where the swept landed?
Nor did anyone make a connection between the mayor’s bold “shove the problem into someone else’s lap” strategy and the Oregonian’s front page headline…
Downtown Portland office buildings hit the market as tenants move out, rents drop
The Oregonian reported (in a paywalled story that any half-aware person also wouldn’t find surprising)…
After two years of dealing with a pandemic that resulted in hundreds of thousands of workers working from home, and now with widespread concerns about crime and personal safety, some major downtown landlords are trying to liquidate.
Through public and private listings and interviews with real estate brokers and owners, The Oregonian/OregonLive has determined that more than 12 significant office buildings in the downtown core are on the market, or have been recently.
Remarkably, the story used the word “homeless” exactly once, in a quote from Brian Pearce, the executive vice president of real estate services of Unico Properties, one of the largest downtown office building owners…
“Let’s be honest, the market is not great,” he said. “Occupancy is down, interest rates are way up. But every city we work with is facing the same challenges: the proliferation of fentanyl, the rise of homelessness.”
Here’s a bet: neither the Oregonian or the Tribune (and forget about WillyWeek or the Mercury) will ever put these items together and run a story about the true cost of the homeless.
Which brings us to yet another story where a real-world approach to homelessness is promptly downplayed and then misunderstood. It comes in a puff-piece in the Oregonian under the headline…
Downtown McMinnville has thrived in spite of the pandemic. Here’s how.
The Yamhill county town—a fine place to live—had a problem with tenters; here’s what they did…
The city council passed a law in 2019 that technically allows people to sleep on public property, provided they remove themselves and any camping paraphernalia from the site between 6:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m.
However, the city’s definition of “public property” excludes residential neighborhoods, parks, parking lots, parking structures and the urban renewal district—essentially most specific forms of public property.
Genius! Although the writer, Tom Henderson, quickly reverted to standard Oregonian boo-hoo…
Most visibly homeless people have been exiled from downtown, forcing them to live in areas where they are less conspicuous but also more vulnerable.
Not that Henderson or his edtors at the O bothered to define just how much “more vulnerable” the campers might be—or, indeed, where they wound up.
Here’s another bet: you’ll find them in the Pearl District.
*Jo Ann Hardesty’s deathless put-down of the mayor at her election celebration.
The Big O's reporting also detailed an act of colossal bureaucratic malpractice by the city of Portland:
"Cody Bowman, a spokesperson for Wheeler’s office, said the city does not track homeless Portlanders once they move into shelter so they can’t say if those who were swept from Old Town were given a housing assessment, were connected to an apartment or were offered mental health services."
"While the Street Services Coordination Center works with local partners like Central City Concern and Cascadia Behavioral Health, Bowman said it doesn’t track those referrals so the city doesn’t know if or how many people may have been connected to mental health services."
"Bowman also said the city doesn’t know if and how many people were given a housing assessment, which is the first step to receiving rental assistance, because the city-county Joint Office of Homeless Services tracks that information. The joint office was not able to immediately say if any housing assessments were done in coordination with the Old Town tent removals."
Let's get this straight. Voters have given local governments a gazillion dollars to make the homleless problem go away. At a minimum this includes housing the homeless and treating the mental health problems that are keeping them on the streets. This has been government's primary assignment since Day One of the homeless crisis, which happened so long ago that its precise date is obscured by the mists of time. And yet in June, 2022, an eon later by crisis standards, the city does not maintain the records needed to document whether or not it is succeeding in its twin objectives of housing the homeless and treating their mental illnesses.
Does the sixth-generation Oregonian and overeducated timber scion who is Portland's hapless mayor get credit for saying, as he did in this article, that "the city is developing a web application that outreach workers will be able to use to track interactions with individuals and to note what services were offered and received"?
Absolutely not. First, the Mayor didn't volunteer, and the potted-plant of a reporter did not elicit, the date this deliverable will be operational or who is responsible for the project. Let's face it. The city can't pay the kind of money that would be required to compete with the private sector for tech talent. Also, why would any tech professional blessed with multiple employment options submit to the city equity bureaucracy's demand for proof of ideological fealty to wokeness?
More importantly, such a tracking system is so essential to the successful operation of the other components of the homelessness bureaucracy that it should have been flagged as a deliverable in the very first brainstorming session, assuming there was such a session and that the brains present were functioning adequately.
What other missing pieces can we look forward to learning about in future pressers?
In a separate vein, I assume that by now that the Oregonian reporters on the homeless beat will have devised a two- or three-character word-processor code that, when typed, will produce the stock phrase: "Many homeless individuals have said they don’t feel safe in mass indoor shelters, the city’s primary type of shelter with beds available." As surely as night follows day, that assertion appears any time the subject of shelters arises.
A diligent and conscientious reporter would use the time saved by that shortcut to pick up the phone, call the people who run our shelters, and ask them to comment. Are Portland's homeless shelters truly more dangerous than, say, any given prison in El Salvador? For that matter, do the homeless have reason to feel unsafe in mass shelters and, if so, what are shelter operators doing about it? As it is, "mass shelters are unsafe" becomes yet another thought- and conversation-ending device on a par with "mass shelters are concentration camps" and the ever popular "Wheeler is criminalizing poverty."
At the risk of being trite, the only way to get out of that kind of the trap is to blow through it with effective responsive reporting. For any Oregonian reporter who might be reading, here's a template:
"Many homeless individuals have said they don’t feel safe in mass indoor shelters, the city’s primary type of shelter with beds available. However, records obtained by OregonLive show there have been very few reports of assaults or other crimes in homeless shelters in the past year."
Or:
"Many homeless individuals have said they don’t feel safe in mass indoor shelters, the city’s primary type of shelter with beds available. According to [ ], Multnomah County's director of shelter safety, recent measures such as enhanced screening and additional staffing have signficantly decreased the number of incident reports in local shelters."
You get the gist. Anything would be better than the brick walls that routinely block readers' understanding of the actual state of the homeless problem and enable homeless advocates to perpetuate the dismal status quo.
Portland's Rule Book applies here. Say nothing that might indicate the ultimate responsibility for being homeless rests on the homeless themselves. Instead, we blame a wide swath of civil society (greedy landlords, the police (ACAB), white people, the "privileged", neoliberalism, "blaming the victim mentality", et al.
The fairy tale of innocent victims utterly without their own agency means that any rules applying to them are potential human rights crimes. A law that would enforce basic guidelines on these innocent victims is "problematic". Fairness, by contrast, must be society's lodestar, one that confers exemptions on people unfairly victimized by rules.
There is no end to this madness. We're living in the post-modern world conjured by French philosophers who figured out that that privileged groups oppress the non-privileged and that laws are the vehicle of this oppression. Therefore, the oppressed need to be completely exempt from rules until that blessed day absolute justice reigns. In this house we believe no nonbinary BIPOC experiencing houselessness is illegal. And if you disagree, you shall be held accountable by the Thought Police.