Jun 16, 2022·edited Jun 16, 2022Liked by Richard Cheverton
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.
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.
I should have tried to trademark "Hapless Ted Wheeler" (the hapless mayor)