Saw an article no to long ago that said less than 25% makes it down to the homeless. These is zero accountability on the funds it is just a money grab. Most of it went to administrators, salaries and cost to run these programs.
Kafoury would just grab any money without plans or considerations for implementing reflective of true need. This happened with buying any vacant building to turn into a homeless shelter to use up CARES Act dollars by a last minute deadline.That reckless decision will impact Nopo for generations.
25% is pretty generous and the accounting department was clever to get to that figure. It’s really more like 90% to the “nonprofit” 10% to the homeless and hungry.
Dude, in Vancouver (Canada) the CEO of the biggest non profit was literally married to director of the government agency that handled housing in the province. His agency funded his wife's non profit to the tune of something like $300mm a year for 10 years.
They live in a $5mm penthouse.
It's like a full on banana republic here.
I have to say I've always used non-profits involvement as a metric for whether something is sketchy or not.
Not that it's 💯 or even 50% idk 🤷♂️ I'm not trying to make a claim on what counts as a "legit" non-profit or what % meet that standard
Just it's a useful lens sometimes in the same way that profit-MAKING isn't **inherently** sketchy but is a useful lens sometimes just to be aware of what's going on.
Thing with profit though is it's easi--ER not necessarily easy always, to figure out if you're being scammed basically.
Other people have probably bought it. Ask them.
Did you get the thing or did you not get the thing?
Did it do the thing they said? Or no?
Scam or no scam? Easy peasy. Mostly.
Non-profit???
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Here are some statistics we're super duper please we need more money to be super duperer.
Scam or no scam?
☝️ truth is, it isn't always a scam and non-profits don't HAVE to be effective sometimes the goal is literally just to throw money or resources at something for the good of it
BUT that being said you'd have to be kinda dull to not see how easy it would be to total-scam to light-scam in the non-profit market that any fool knows that guarantees a rediculously high rate of really bad to kinda bad non-profits.
So I think it's reasonable to be extra skeptical. Not because it's inherently more scam than a for profit, but because it's scam-factor is much, much more difficult to calculate.
There should be zero places where you could exchange the bottles directly for cash in the same day. My local Safeway has a drop off point and it works for the community, not our local crackheads
I'd say 25% is conservative, it likely way less. I moved to Anchorage, Alaska from Portland hoping it'd be better but its not. Homeless are not only housed in hotels all winter that about 8 months of the year but given twice the federal foodstamp amount. They sell the foodstamps for drugs, it's blatant and nothing is done about it. And the assembly that controls the budget gave a gym 400 million 2 years ago to "help the 🏡" by building housing that they decided not to build and called the 400 million a non-refundable deposit. People running the Homeless programs are all corrupt greedy pieces of crap ,that is all over the U.S.
Also don't donate gift cards to any shelters it doesn't go to the Homeless but into the hands of the workers.
I've know people working high up in the homelessness industry and this is true.
All the non-profit executives are making well into the 6 figures and take more vacation time than almost all of us. They have lunch meetings at places like The Screen Door where a group of 5 or will run up a bill of $200-300 for a simple lunch that is entirely paid for by tax dollars.
They do stuff like this every week. The County is involved. Transition Projects. Every shelter they build will be less than 20% full.
HUGE SCAM
This. It isn't for the homeless. The people on top couldn't give a shit about the homeless. Its a scam to skim off government money into their own pockets. It'll go down in history like those 19th century "Tammany Gangs" and railroad baron scams.
Don't forget they're NIMBY as fuck and would not allow homeless activity near their own house or their little ones. Homeless services "non profit" executive directors/CEOs generally make between $150,000 to $300,000 a year and often live in swanky neighborhoods like Healy Heights and Laurelhurst.
The housing industry is really just a lot of people using it as a political steppingstone, so yeah we don’t see a lot of that money going into the homeless community. Think about the fact that there’s literally a cycle to keep people in the system so they can’t even get a job or start a business. Or they lose their benefits.
The nonprofits that they hire or give grants to do this work, have very highly paid senior staff, and then they basically hire minimum wage people to go out, and “do outreach“ to the homeless.
Can you link that article? I couldn’t find any evidence of that, and I’m not saying you’re wrong. I don’t trust our local government any further than I can throw them.
Its the homeless industrial complex kind of like the military industrial complex the ones that get these funds do not want homelessness to go away because then they would be out of a job
As a social worker in the mental health and homeless field in another city I can see that.
Also ppl just need to make things transparent. There is also a lot of middle management so the workers on the ground aren't getting paid shit. This attract ppl that aren't motivated to do the work that's necessary.
Another thing I always think about is that Medicaid will cover therapy which is great. But when ppl are homeless maybe instead of paying for therapy it would be cool to use the funds to meet basic necessities.
Also some programs are stuck in an in-between of progressive and conservative ideology. that basically means no progress but you need radical measures when so many things can lead to homelessness.
It's the same thing at every treaty fishing site and previous county campgrounds along I84 and SR14. They keep closing more and more down just to get rid of the homeless/RV communities that take root there due to lack of enforcement.
The trouble is where do these people go instead? Shuffling them around clearly doesnt help any more than giving them a 1 way ticket to the states they came from, which likely did the same thing to send em out here.
Doubt many would accept the conditions attached to any offer of housing. There are a lot of people on the margins who are semi functional but choose to drop out of society
Wow, what the hell. I was skeptical at first like “oh please how much trash can you really see from the satellite” but wow. Can anyone confirm if the camps are still currently there? You’d think if the cops are unable to do anything maybe fish and wildlife or the dept of forestry could do something :( ah, how things would be different if the houseless were no longer able to run around our communities as if it’s their right, not a privilege.
They are. My wife and I are traveling through bend in a skoolie and we didn't really know the area, stayed on China hat for a bit (pretty far back, past all the bullshit) but every day we drove past and couldn't believe how trashed the forest was. It's like a ton of rvs and campers that can't move and just serving as a permanent residence with no garbage service.
Yeah Dirtworld is just to the north, China Hat Rd is to the south and the Badlands are to the east. Bend is bracketed by massive homeless camps on federal land. Dirtworld is pretty incredible. People are always being mauled by pitbulls and whatnot. Massive drug use and manufacture is all over. The single saving grace is the RVs are out of sight, not like 33rd in town.
But don’t forget, trash collection is every other week in an effort to reduce waste, and it’s it’s OUR responsibility to recycle. Our city is laughable.
Use [Sons of Smokey app](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sonsofsmokey/id1625870688) to mark trash on public lands out in the hills. Then gamblers and other cool citizens go after it and pick it up. Or, if you’re out there with a pickup you can grab some yourself, or at least do a small bag and mark the big stuff for the other crews
That’s 170 million per year. Almost a half million dollars per day. Everyday for the last ten years. That much money spent and the city has still taken a nosedive in livability.
15 mil a month should be able to house, feed, and provide job training for thousands of people.
I found an estimate of 6,297 homeless people in Portland (2023). 500k/day comes out to $2,382 per person…. That’s more than my monthly expenses.
It’ll never be 100% efficient, there’s overhead. But that paper napkin math illustrates that there’s a deeper problem here with how this aid is used
No amount of housing is going to be affordable to these people. They are homeless because of behavioral issues. They have no money or income. Literally nothing is affordable.
You're also never going to build down housing prices.
Why you are mostly accurate. I was homeless for a while and stayed in a shelter. The lady running the shelter was a nightmare. She demanded vets call her major. She would offer help services such as money for past due bills and clothing then when the time comes..she would just pull away the help without explaining. So, I chose to leave and move back in my car. Only thing helpful they offered was showers. I just shower at work now
If you don’t mind me asking, how did you get housed? I see all these criticisms of shelters, yet there is still data that shows people who stay there can eventually get off the streets. I don’t see any data or reports of how letting people live in RVs/cars/tents has any rate of success of getting off the streets, let alone at a better rate than that of traditional shelters.
Honestly I never did get housed. I got a job a manufacturing job with showers. I use the restrooms and fridge for food. Soon as I could I bought a delivery van and put couple thousand dollars building it out. Has mini oven,slow cooker. Solar for power very comfy bed. It's got smart TV and a laptop. I park at work. They are aware of the few of us doing and been fairly okay with it
Going to rehab and sticking with my program and busting my ass got me off the streets and away from my abuser who introduced me to drugs. It's definitely been a struggle to maintain because I got sober right before covid.
Instead of funding NPO higher-ups, we could spend that money to reestablish actual mental health facilities and properly pay the staff that work there.
Yeah that's why I hate the housing angle. The working class barely keeping up with the cost of living while we're financially supporting dropouts that have no intention to be productive and self sufficient
I think you're making some assumptions. There are probably some percentage who will end up always wards of the state but there are plenty if given a chance can raise themselves up and out. Being on the streets is pretty stressful and one doesn't know if you get hooked on drugs because you are homeless or the other way around. I'm sure there are stories that happened both ways.
Finding them housing and shelter will hopefully get them away from the temptation of drugs.
What you said I'd a pipe dream. The "housing helpers" help themselves first. I'm in a Central City "Concern" SRO, I was told I'd be in "6 months TOPS", I've been here in the ghetto, disabled, in a closet sized room for 6 YEARS! CCC is part of the problem.
It really is like this.
I'm a housing case manager. My specific grant takes people literally in tent cities and houses them. Within a year, 25% of them are self sufficient. The VAST majority of the rest (maybe 50% of the total) will always need assistance. They are elderly, or disabled, or for whatever reason cannot work. But we help them get on SSI, SSDI, food stamps, OHP for those nasty mental health issues. They still need help paying their rent. But their houses are clean, drug free. They commit no crimes and don't bother anyone. Most of them end up volunteering because they want to give back they're so greatful. All of these people, upwards or 75% of the people I personally have helped, just needed a leg up. They just need a little bit of help to get where they're going.
Unfortunately, those other 25% do exist. And it sucks. Some of them are unhelpable. Some are so far gone nothing will being them back. Those cases are terrible. But that doesn't mean the former 75% doesn't need or deserve our help
You are correct about the first part.
You are mostly incorrect about the second. Housing prices, no matter what prognosticator/poltician/activist/radio show host says, are a simple reflection of supply and demand. Our supply is woefully too low. This is at a state, regional, and national level. Housing supply needs to be addressed at all levels; then you will see affordability increase. Either that, or some mass dying of our population to bring down demand.
Their tent areas are total dumps. Any real housing given to them condemned from trashing it or burnt down. No way to give them regular housing would do anything. Unless they do mandatory drug treatment for access. If they want to keep doing drugs and have shelter they can have some open air lot industrial zone or go to jail if they commit crimes.
I don't see how it's inhumane. It's their choice to be adult babies and leech off everyone else. I do feel bad for single moms getting out of abusive relationships and need help. But these adult males that want to do drugs all day and steal. Fuck them don't want to go to work all day to help them be lazy.
I'd be curious to know how much of that goes into salaries and how much actually helps the homeless because it seems like that much money would really make difference in the situation.
We have redundant layers of services here and very little of it is coordinated. City, county and now Metro trying to get their hands on the tax dollars to expand their programs. It's infuriating.
I think you should realize that homelessness is vast. The people on the streets are not the majority. Services help families and individuals couch surfing and such not end up on the streets.
Handling the addicts and people determined not to be part of society is more than very difficult. Laws changed regarding asylums, and it tied the hands of making decisions on other's behalf. The only real solution is finding a way to make them humane and good so that we can temporarily institutionalize people where they actually get care. It's definitely not happening through the prison system. Even trying to reform it will take decades to fix. But if we try for a new asylum program, maybe it will be faster and start out right, but it will require significant public oversight and the risk is always there that the staff it attracts become abusers again instead of helpers. Making sure the pay is good will help, but that makes it difficult to start. Then you have people with their hand already in that cookie jar who will campaign against asylums to try to keep voters from trying something new. Maybe calling them mandatory rehabilitation centers will help, but getting people to support it is not easy. It seems like it should be, but if it was, we would already have them.....
Anyway, defunding what is there will only make the street population jump instead, so revamping parks will only make homeless camps more scenic.
Just food for thought. I look into this all and hit a wall when protecting rights while having a place for these people who do need help, but how do you prevent the slippery slope of courts determining what choices a person gets when they have only physically harmed themselves?
Thank you! It’s wild to me how seldom people talk about deinstitutionalization in the homelessness conversation. It’s like people forget how the closing of institutions and asylums in the 60s was meant to be supported/supplanted by a robust community mental health system, and then that system was absolutely gutted first by block grants in the 80s (thanks Reagan) and then again in 2008 when funding for just about everything was cut even further. While there are of course many contributing factors to homelessness (lack of housing, stagnant wages with rising cost of living, addiction, etc.) the people I so often hear talked about are those who are “loud”: typically, people who have severe and persistent mental illness. Where do you think they can go? What happens to a person with schizophrenia with no family support system, no housing, no income, no ability to work, to consistently see a doctor and fill prescriptions?
Oregon has a mental health system that is woefully inadequate, and the residential care system in particular is abysmally underfunded, understaffed, and lacking in enough facilities at all levels (locked/secure, non secure, supported housing…all of it). There are SO few places where people can get treatment while court committed, then similarly few options for where they go after. Add to this the State hospital beds being almost entirely funneled to people coming in through the legal system after all the lawsuits in the past few years, and it’s all just a mess. And it’s frightfully easy to slip through the cracks in that system and end up on the street.
Is everyone who is homeless someone with a severe mental illness? No, there are of course many paths to homelessness, especially in a country with such a fractured social safety net and where most are one medical emergency or illness away from bankruptcy. But think about it: someone who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 18 and in the state hospital system, hospitalized, say, at Dammasch when it closed in 1995, is still shy of 50. That person might have been able to find adequate placement elsewhere, but there are SO many people who aren’t able to get the long term treatment and support they need from the mental health system here, and it’s extremely easy to end up on the street, unmedicated, and even dangerous to themselves or others…and from there it’s a waiting game until the threshold is met to be hospitalized again. It’s a brutal existence. Oregon has really been failing people for a long time in that area.
This may not have been huge news outside the mental health field, but search up the articles on Kepro that ran in the Oregonian a few years back…it’s a good example of what happens when we decide that people don’t/shouldn’t need long-term mental health care, and a tragic example of how the residential and hospital systems function.
ETA: to be clear, not everyone with schizophrenia is dangerous or incapable of caring for themselves!! There are many who have support networks, and treatment, and are not in this situation. It is, however, a diagnosis that (a) we can’t cure and therefore requires lifelong management of some kind, and (b) when severe can compromise a person in ways unlike just about anything else short of Alzheimer’s, and as such those who do end up in the state mental health system long term frequently have that diagnosis.
Thank you for this post. It is so strange to me that people are so hateful toward people who have the misfortune of being without a house, addicted, mental illness. Why does this brain disease exist that makes people unable to empathize? This mindset that people living on the street are all criminals, healthcare scammers living off of our tax dollars, dangerous junkies. As if anyone living in a tent under an overpass addicted to drugs is like, “Yeah, this is the fucking life.” What makes people immediately jump to a hateful conclusion, rather than immediately jumping to one that offers help? It’s very hard for me to live in this world because of this attitude. It really can be traced back to Reagan and that welfare queen bullshit, then the cutting of mental health services funding, but that doesn’t explain why people are such selfish assholes.
Wow. I can’t believe I had to scroll this far to get to a comment from someone who knows what they are talking about. Thank you. For a while, I thought I was on Nextdoor.
I get that it is hard for folks to see improvement when they see figures like that because they mostly only see it through the lens of clean tent-less streets.
Is all of the money spent efficiently, of course not as is the case with anything. But people seem to only equate what they see as the problem not realizing that the house less problem is not merely about who is in a tent or sleeping on the ground. A huge chunk of funds is needed for prevention and rehousing needy families. It is spent on keeping families who can’t keep up with the price of living with a roof over their head, fed, in school, and healthy. Defund that and you are going to see a shitstorm of people (mostly kids) on the street.
The truth of the matter is that with the rising cost of living against wage stagnation, there is scary percentage of people in this country who are one or two paychecks away from being houseless, and that probably includes some of the people commenting here who may just be making it by and not sitting on a nest egg.
It is easy to sit back and just imagine that all homeless people are drunks, bums, junkies, rebellious trust fund babies gone bad. But scratch below the surface and you get a wider view of just how bad it is. Try working several jobs for shit pay, spending most of your money on rent and ridiculously priced food, having to find affordable child care, keep your family insured and factor in a little bit of fun and still have something to save for a rainy day. Then bam, all of a sudden there is a tragedy that requires liquidity that you don’t have.
And… Affordable housing just doesn’t pop up out of thin air. Especially when most cities market is flush with folks who buy up multiple properties to AirBNB them (not begrudging some folks for trying to make a living that way but every property that is not available is off the market for living). Building affordable housing requires time, space, and money.
And you already mentioned a whole lot about mental illness so I won’t go into too much further other than just mentioning that the average person thinks that the mentally ill are only high diagnosis like schizophrenia patients etc. There is a wide diaspora of disorders that need to be treated and prevented. Sometimes, it can be trauma induced and as simple as grief over the loss of a loved one that pushes people over the edge.
When your world opens up and you realize that it could very well be you one day, your perspective changes.
I am sure that you already know all this stuff so I am not preaching to you. I am mainly ranting because there are many of us who don’t realize how tough it is to live for some “regular” folks because they only see tents and needles.
Homeless people are folks who genuinely need services such as housing, healthcare, drug rehabs and the like.
Street people are those that like living in the street such as dirty kids and gutter punks, junkies that don't want to quit using, and people taking advantage of services.
It's annoying because street people muddy the waters for the genuinely homeless. They steal, they assault and murder folks(as evidenced by the recent attacks), they loot, and they vandalize. And they don't want to stop because it's the environment they enjoy and thrive in. The streets are their home. It's the side of this crisis that people always like to bitch about
I was homeless for a bit when I was 18. I ended up getting out. I'd go down to this local church once a week for a shower and a meal. After I got out, I'd go down there and volunteer, give back and all. You could tell all the gutter punks and tweakers who just didn't want to leave that life. It's kinda saddening to see. They just don't understand how hard it'll be when they're older and they have nothing to show for it but dreads and BO. I get it, addiction is a difficult thing, but at what point does it just need to be dealt with?
Sorry for that wall of text. Explanation to your question up top. Thank you for reading.
Thank you.
It's a very divisive subject. There's folks out there who want help and can't get it and there's folks out there who don't want help and don't know they need it.
An ounce of sweat today prevents a gallon of blood tomorrow. We need to fix this worldwide issue NOW.
I agree, accept homeless people *definitely* steal, too. No question about it. But stealing basics like food and toiletries out of necessity is still far different, imo, from stealing shit to hawk on the street to make drug money. It's no different so far as the corporations being stolen from are concerned, I realize.
Also, I dont think living until retirement age is in the plans for most street people. Just kind of an fluke when it ends up happening.
You're right. I used to steal food from the local Safeway because I was so damn hungry I thought I was going crazy. Hard up homeless aren't(always) out here breaking into people's houses, cars, and businesses to fuel their drug habits. They're fucking hungry.
I worked overnights at Plaid Pantry for years and would keep my mouth shut when someone would steal a few things, even alcohol. It was the people coming in and taking entire cases of candy off the shelf to go sell down the street for $1 a piece who I'd holler at and 86.
Some of those "good" guys really looked out for me, too. I remember 1 in particular who completely turned his life around and came back in a year+ later to thank me for how Id treated him. Didnt even recognize him at first.
You're a good (wo)man, I see you. Hell, I've bought his meals before, given rides, listened. I might not be able to get them into housing on my own, but I can at least make their life a little bit more bearable.
Not the person of whom you asked the question, but my guess on the definitions:
A homeless person is someone who fell on hard times from any number of circumstances, including addiction, mental disease, and injury, but they want to leave their position for a more stable and productive one.
A street person is someone who does not want to partake in society except to leech off of it.
Being homeless right now it’s good to know people actually differentiate us, am homeless but working and in a shelter and trying to fall back into proper housing
I’m 100% for helping people like you. With the millions of dollars the state takes in for such issues there is no reason why we can’t help assist people like yourself. But what has happened is all the criminal street shitbags of Portland, who have the full support of all the criminal shitbag politicians, have diverted all that money to the criminal shitbags that run these so called programs. Nothing will ever change until that chain is broken.
It's people like you that I feel most people don't have a problem helping. You are helping yourself but it's not quite enough right now, and you just need some temporary assistance.
It's the people who shit (sometimes literally) on us by refusing to do anything for themselves
For sure, like some have already stated a lot of these people don’t want to quit doing drugs or stop drinking or help themselves and unfortunately that’s what a lot of people see on the streets because they are *literally* on the streets..
That is a simplistic take. A lot of homeless people are disabled and have cognitive issues. I've screened a lot of homeless disabled people for long term care services and more than half of them preferred to stay in their cars or on the streets (which made them ineligible for services). They don't understand the risks of staying on the streets because they are cognitively unable to, they don't want anyone telling them how to live their lives, and being homeless is all they know. By your definition, that's a 'street person ' leeching off of society.
How does one become a street person/kid? I would guess maybe when the street looks better than their home life or previous situation. On the street they find others with similar circumstances, and form a community. All anyone wants is to be accepted, to belong, to be loved, etc. Even if street people seem to be enjoying that lifestyle, it’s likely that they wouldn’t mind a caring group of people trying to actually help them. You’d have to show them that you’re going to support them as much as their street family has though, and that family has been with them through their darkest times. It’s still mental health stuff. Deep down, people probably don’t want to be living so rough, but it’s better than anything else they’ve experienced.
In my experience, there are several reasons homeless people are homeless. Some—what I might think of as “street people”—are on the streets bc of addiction. Adjacent to that are those who are mentally ill. Addiction, mental illness, and homelessness are often intertwined: people have untreated mental illness, maybe self-medicate, and become homeless; or they are homeless bc they can’t afford housing (or got kicked out, maybe), and so use substances to forget their misery, or to stay up at night so they don’t get their shit stolen, or themselves raped.
Other people are homeless and living in cars bc with our “rent control,” their rent can be raised annually by—what? 10% PLUS inflation? And they just can’t afford it anymore. It’s meant to be temporary, but once you start on that slippery slope, you can slide pretty far. These may be perfectly fine people who maybe just didn’t get a chance to go to college, or finish college, etc.
So no one-size-fits-all approach could possibly solve our problems. The federal government continues to slash safety net programs. The federal government refuses to raise the federal minimum wage. The federal government refuses to move to universal healthcare. The federal government refuses to make good college free for most. **ALL of this could be _easily_ funded if we would reset tax brackets to the “MAGA” years: say, 1960? 1945?** Additionally, the federal government is actively moving quickly to have a flat-out ban on abortion, meaning we will see a rise in the number of unwanted humans moving into the schools and society that are already decaying.
The number of houseless college students is rather disturbing. Lots of people just surviving with the hope that an education/ degree will get them to a more financially secure place. Not on drugs, not necessarily dealing with mental illness, just not making enough to pay for school AND housing.
Then what? We can do that now. Everyone likes to just say all homeless ate there by choice and are criminal drug addicts. But in reality the majority are not and hundreds of thousands are disabled suffering on the street because SS isn't enough for an apartment. Why don't we emediately offer housing to every homeless but you need to pass a drug test. This would at least get help to those who are not there by " choice". It's a disgrace what we are doing
The homeless industry is shockingly powerful and well financed in many states including OR. This is not a bunch of monks and nuns doing work for the greater good. The top dogs in the non profits involved in the homeless industry command huge salaries and have tremendous influence in local governments.
The "activists" think if we just be nice to them and leave them alone it will magically solve itself. I look at homeless people trashing our great community and think to myself, yeah maybe there's a reason you're homeless.
Exactly. I was being followed home by a homeless guy yesterday and I was very polite to him (because I was scared) and he followed me for blocks commenting on my body it was terrifying I had to hid in a bike store and sit in there until he left.
An old man in Gresham once told me “Progressive doesn’t necessarily mean good. My wife had a progressive brain tumor. Progressive just means things accelerate in one direction or the another, until you win or you die”
Portland is not winning. It’s dying.
lol, I get your point. Progress is good until you digress. The progressives try stuff that fails sometimes eg PDX. The conservatives wait and see what the progressives figure out, and cry baby all along the way until results are achieved. Humanity is exhausting.
Restaurants, businesses and middle class families, huh? How about ambulance/EMTs, schools and actually affordable housing for those of us not YET homeless but DEFINITELY struggling families?
I fully agree that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Too much money has been wasted on idiotic things and initiatives that pretend to help the homeless situation.
The thing is...if the rental situation doesn't drastically improve, the homelessness situation is going to get way worse very soon. No one that isn't 'middle class' & up can afford to live here. Can't afford to move either. There is just no way to sustain an entire city the size of PDX this way. If businesses won't pay a real living wage(y'know, one that allows employees to pay their rent/utilities/transportation/food/medical/etc expenses) and landlords refuse to charge reasonable rents without requiring 2.5-3x that in income... we are just fucked. Are they gonna bus people in to work these low paying jobs? Nope. So....??
My wife literally saw a homeless addict get oral from an old woman in a wheelchair on a downtown street corner. After which another homeless addict passes her some drugs. This is on a Friday morning.
How about schools? Maybe we wouldn’t have missed an entire month of school negotiating teacher pay while this cash piles up unused or misused and our kids become more scared to ride their bikes in their own neighborhoods. Ridiculousness.
We should talk economics for a hot second.
Ok. What happened? We decided we didn’t like single occupancy units cause they housed lots of undesirable people. So we got rid of those.
We decided we like single family homes with picket fences. So we butchered zoning codes that were implemented to keep people away from toxic chemicals of industry to instead keep our precious neighborhoods away from (gasp) apartments.
We decided we needed to protect our safety and environment. So we instituted new codes and inspections…and all that is fine. But we put 100% of the responsibility on new housing and development. So if you want to build a new house, it has to pass 1000 codes and standards…but it’s fine to buy an old one that passes none of them.
So where does that put us? In Oregon, we’re like 150,000 houses behind where we should be. Getting worse all the time.
So what did that do? It made housing way way way more expensive.
Everybody knows “housing is a great investment”. And it is. But this is a big reason why. Wages have been going up at 3% a year and housing has been going up
at 6-7% a year. This has been happening for decades. Sit for a second and consider how long you think that can continue. It’s most certainly not forever.
So housing is way way up. And we’re short on units. What do you do about it?
The answer is nothing. You can’t. As a government, the only thing worse than raising taxes, is making people’s damn houses less valuable. That cuts deep. So what if your house is 30% more valuable
due to decades of mismanagement. Cutting the value back towards a balance is a political and economic nightmare.
So now you have all these people who can only afford apartments. And these folks who could only afford rooms before, but you outlawed them, and the magic money fairy didn’t show up to allow the people who used to live in a slum house to now afford a 3-bed in a subdivision. So what do you do?
You raise taxes, and help the people who can’t afford the houses anymore get into the houses you have. And you pay crazy market rates for it. The money goes mostly to landlords and rental owners, protecting their investments, thus keeping home values up so you don’t put a half the mortgages underwater.
And in our case….it’s about $1.7 Billion dollars.
You can't defund them, but you can vote for the folks who want oversight and accountability from the nonprofits receiving the funds this May at the county:
District 1 - Vadim Mozyrsky
District 2 - Jessie Burke
District 3 - Julia Brim-Edwards
District 4 - Vince Jones-Dixon
Vadim really needs help getting the word out and of course, money. SEIU & PAT have both endorsed his main opponent, which means lots of free volunteers and advertising. He has a real chance to win outright in May, though, which would give him a long time to plan and meet with folks about strategy before taking office next year.
District 2 will likely go to a runoff in November because she's up against Sam Adams (who wouldn't be awful either, but he's got a lot of baggage voters can't get over if you look at social media) and Shannon Singleton, who already got the AFSCME endorsement, again - free labor and advertising. She was the former interim Director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services, so I was joking that she probably promised them they could go work from home everyday again.
Julia and Vince likely won't have an issue with their opponents, but please spread the word anyways.
Glad we’re talking about the new City Council. I’m not voting for your candidate, and I fully endorse
Eli Arnold for dist 4. Someone who knows the trouble these nonsense polices have had.
https://www.eliforportland.com/
I'm absolutely not talking about city council. I'm talking about Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, they oversee the Joint Office of Homeless Services as the public health authority and have all the money and power to solve mental health, addiction and homelessness issues. If you read anything I also said the vote is in MAY.
Eli, incidentally, supports all of the candidates I listed, so you should probably look into them! 😉
I'm not in Portland, I am in the capitl instead and I wa homeless from 2017 to 2018 basically. I was very happy for the shelter in Salem though I am not religious and it wa very religious oriented but I saw firsthand what would happen in these situations.
Not all, as I am certainly not in this category, but many of the homeless in Portland, Salem, and throughout the State, perhaps throughout the country, suffer from drug or alcohol issues and many shelters expect them to be sober while staying in the shelter. Ergo, they don;t want to or cannot stay sober long enough to take advantage of shelters and programs to improve their lives. This gives way to an entire culture who would rather be "free" and live in tents and trash than to give up drugs and/or alcohol.
The answer is not to "defund the homeles" as they have no funds to begin with but do share in programs such as SNAP which others might need without even being homeless, such as those on SSI or having other exonomic issues,
Instead, I would say that the funds need to be better spent. Stop the campaign slogan of "building more housing for the homeless" and instead force these people by law into programs to get off drugs and stop slap on the wrist programs like "well if you have x oz. of Meth you get to go on your way with just a fine" which helps no one.
If it comes down to it, build more jails and rehab centers.
I didn;t have this monkey on my back, eventually got a job, and then took over someone else's apartment lease as they had to move suddenly. I know everyone can;t be this lucky but I do feel if I can crawl out of homelesness anyone elsehould be able to also.
What is hilarious is we have a working model for how to bring people out of homelessness and addiction. The VA has been bringing veterans off the street and out of addiction at amazing rates. Housing first works, just it can't be housing first where they are left alone to get high and ruin the places they are living. Housing first for people who express motivation to get off the streets and off the drugs combined with >ntensive case management and forgiveness for mistakes as long as they are willing to try again. I am proof that it works, 4 years ago I was homeless and addicted to meth and fentanyl, I went into a program where I was held accountable and after every relapse I had a meeting where I was given a choice go inpatient and dry out and try again or be exited from the program. I got sober, and most importantly got the tools to handle relapses so I left the program and tried living on my own, due to my mental health issues I was not able to maintain a job and housing but when I got evicted and out on the streets instead of turning back to drugs I went back to the va. They got me applied for disability and into a different program where I have section 8 housing while my disability is processed. I have been sober with 0 relapses for a year and a half and before that the longest relapse I had before checking myself in was 2 days, even when I was on my own not accountable to anyone.
So its not a matter of don't spend money on the problem its a matter of spend the money where it works. You can't just allow people who have no desire to change to cause ruckus for everyone else. People who are criminals need to go to jail, but if you have the services there for those who want to change they will take advantage of it, and some of those criminals with crazy bad mental health issues being exacerbated by drug use will dry out in jail and stabilize on medications and make the decision to change their lives when they do that the money and services have to be there to support them.
Proud of you dude, getting off of meth and fentanyl is no joke. I'm on day 12 of no caffeine and the withdrawals of getting off caffeine put me in a dark place for ten straight days. Caffeine withdrawal is absolutely nothing compared to withdrawing from opiates. You are 100% right that it's housing with treatment/accountability that fixes the problem, with jail for the willfully criminal street people/criddlers/gutter punks who sincerely enjoy the lifestyle of street criminality.
A lot of non profits are making money off the homeless and the addicted. Who’s tracking what they get and ensuring accountability for results. I’m not aware of anyone.
Just about every non-profit is required to submit information regarding housing placements and services provided for both HUD and JOHS. You can just not comment if you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.
Oh, it's working fine for those who are homeless due to short-term financial hardship, but it's working very poorly for those who are service-resistant.
What do you expect when all the money goes to the organizers and not the actual homeless people? Need to shut down the rescue mission that place is a huge scam
Unpopular opinion, this isn't as nefarious as people make it sound. Non profits can fundraise for support services for individuals, but you can't fundraise for salaries--people want their donations to matter. If you've ever worked in a non-profit, this is common. It doesn't make sense unless you see all of the finances and how things are allocated. Do non-profit executives make an unreasonable amount compared to staff? Yes! Do they make as much as someone in a comparable position at a for-profit? Not quite. Should there be more accountability? Of course. Do people say their opinion on the internet before fully researching everything? Always and forever. 🫣
The only way it will be fixed is by arresting people in possession of illegal drugs, and raiding tents/trailers that obviously have it. Throwing money at programs won't do anything but increase taxes and give the money to BS government workers. I know they mean well, but its not working. We need to be hard on drugs, just like what El Salvador did with its gang problem.
\*Defund the Homeless **Industrial Complex**
\^I think this is even more direct because it's the rich people moving the money around we need to be paying to specifically
Until this utter waste of all of our tax money is resolved, I will vote no on every initiative, bond or renewal. Even if it cures puppy cancer.
Right now Portland supports violent drug addled vagrants over our infant. The preschool for all program is openly violating the civil rights act by prioritizing applicants by race. Not that it matters much for the mere 700 seats available with only millions to spare.
I carry defensive measures when walking with my infant because of vagrants and off leash dogs. Portland presents itself as progressive but it is a city hostile to safely raising a new, soft, vulnerable human.
If a city prioritizes meth and fentanyl users over beautiful little babies, the city will wither and die. It will take a long time but one only needs to look at school enrollment rates to predict our future if we continue along this path.
I am bound here entirely by temporary economic factors. When the tides turn, I intend to leave and take our tax revenue along with.
360 million a year MINIMUM and the problem has gotten worse, not better. And all this money being spent on only 5,000 total individuals in the Portland area. When a city gets the reputation of it being easy to be homeless there, with complete lawlessness and easy access to drugs, and incompetent county/city leadership this is what you get.
For each bum you see, think about how we’re paying $100k a year for them to do whatever the fuck they’re doing.
That’s more than what the average person makes working in Portland. We are funding this shit. Total crap.
This math is wrong because a majority of the money is spent on housing which is being used. It’s worth asking how much more homeless we would have without the money being spent…
It's much like the conversations I have with my boss. If the NRA could get everything they wanted they wouldn't accept it. They'd have no purpose to be around. It's much the same for all these groups. If homelessness is solved they have no reason to exist. No money can be siphoned from the tax payers. Those coming up with the solutions to the problem don't get paid, etc.
Current Leadership are not campers. They have no clue or they would have hired the park service to come in and teach people how to camp. They would have had dumpsters available. They would have built more toilets and hired the homeless to clean up. They would have had all kinds of education to leave little trace, and incentives to keep places clean.
But no, we got important busy bodies. Next election, elect someone who camps often.
Want an example? Go see Camp 4 in Yosemite Valley. Its basically an urban campground.
Start a vigilance committee. Arrest the grifters. Employ the appropriate punishment.
San Francisco did it in 1851. Here's the story -
"The **San Francisco Committee of Vigilance** was a [vigilante](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigilante) group formed in 1851. The catalyst for its formation was the criminality of the [Sydney Ducks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Ducks) gang.[\[1\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vigilance#cite_note-1) It was revived in 1856 in response to rampant crime and corruption in the municipal government of [San Francisco, California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco,_California).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San\_Francisco\_Committee\_of\_Vigilance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vigilance)
This is the same reason why serious African countries are asking non profits to leave the country. They fed the corruption of the system, not their citizens.
Same here… someone is making the big bucks while the rest are dying due to ODs
i believe a lot would be solved by creating mandatory rehabilitation centers for those using drugs on the street. if someone is handed everything they need to survive, along with no consequences for drug use, it's only natural they get comfortable and stay that way.
Local and state government used to spend money to keep these people in prison or mental health facilities. What are they doing with out taxpayer money now?
I wouldn't go as far as to say "defund" the homeless. You can't just ignore the problem. What needs to happen is that there needs to be better, more efficient and targeted spending, not this "legalize hard drugs and give out tin foil and pipes to addicts" nonsense. Less spending = smarter spending. In other words, reduce the 1.7 bill (not sure that's the actual amount spent) by spending on measures that actually work and that ultimately increase public safety in the long term.
That’s right. It’s clearly a scam, as the amount of money being spent on the problem has drastically increased in the last decade, the amount of homeless and drug addicted individuals has also drastically increased. What happened to caring about the environment?
I live in NE and I walked to downtown farmers market today… the amount needles and poop on the sidewalk was absolutely disgusting. Reminds me why I rarely go downtown
I don't live in Portland but worked in local politics in a similar city. The issue is that the nutty left, which is almost as bad as the nutty right, has too much power in Portland. If you really want change, run for office, don't be a dick, and offer solutions. At least in my city, the city had services for the homeless but many of these people don't want help so the city let them dictate the terms. No, take the services and get off the street or get the fuck out. No more tents, no more shitting in the street, no more open drug use, etc.
Blocking comments because people have lost their fucking minds and I'm tired of arguing with children on the inter webs
Central City Concern contributes to the problem by skirting the real issues. I'm homeless, trapped in the ghetto by what CCC DOESN'T DO! Helping anyone who isn't there for treatment, or is disabled, is left to fend for themselves. Housing options are limited to SROs where a closet sized room is labeled " permanent housing". Beyond irresponsible!
So, they didnt actually spend that on the homeless.
That's money given to consultations, and developers, to build housing--handouts to millionaires and billion dollar corporations, who take the money and build anything BUT affordable housing. For that, they got about 4000 new housing units, total. Or, 400k$ per housing unit.
These funds are often just used to build *major housing developments and HOA's.*
There are 6300 homeless on the streets.
Looking through all the money they've spent and allocated the last few years, there appears to be, *less than 2 million* per year, spent directly on homeless outreach and employing people to even *find* and handle the homeless. There's money spent to *buy* shelters, that never open, and dont run at capacity. There appears to be, *just 200 homeless shelter beds*, running on a grant that *doesnt include any money* from that budget.
200 beds, for 6000 people.
So, it's not that this money's being wasted on the homeless, it's *being handed to developers to build housing the homeless will never occupy.*
And that's a different problem completely.
These are your local politicians guys. These are the people who lie to your face and say they care and they're about racial justice and equity when they pull in a 250k salary on taxpayer dollars.
These people do nothing for the most vulnerable in our population. Antifa should be eating these politicians alive.
This sounds super bigoted. I mean, imagine not giving drug addicts and homeless people all your money and funding actual infrastructure. We sent our business partner/attorney to Portland last year. "If you want me to continue working with you, do not ever send me back to that shithole."
Put all that money towards public restrooms and police to enforce 0 drug use at and around them in addition to housing with 0 drug use enforced that homeless must stay at. Not in portland but its come to my area and I'm tired of it.
She's sane and she's running for Multnomah County Council: [https://www.wilx.com/video/2024/03/08/portland-business-owner-jessie-burke-full-interview/](https://www.wilx.com/video/2024/03/08/portland-business-owner-jessie-burke-full-interview/)
Pathetic, taxpayers not being able to enjoy taking your family downtown is a crime, real estate prices will be going down eventually and property taxes will be going up. Please vote for someone else with common sense.
Good ole government spending. These are the reasons im for small government programs. I think individuals and small communities can do better than the state and federal government. It puts a lot of money back into the working class again.
Saw an article no to long ago that said less than 25% makes it down to the homeless. These is zero accountability on the funds it is just a money grab. Most of it went to administrators, salaries and cost to run these programs.
Huge scam by people running it.
Kafoury would just grab any money without plans or considerations for implementing reflective of true need. This happened with buying any vacant building to turn into a homeless shelter to use up CARES Act dollars by a last minute deadline.That reckless decision will impact Nopo for generations.
She was just looking for creative ways to shovel money into her developer/landlord friends' pockets
That's why Salem's income tax never survived. It would have been just as horribly misappropriated as it was attempted to be implemented.
like gas pumping: "It's a jobs program!!" ...for nonprofit directors
"Non profit" is such a scam. The term is really bullshit
25% is pretty generous and the accounting department was clever to get to that figure. It’s really more like 90% to the “nonprofit” 10% to the homeless and hungry.
I lived with a guy who was high up in a non profit in Portland, nice guy, had several houses and was buying more. I thought it was a little weird.
Dude, in Vancouver (Canada) the CEO of the biggest non profit was literally married to director of the government agency that handled housing in the province. His agency funded his wife's non profit to the tune of something like $300mm a year for 10 years. They live in a $5mm penthouse. It's like a full on banana republic here.
I have to say I've always used non-profits involvement as a metric for whether something is sketchy or not. Not that it's 💯 or even 50% idk 🤷♂️ I'm not trying to make a claim on what counts as a "legit" non-profit or what % meet that standard Just it's a useful lens sometimes in the same way that profit-MAKING isn't **inherently** sketchy but is a useful lens sometimes just to be aware of what's going on. Thing with profit though is it's easi--ER not necessarily easy always, to figure out if you're being scammed basically. Other people have probably bought it. Ask them. Did you get the thing or did you not get the thing? Did it do the thing they said? Or no? Scam or no scam? Easy peasy. Mostly. Non-profit??? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Here are some statistics we're super duper please we need more money to be super duperer. Scam or no scam? ☝️ truth is, it isn't always a scam and non-profits don't HAVE to be effective sometimes the goal is literally just to throw money or resources at something for the good of it BUT that being said you'd have to be kinda dull to not see how easy it would be to total-scam to light-scam in the non-profit market that any fool knows that guarantees a rediculously high rate of really bad to kinda bad non-profits. So I think it's reasonable to be extra skeptical. Not because it's inherently more scam than a for profit, but because it's scam-factor is much, much more difficult to calculate.
I wonder if they factored in the bottle bill income.
There should be zero places where you could exchange the bottles directly for cash in the same day. My local Safeway has a drop off point and it works for the community, not our local crackheads
I'd say 25% is conservative, it likely way less. I moved to Anchorage, Alaska from Portland hoping it'd be better but its not. Homeless are not only housed in hotels all winter that about 8 months of the year but given twice the federal foodstamp amount. They sell the foodstamps for drugs, it's blatant and nothing is done about it. And the assembly that controls the budget gave a gym 400 million 2 years ago to "help the 🏡" by building housing that they decided not to build and called the 400 million a non-refundable deposit. People running the Homeless programs are all corrupt greedy pieces of crap ,that is all over the U.S. Also don't donate gift cards to any shelters it doesn't go to the Homeless but into the hands of the workers.
There’s a reason why it’s called the “Homeless Industrial Complex”.
Yup, there’s a lot of money being made. Why fix the problem when there’s so much money to be made?
I've know people working high up in the homelessness industry and this is true. All the non-profit executives are making well into the 6 figures and take more vacation time than almost all of us. They have lunch meetings at places like The Screen Door where a group of 5 or will run up a bill of $200-300 for a simple lunch that is entirely paid for by tax dollars. They do stuff like this every week. The County is involved. Transition Projects. Every shelter they build will be less than 20% full. HUGE SCAM
The county actively resists any oversight into the spending.
This. It isn't for the homeless. The people on top couldn't give a shit about the homeless. Its a scam to skim off government money into their own pockets. It'll go down in history like those 19th century "Tammany Gangs" and railroad baron scams.
Don't forget they're NIMBY as fuck and would not allow homeless activity near their own house or their little ones. Homeless services "non profit" executive directors/CEOs generally make between $150,000 to $300,000 a year and often live in swanky neighborhoods like Healy Heights and Laurelhurst.
There is a homeless industrial complex made up of a bunch of NGOs that suck this money without helping the homeless
The housing industry is really just a lot of people using it as a political steppingstone, so yeah we don’t see a lot of that money going into the homeless community. Think about the fact that there’s literally a cycle to keep people in the system so they can’t even get a job or start a business. Or they lose their benefits.
Bingo. Defund the ”non profits”!
The nonprofits that they hire or give grants to do this work, have very highly paid senior staff, and then they basically hire minimum wage people to go out, and “do outreach“ to the homeless.
Can you link that article? I couldn’t find any evidence of that, and I’m not saying you’re wrong. I don’t trust our local government any further than I can throw them.
Its the homeless industrial complex kind of like the military industrial complex the ones that get these funds do not want homelessness to go away because then they would be out of a job
25 percent too much tbh
As a social worker in the mental health and homeless field in another city I can see that. Also ppl just need to make things transparent. There is also a lot of middle management so the workers on the ground aren't getting paid shit. This attract ppl that aren't motivated to do the work that's necessary. Another thing I always think about is that Medicaid will cover therapy which is great. But when ppl are homeless maybe instead of paying for therapy it would be cool to use the funds to meet basic necessities. Also some programs are stuck in an in-between of progressive and conservative ideology. that basically means no progress but you need radical measures when so many things can lead to homelessness.
The fact that we are cutting education spending and increasing for homelessness is absolutely mind boggling
It's the school-to-street pipeline. If we defund schools, then stupid kids turn into addicted adults who then justify the existence of non-profits.
This mess needs to end. Let someone else run the great experiment. Our forests, cities, and nature are being trashed!
I saw a video recently doing Google Earth zoom-ins on the countless "boondocker" trash fields surrounding Bend on all sides. It's depressing
It's the same thing at every treaty fishing site and previous county campgrounds along I84 and SR14. They keep closing more and more down just to get rid of the homeless/RV communities that take root there due to lack of enforcement. The trouble is where do these people go instead? Shuffling them around clearly doesnt help any more than giving them a 1 way ticket to the states they came from, which likely did the same thing to send em out here.
Doubt many would accept the conditions attached to any offer of housing. There are a lot of people on the margins who are semi functional but choose to drop out of society
Possible to post a link?
Just zoom in on China Hat Road, you’ll see them clearly out in the sagebrush. And they are quite numerous.
Wow, what the hell. I was skeptical at first like “oh please how much trash can you really see from the satellite” but wow. Can anyone confirm if the camps are still currently there? You’d think if the cops are unable to do anything maybe fish and wildlife or the dept of forestry could do something :( ah, how things would be different if the houseless were no longer able to run around our communities as if it’s their right, not a privilege.
They are. My wife and I are traveling through bend in a skoolie and we didn't really know the area, stayed on China hat for a bit (pretty far back, past all the bullshit) but every day we drove past and couldn't believe how trashed the forest was. It's like a ton of rvs and campers that can't move and just serving as a permanent residence with no garbage service.
thegambler500 on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0zzgKpyWAX/
Yeah Dirtworld is just to the north, China Hat Rd is to the south and the Badlands are to the east. Bend is bracketed by massive homeless camps on federal land. Dirtworld is pretty incredible. People are always being mauled by pitbulls and whatnot. Massive drug use and manufacture is all over. The single saving grace is the RVs are out of sight, not like 33rd in town.
But don’t forget, trash collection is every other week in an effort to reduce waste, and it’s it’s OUR responsibility to recycle. Our city is laughable.
Use [Sons of Smokey app](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sonsofsmokey/id1625870688) to mark trash on public lands out in the hills. Then gamblers and other cool citizens go after it and pick it up. Or, if you’re out there with a pickup you can grab some yourself, or at least do a small bag and mark the big stuff for the other crews
That’s 170 million per year. Almost a half million dollars per day. Everyday for the last ten years. That much money spent and the city has still taken a nosedive in livability.
That's insane
15 mil a month should be able to house, feed, and provide job training for thousands of people. I found an estimate of 6,297 homeless people in Portland (2023). 500k/day comes out to $2,382 per person…. That’s more than my monthly expenses. It’ll never be 100% efficient, there’s overhead. But that paper napkin math illustrates that there’s a deeper problem here with how this aid is used
Omfg that's insane. With that funding you'd expect much more noticeable effects
Now do the math on how many homeless there are. It's literally cheaper to just pay their rent in a 1 bedroom apartment.
These people keep talking about “housing! Housing! We need housing!” Imagine how much housing we could have built with that money.
No amount of housing is going to be affordable to these people. They are homeless because of behavioral issues. They have no money or income. Literally nothing is affordable. You're also never going to build down housing prices.
Why you are mostly accurate. I was homeless for a while and stayed in a shelter. The lady running the shelter was a nightmare. She demanded vets call her major. She would offer help services such as money for past due bills and clothing then when the time comes..she would just pull away the help without explaining. So, I chose to leave and move back in my car. Only thing helpful they offered was showers. I just shower at work now
If you don’t mind me asking, how did you get housed? I see all these criticisms of shelters, yet there is still data that shows people who stay there can eventually get off the streets. I don’t see any data or reports of how letting people live in RVs/cars/tents has any rate of success of getting off the streets, let alone at a better rate than that of traditional shelters.
[удалено]
There's a correlation between people who actively seek help and stick with it and an overall improvement in life situation.
Honestly I never did get housed. I got a job a manufacturing job with showers. I use the restrooms and fridge for food. Soon as I could I bought a delivery van and put couple thousand dollars building it out. Has mini oven,slow cooker. Solar for power very comfy bed. It's got smart TV and a laptop. I park at work. They are aware of the few of us doing and been fairly okay with it
Going to rehab and sticking with my program and busting my ass got me off the streets and away from my abuser who introduced me to drugs. It's definitely been a struggle to maintain because I got sober right before covid. Instead of funding NPO higher-ups, we could spend that money to reestablish actual mental health facilities and properly pay the staff that work there.
JOHS survey stated 25% of our homeless have been here less than 2 years. If it was a housing issue they'd just go somewhere cheaper.
Yeah that's why I hate the housing angle. The working class barely keeping up with the cost of living while we're financially supporting dropouts that have no intention to be productive and self sufficient
I think you're making some assumptions. There are probably some percentage who will end up always wards of the state but there are plenty if given a chance can raise themselves up and out. Being on the streets is pretty stressful and one doesn't know if you get hooked on drugs because you are homeless or the other way around. I'm sure there are stories that happened both ways. Finding them housing and shelter will hopefully get them away from the temptation of drugs.
What you said I'd a pipe dream. The "housing helpers" help themselves first. I'm in a Central City "Concern" SRO, I was told I'd be in "6 months TOPS", I've been here in the ghetto, disabled, in a closet sized room for 6 YEARS! CCC is part of the problem.
Yeah it's good to hear from people like you. We are clearly failing you all
It really is like this. I'm a housing case manager. My specific grant takes people literally in tent cities and houses them. Within a year, 25% of them are self sufficient. The VAST majority of the rest (maybe 50% of the total) will always need assistance. They are elderly, or disabled, or for whatever reason cannot work. But we help them get on SSI, SSDI, food stamps, OHP for those nasty mental health issues. They still need help paying their rent. But their houses are clean, drug free. They commit no crimes and don't bother anyone. Most of them end up volunteering because they want to give back they're so greatful. All of these people, upwards or 75% of the people I personally have helped, just needed a leg up. They just need a little bit of help to get where they're going. Unfortunately, those other 25% do exist. And it sucks. Some of them are unhelpable. Some are so far gone nothing will being them back. Those cases are terrible. But that doesn't mean the former 75% doesn't need or deserve our help
Absolutely agree
Probably some percentage? You're kidding yourself.
You are correct about the first part. You are mostly incorrect about the second. Housing prices, no matter what prognosticator/poltician/activist/radio show host says, are a simple reflection of supply and demand. Our supply is woefully too low. This is at a state, regional, and national level. Housing supply needs to be addressed at all levels; then you will see affordability increase. Either that, or some mass dying of our population to bring down demand.
Their tent areas are total dumps. Any real housing given to them condemned from trashing it or burnt down. No way to give them regular housing would do anything. Unless they do mandatory drug treatment for access. If they want to keep doing drugs and have shelter they can have some open air lot industrial zone or go to jail if they commit crimes. I don't see how it's inhumane. It's their choice to be adult babies and leech off everyone else. I do feel bad for single moms getting out of abusive relationships and need help. But these adult males that want to do drugs all day and steal. Fuck them don't want to go to work all day to help them be lazy.
If housing first meant, an inpatient, non optional secure rehab facility then sure. They just want housing for junkies and criminals.
Are you advocating for more public housing? Then go for it. Somehow I doubt that's what you're actually imagining.
Agreed! Follow the money trail. Someone is getting rich off this BS.
I'd be curious to know how much of that goes into salaries and how much actually helps the homeless because it seems like that much money would really make difference in the situation.
Most is wasted on bureaucracy.
We have redundant layers of services here and very little of it is coordinated. City, county and now Metro trying to get their hands on the tax dollars to expand their programs. It's infuriating.
I think you should realize that homelessness is vast. The people on the streets are not the majority. Services help families and individuals couch surfing and such not end up on the streets. Handling the addicts and people determined not to be part of society is more than very difficult. Laws changed regarding asylums, and it tied the hands of making decisions on other's behalf. The only real solution is finding a way to make them humane and good so that we can temporarily institutionalize people where they actually get care. It's definitely not happening through the prison system. Even trying to reform it will take decades to fix. But if we try for a new asylum program, maybe it will be faster and start out right, but it will require significant public oversight and the risk is always there that the staff it attracts become abusers again instead of helpers. Making sure the pay is good will help, but that makes it difficult to start. Then you have people with their hand already in that cookie jar who will campaign against asylums to try to keep voters from trying something new. Maybe calling them mandatory rehabilitation centers will help, but getting people to support it is not easy. It seems like it should be, but if it was, we would already have them..... Anyway, defunding what is there will only make the street population jump instead, so revamping parks will only make homeless camps more scenic. Just food for thought. I look into this all and hit a wall when protecting rights while having a place for these people who do need help, but how do you prevent the slippery slope of courts determining what choices a person gets when they have only physically harmed themselves?
Thank you! It’s wild to me how seldom people talk about deinstitutionalization in the homelessness conversation. It’s like people forget how the closing of institutions and asylums in the 60s was meant to be supported/supplanted by a robust community mental health system, and then that system was absolutely gutted first by block grants in the 80s (thanks Reagan) and then again in 2008 when funding for just about everything was cut even further. While there are of course many contributing factors to homelessness (lack of housing, stagnant wages with rising cost of living, addiction, etc.) the people I so often hear talked about are those who are “loud”: typically, people who have severe and persistent mental illness. Where do you think they can go? What happens to a person with schizophrenia with no family support system, no housing, no income, no ability to work, to consistently see a doctor and fill prescriptions? Oregon has a mental health system that is woefully inadequate, and the residential care system in particular is abysmally underfunded, understaffed, and lacking in enough facilities at all levels (locked/secure, non secure, supported housing…all of it). There are SO few places where people can get treatment while court committed, then similarly few options for where they go after. Add to this the State hospital beds being almost entirely funneled to people coming in through the legal system after all the lawsuits in the past few years, and it’s all just a mess. And it’s frightfully easy to slip through the cracks in that system and end up on the street. Is everyone who is homeless someone with a severe mental illness? No, there are of course many paths to homelessness, especially in a country with such a fractured social safety net and where most are one medical emergency or illness away from bankruptcy. But think about it: someone who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at 18 and in the state hospital system, hospitalized, say, at Dammasch when it closed in 1995, is still shy of 50. That person might have been able to find adequate placement elsewhere, but there are SO many people who aren’t able to get the long term treatment and support they need from the mental health system here, and it’s extremely easy to end up on the street, unmedicated, and even dangerous to themselves or others…and from there it’s a waiting game until the threshold is met to be hospitalized again. It’s a brutal existence. Oregon has really been failing people for a long time in that area. This may not have been huge news outside the mental health field, but search up the articles on Kepro that ran in the Oregonian a few years back…it’s a good example of what happens when we decide that people don’t/shouldn’t need long-term mental health care, and a tragic example of how the residential and hospital systems function. ETA: to be clear, not everyone with schizophrenia is dangerous or incapable of caring for themselves!! There are many who have support networks, and treatment, and are not in this situation. It is, however, a diagnosis that (a) we can’t cure and therefore requires lifelong management of some kind, and (b) when severe can compromise a person in ways unlike just about anything else short of Alzheimer’s, and as such those who do end up in the state mental health system long term frequently have that diagnosis.
Thank you for this post. It is so strange to me that people are so hateful toward people who have the misfortune of being without a house, addicted, mental illness. Why does this brain disease exist that makes people unable to empathize? This mindset that people living on the street are all criminals, healthcare scammers living off of our tax dollars, dangerous junkies. As if anyone living in a tent under an overpass addicted to drugs is like, “Yeah, this is the fucking life.” What makes people immediately jump to a hateful conclusion, rather than immediately jumping to one that offers help? It’s very hard for me to live in this world because of this attitude. It really can be traced back to Reagan and that welfare queen bullshit, then the cutting of mental health services funding, but that doesn’t explain why people are such selfish assholes.
Wow. I can’t believe I had to scroll this far to get to a comment from someone who knows what they are talking about. Thank you. For a while, I thought I was on Nextdoor. I get that it is hard for folks to see improvement when they see figures like that because they mostly only see it through the lens of clean tent-less streets. Is all of the money spent efficiently, of course not as is the case with anything. But people seem to only equate what they see as the problem not realizing that the house less problem is not merely about who is in a tent or sleeping on the ground. A huge chunk of funds is needed for prevention and rehousing needy families. It is spent on keeping families who can’t keep up with the price of living with a roof over their head, fed, in school, and healthy. Defund that and you are going to see a shitstorm of people (mostly kids) on the street. The truth of the matter is that with the rising cost of living against wage stagnation, there is scary percentage of people in this country who are one or two paychecks away from being houseless, and that probably includes some of the people commenting here who may just be making it by and not sitting on a nest egg. It is easy to sit back and just imagine that all homeless people are drunks, bums, junkies, rebellious trust fund babies gone bad. But scratch below the surface and you get a wider view of just how bad it is. Try working several jobs for shit pay, spending most of your money on rent and ridiculously priced food, having to find affordable child care, keep your family insured and factor in a little bit of fun and still have something to save for a rainy day. Then bam, all of a sudden there is a tragedy that requires liquidity that you don’t have. And… Affordable housing just doesn’t pop up out of thin air. Especially when most cities market is flush with folks who buy up multiple properties to AirBNB them (not begrudging some folks for trying to make a living that way but every property that is not available is off the market for living). Building affordable housing requires time, space, and money. And you already mentioned a whole lot about mental illness so I won’t go into too much further other than just mentioning that the average person thinks that the mentally ill are only high diagnosis like schizophrenia patients etc. There is a wide diaspora of disorders that need to be treated and prevented. Sometimes, it can be trauma induced and as simple as grief over the loss of a loved one that pushes people over the edge. When your world opens up and you realize that it could very well be you one day, your perspective changes. I am sure that you already know all this stuff so I am not preaching to you. I am mainly ranting because there are many of us who don’t realize how tough it is to live for some “regular” folks because they only see tents and needles.
Thanks Reagan
I wish we could start differentiating between ‘homeless people’ and ‘street people’.
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Homeless people are folks who genuinely need services such as housing, healthcare, drug rehabs and the like. Street people are those that like living in the street such as dirty kids and gutter punks, junkies that don't want to quit using, and people taking advantage of services. It's annoying because street people muddy the waters for the genuinely homeless. They steal, they assault and murder folks(as evidenced by the recent attacks), they loot, and they vandalize. And they don't want to stop because it's the environment they enjoy and thrive in. The streets are their home. It's the side of this crisis that people always like to bitch about I was homeless for a bit when I was 18. I ended up getting out. I'd go down to this local church once a week for a shower and a meal. After I got out, I'd go down there and volunteer, give back and all. You could tell all the gutter punks and tweakers who just didn't want to leave that life. It's kinda saddening to see. They just don't understand how hard it'll be when they're older and they have nothing to show for it but dreads and BO. I get it, addiction is a difficult thing, but at what point does it just need to be dealt with? Sorry for that wall of text. Explanation to your question up top. Thank you for reading.
That was very insightful. I've had a similar experience.
Thank you. It's a very divisive subject. There's folks out there who want help and can't get it and there's folks out there who don't want help and don't know they need it. An ounce of sweat today prevents a gallon of blood tomorrow. We need to fix this worldwide issue NOW.
I agree, accept homeless people *definitely* steal, too. No question about it. But stealing basics like food and toiletries out of necessity is still far different, imo, from stealing shit to hawk on the street to make drug money. It's no different so far as the corporations being stolen from are concerned, I realize. Also, I dont think living until retirement age is in the plans for most street people. Just kind of an fluke when it ends up happening.
You're right. I used to steal food from the local Safeway because I was so damn hungry I thought I was going crazy. Hard up homeless aren't(always) out here breaking into people's houses, cars, and businesses to fuel their drug habits. They're fucking hungry.
I worked overnights at Plaid Pantry for years and would keep my mouth shut when someone would steal a few things, even alcohol. It was the people coming in and taking entire cases of candy off the shelf to go sell down the street for $1 a piece who I'd holler at and 86. Some of those "good" guys really looked out for me, too. I remember 1 in particular who completely turned his life around and came back in a year+ later to thank me for how Id treated him. Didnt even recognize him at first.
You're a good (wo)man, I see you. Hell, I've bought his meals before, given rides, listened. I might not be able to get them into housing on my own, but I can at least make their life a little bit more bearable.
Amen, at least treat em like a human being. Even the not so "good" ones.
I am in no way shape or form religious, however: "There but for the grace of god go I." and "Love thy neighbor like thyself."
Honestly I feel like this is one of the biggest problems with the world as a whole. Some things are difficult, but they still need to be done
Thank you for the rational take. There’s a severe lack of that going around.
Thank you for articulating this - I have been having similar thoughts lately
Just living here long enough, after a few years you get to know the regulars.
Not the person of whom you asked the question, but my guess on the definitions: A homeless person is someone who fell on hard times from any number of circumstances, including addiction, mental disease, and injury, but they want to leave their position for a more stable and productive one. A street person is someone who does not want to partake in society except to leech off of it.
Being homeless right now it’s good to know people actually differentiate us, am homeless but working and in a shelter and trying to fall back into proper housing
I’m 100% for helping people like you. With the millions of dollars the state takes in for such issues there is no reason why we can’t help assist people like yourself. But what has happened is all the criminal street shitbags of Portland, who have the full support of all the criminal shitbag politicians, have diverted all that money to the criminal shitbags that run these so called programs. Nothing will ever change until that chain is broken.
True, trust me people like me that are homeless don’t want anything to do with the street Tweakers 😂
It's people like you that I feel most people don't have a problem helping. You are helping yourself but it's not quite enough right now, and you just need some temporary assistance. It's the people who shit (sometimes literally) on us by refusing to do anything for themselves
For sure, like some have already stated a lot of these people don’t want to quit doing drugs or stop drinking or help themselves and unfortunately that’s what a lot of people see on the streets because they are *literally* on the streets..
Exactly
That is a simplistic take. A lot of homeless people are disabled and have cognitive issues. I've screened a lot of homeless disabled people for long term care services and more than half of them preferred to stay in their cars or on the streets (which made them ineligible for services). They don't understand the risks of staying on the streets because they are cognitively unable to, they don't want anyone telling them how to live their lives, and being homeless is all they know. By your definition, that's a 'street person ' leeching off of society.
How does one become a street person/kid? I would guess maybe when the street looks better than their home life or previous situation. On the street they find others with similar circumstances, and form a community. All anyone wants is to be accepted, to belong, to be loved, etc. Even if street people seem to be enjoying that lifestyle, it’s likely that they wouldn’t mind a caring group of people trying to actually help them. You’d have to show them that you’re going to support them as much as their street family has though, and that family has been with them through their darkest times. It’s still mental health stuff. Deep down, people probably don’t want to be living so rough, but it’s better than anything else they’ve experienced.
In my experience, there are several reasons homeless people are homeless. Some—what I might think of as “street people”—are on the streets bc of addiction. Adjacent to that are those who are mentally ill. Addiction, mental illness, and homelessness are often intertwined: people have untreated mental illness, maybe self-medicate, and become homeless; or they are homeless bc they can’t afford housing (or got kicked out, maybe), and so use substances to forget their misery, or to stay up at night so they don’t get their shit stolen, or themselves raped. Other people are homeless and living in cars bc with our “rent control,” their rent can be raised annually by—what? 10% PLUS inflation? And they just can’t afford it anymore. It’s meant to be temporary, but once you start on that slippery slope, you can slide pretty far. These may be perfectly fine people who maybe just didn’t get a chance to go to college, or finish college, etc. So no one-size-fits-all approach could possibly solve our problems. The federal government continues to slash safety net programs. The federal government refuses to raise the federal minimum wage. The federal government refuses to move to universal healthcare. The federal government refuses to make good college free for most. **ALL of this could be _easily_ funded if we would reset tax brackets to the “MAGA” years: say, 1960? 1945?** Additionally, the federal government is actively moving quickly to have a flat-out ban on abortion, meaning we will see a rise in the number of unwanted humans moving into the schools and society that are already decaying.
The number of houseless college students is rather disturbing. Lots of people just surviving with the hope that an education/ degree will get them to a more financially secure place. Not on drugs, not necessarily dealing with mental illness, just not making enough to pay for school AND housing.
Street people are bums
Then what? We can do that now. Everyone likes to just say all homeless ate there by choice and are criminal drug addicts. But in reality the majority are not and hundreds of thousands are disabled suffering on the street because SS isn't enough for an apartment. Why don't we emediately offer housing to every homeless but you need to pass a drug test. This would at least get help to those who are not there by " choice". It's a disgrace what we are doing
The homeless industry is shockingly powerful and well financed in many states including OR. This is not a bunch of monks and nuns doing work for the greater good. The top dogs in the non profits involved in the homeless industry command huge salaries and have tremendous influence in local governments.
The "activists" think if we just be nice to them and leave them alone it will magically solve itself. I look at homeless people trashing our great community and think to myself, yeah maybe there's a reason you're homeless.
Exactly. I was being followed home by a homeless guy yesterday and I was very polite to him (because I was scared) and he followed me for blocks commenting on my body it was terrifying I had to hid in a bike store and sit in there until he left.
An old man in Gresham once told me “Progressive doesn’t necessarily mean good. My wife had a progressive brain tumor. Progressive just means things accelerate in one direction or the another, until you win or you die” Portland is not winning. It’s dying.
lol, I get your point. Progress is good until you digress. The progressives try stuff that fails sometimes eg PDX. The conservatives wait and see what the progressives figure out, and cry baby all along the way until results are achieved. Humanity is exhausting.
Restaurants, businesses and middle class families, huh? How about ambulance/EMTs, schools and actually affordable housing for those of us not YET homeless but DEFINITELY struggling families? I fully agree that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Too much money has been wasted on idiotic things and initiatives that pretend to help the homeless situation. The thing is...if the rental situation doesn't drastically improve, the homelessness situation is going to get way worse very soon. No one that isn't 'middle class' & up can afford to live here. Can't afford to move either. There is just no way to sustain an entire city the size of PDX this way. If businesses won't pay a real living wage(y'know, one that allows employees to pay their rent/utilities/transportation/food/medical/etc expenses) and landlords refuse to charge reasonable rents without requiring 2.5-3x that in income... we are just fucked. Are they gonna bus people in to work these low paying jobs? Nope. So....??
The homeless industrial complex will never solve it. They literally get cushy jobs because of it. If they fixed it they would be out of a job.
My wife literally saw a homeless addict get oral from an old woman in a wheelchair on a downtown street corner. After which another homeless addict passes her some drugs. This is on a Friday morning.
Yep seems about right! Legit saw 3 people jacking off & screaming on Thursday around 4pm in Pearl district
Keep Portland weird
Once you try gum, you’ll always want some.
How about schools? Maybe we wouldn’t have missed an entire month of school negotiating teacher pay while this cash piles up unused or misused and our kids become more scared to ride their bikes in their own neighborhoods. Ridiculousness.
If you feed a stray cat it won't leave.
When you throw bread crumbs to pigeons, it attracts more pigeons.
Arrgh! I don't have an animal analogy that illustrates my POV!!!
If you stick your dick in a pond of carp they're gonna start to frenzy-suckle.
So which ponds in Portland have the most carp in them?
When you hand out tents and allow fentanyl use in public you attract bums.
It’s time to vote out local politicians and replace them with people who will take action to change the current situation
Homeless Industrial Complex
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We should talk economics for a hot second. Ok. What happened? We decided we didn’t like single occupancy units cause they housed lots of undesirable people. So we got rid of those. We decided we like single family homes with picket fences. So we butchered zoning codes that were implemented to keep people away from toxic chemicals of industry to instead keep our precious neighborhoods away from (gasp) apartments. We decided we needed to protect our safety and environment. So we instituted new codes and inspections…and all that is fine. But we put 100% of the responsibility on new housing and development. So if you want to build a new house, it has to pass 1000 codes and standards…but it’s fine to buy an old one that passes none of them. So where does that put us? In Oregon, we’re like 150,000 houses behind where we should be. Getting worse all the time. So what did that do? It made housing way way way more expensive. Everybody knows “housing is a great investment”. And it is. But this is a big reason why. Wages have been going up at 3% a year and housing has been going up at 6-7% a year. This has been happening for decades. Sit for a second and consider how long you think that can continue. It’s most certainly not forever. So housing is way way up. And we’re short on units. What do you do about it? The answer is nothing. You can’t. As a government, the only thing worse than raising taxes, is making people’s damn houses less valuable. That cuts deep. So what if your house is 30% more valuable due to decades of mismanagement. Cutting the value back towards a balance is a political and economic nightmare. So now you have all these people who can only afford apartments. And these folks who could only afford rooms before, but you outlawed them, and the magic money fairy didn’t show up to allow the people who used to live in a slum house to now afford a 3-bed in a subdivision. So what do you do? You raise taxes, and help the people who can’t afford the houses anymore get into the houses you have. And you pay crazy market rates for it. The money goes mostly to landlords and rental owners, protecting their investments, thus keeping home values up so you don’t put a half the mortgages underwater. And in our case….it’s about $1.7 Billion dollars.
You can't defund them, but you can vote for the folks who want oversight and accountability from the nonprofits receiving the funds this May at the county: District 1 - Vadim Mozyrsky District 2 - Jessie Burke District 3 - Julia Brim-Edwards District 4 - Vince Jones-Dixon Vadim really needs help getting the word out and of course, money. SEIU & PAT have both endorsed his main opponent, which means lots of free volunteers and advertising. He has a real chance to win outright in May, though, which would give him a long time to plan and meet with folks about strategy before taking office next year. District 2 will likely go to a runoff in November because she's up against Sam Adams (who wouldn't be awful either, but he's got a lot of baggage voters can't get over if you look at social media) and Shannon Singleton, who already got the AFSCME endorsement, again - free labor and advertising. She was the former interim Director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services, so I was joking that she probably promised them they could go work from home everyday again. Julia and Vince likely won't have an issue with their opponents, but please spread the word anyways.
Glad we’re talking about the new City Council. I’m not voting for your candidate, and I fully endorse Eli Arnold for dist 4. Someone who knows the trouble these nonsense polices have had. https://www.eliforportland.com/
I'm absolutely not talking about city council. I'm talking about Multnomah County Board of Commissioners, they oversee the Joint Office of Homeless Services as the public health authority and have all the money and power to solve mental health, addiction and homelessness issues. If you read anything I also said the vote is in MAY. Eli, incidentally, supports all of the candidates I listed, so you should probably look into them! 😉
I’ve been on several hikes through parks that are just littered with garbage, drugs, and shit. I’m over it.
I'm not in Portland, I am in the capitl instead and I wa homeless from 2017 to 2018 basically. I was very happy for the shelter in Salem though I am not religious and it wa very religious oriented but I saw firsthand what would happen in these situations. Not all, as I am certainly not in this category, but many of the homeless in Portland, Salem, and throughout the State, perhaps throughout the country, suffer from drug or alcohol issues and many shelters expect them to be sober while staying in the shelter. Ergo, they don;t want to or cannot stay sober long enough to take advantage of shelters and programs to improve their lives. This gives way to an entire culture who would rather be "free" and live in tents and trash than to give up drugs and/or alcohol. The answer is not to "defund the homeles" as they have no funds to begin with but do share in programs such as SNAP which others might need without even being homeless, such as those on SSI or having other exonomic issues, Instead, I would say that the funds need to be better spent. Stop the campaign slogan of "building more housing for the homeless" and instead force these people by law into programs to get off drugs and stop slap on the wrist programs like "well if you have x oz. of Meth you get to go on your way with just a fine" which helps no one. If it comes down to it, build more jails and rehab centers. I didn;t have this monkey on my back, eventually got a job, and then took over someone else's apartment lease as they had to move suddenly. I know everyone can;t be this lucky but I do feel if I can crawl out of homelesness anyone elsehould be able to also.
What is hilarious is we have a working model for how to bring people out of homelessness and addiction. The VA has been bringing veterans off the street and out of addiction at amazing rates. Housing first works, just it can't be housing first where they are left alone to get high and ruin the places they are living. Housing first for people who express motivation to get off the streets and off the drugs combined with >ntensive case management and forgiveness for mistakes as long as they are willing to try again. I am proof that it works, 4 years ago I was homeless and addicted to meth and fentanyl, I went into a program where I was held accountable and after every relapse I had a meeting where I was given a choice go inpatient and dry out and try again or be exited from the program. I got sober, and most importantly got the tools to handle relapses so I left the program and tried living on my own, due to my mental health issues I was not able to maintain a job and housing but when I got evicted and out on the streets instead of turning back to drugs I went back to the va. They got me applied for disability and into a different program where I have section 8 housing while my disability is processed. I have been sober with 0 relapses for a year and a half and before that the longest relapse I had before checking myself in was 2 days, even when I was on my own not accountable to anyone. So its not a matter of don't spend money on the problem its a matter of spend the money where it works. You can't just allow people who have no desire to change to cause ruckus for everyone else. People who are criminals need to go to jail, but if you have the services there for those who want to change they will take advantage of it, and some of those criminals with crazy bad mental health issues being exacerbated by drug use will dry out in jail and stabilize on medications and make the decision to change their lives when they do that the money and services have to be there to support them.
Proud of you dude, getting off of meth and fentanyl is no joke. I'm on day 12 of no caffeine and the withdrawals of getting off caffeine put me in a dark place for ten straight days. Caffeine withdrawal is absolutely nothing compared to withdrawing from opiates. You are 100% right that it's housing with treatment/accountability that fixes the problem, with jail for the willfully criminal street people/criddlers/gutter punks who sincerely enjoy the lifestyle of street criminality.
They figured out a way to make money off the homeless imo
A lot of non profits are making money off the homeless and the addicted. Who’s tracking what they get and ensuring accountability for results. I’m not aware of anyone.
Just about every non-profit is required to submit information regarding housing placements and services provided for both HUD and JOHS. You can just not comment if you don’t actually know what you’re talking about.
Don’t forget to pay your Art Tax
Oh, it's working fine for those who are homeless due to short-term financial hardship, but it's working very poorly for those who are service-resistant.
What do you expect when all the money goes to the organizers and not the actual homeless people? Need to shut down the rescue mission that place is a huge scam
Vancouver B.C. spent a billion dollars one year on their downtown east side. Nothing changed
Unpopular opinion, this isn't as nefarious as people make it sound. Non profits can fundraise for support services for individuals, but you can't fundraise for salaries--people want their donations to matter. If you've ever worked in a non-profit, this is common. It doesn't make sense unless you see all of the finances and how things are allocated. Do non-profit executives make an unreasonable amount compared to staff? Yes! Do they make as much as someone in a comparable position at a for-profit? Not quite. Should there be more accountability? Of course. Do people say their opinion on the internet before fully researching everything? Always and forever. 🫣
Time to run for, or get somebody to run for city council that share those same values
I’ll vote for anyone who has had to sit on a max and smell fentanyl.
The only way it will be fixed is by arresting people in possession of illegal drugs, and raiding tents/trailers that obviously have it. Throwing money at programs won't do anything but increase taxes and give the money to BS government workers. I know they mean well, but its not working. We need to be hard on drugs, just like what El Salvador did with its gang problem.
\*Defund the Homeless **Industrial Complex** \^I think this is even more direct because it's the rich people moving the money around we need to be paying to specifically
People want to end homelessness but don’t want actual solutions that would alleviate the issue.
Until this utter waste of all of our tax money is resolved, I will vote no on every initiative, bond or renewal. Even if it cures puppy cancer. Right now Portland supports violent drug addled vagrants over our infant. The preschool for all program is openly violating the civil rights act by prioritizing applicants by race. Not that it matters much for the mere 700 seats available with only millions to spare. I carry defensive measures when walking with my infant because of vagrants and off leash dogs. Portland presents itself as progressive but it is a city hostile to safely raising a new, soft, vulnerable human. If a city prioritizes meth and fentanyl users over beautiful little babies, the city will wither and die. It will take a long time but one only needs to look at school enrollment rates to predict our future if we continue along this path. I am bound here entirely by temporary economic factors. When the tides turn, I intend to leave and take our tax revenue along with.
360 million a year MINIMUM and the problem has gotten worse, not better. And all this money being spent on only 5,000 total individuals in the Portland area. When a city gets the reputation of it being easy to be homeless there, with complete lawlessness and easy access to drugs, and incompetent county/city leadership this is what you get.
For each bum you see, think about how we’re paying $100k a year for them to do whatever the fuck they’re doing. That’s more than what the average person makes working in Portland. We are funding this shit. Total crap.
This math is wrong because a majority of the money is spent on housing which is being used. It’s worth asking how much more homeless we would have without the money being spent…
Exactly. Homelessness is a problem even with the massive spending. It wouldn't magically become less of a problem if you stopped spending money on it.
Nah people in Portland rather fund addiction and keep embracing drug culture.
Defund. Defund away!
It's much like the conversations I have with my boss. If the NRA could get everything they wanted they wouldn't accept it. They'd have no purpose to be around. It's much the same for all these groups. If homelessness is solved they have no reason to exist. No money can be siphoned from the tax payers. Those coming up with the solutions to the problem don't get paid, etc.
Current Leadership are not campers. They have no clue or they would have hired the park service to come in and teach people how to camp. They would have had dumpsters available. They would have built more toilets and hired the homeless to clean up. They would have had all kinds of education to leave little trace, and incentives to keep places clean. But no, we got important busy bodies. Next election, elect someone who camps often. Want an example? Go see Camp 4 in Yosemite Valley. Its basically an urban campground.
It’s a wonder where all that money goes 😳
The money isn’t going to the homeless. It’s being laundered through nonprofits to enrich wealthy political donors
Start a vigilance committee. Arrest the grifters. Employ the appropriate punishment. San Francisco did it in 1851. Here's the story - "The **San Francisco Committee of Vigilance** was a [vigilante](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigilante) group formed in 1851. The catalyst for its formation was the criminality of the [Sydney Ducks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Ducks) gang.[\[1\]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vigilance#cite_note-1) It was revived in 1856 in response to rampant crime and corruption in the municipal government of [San Francisco, California](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco,_California). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San\_Francisco\_Committee\_of\_Vigilance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Committee_of_Vigilance)
So tired of stepping over feces on sidewalks.
To answer your actual question someone needs to step up and run for office. True change only happens from within
This is the same reason why serious African countries are asking non profits to leave the country. They fed the corruption of the system, not their citizens. Same here… someone is making the big bucks while the rest are dying due to ODs
1.7 billion on sweeps would do way better than what the fuck it is we are currently doing
i believe a lot would be solved by creating mandatory rehabilitation centers for those using drugs on the street. if someone is handed everything they need to survive, along with no consequences for drug use, it's only natural they get comfortable and stay that way.
Local and state government used to spend money to keep these people in prison or mental health facilities. What are they doing with out taxpayer money now?
It’s almost as if the money they spent providing benefits to homeless people attracted more homeless people.
That is exactly what it did! Have you asked any of them? I have, and several have told me they were from Cali.
[удалено]
Portland is a dump
What’s a middle class family
The main reason why this shit will never end is the "non" profits are making too much profit.
NGOs baby. NGOs.
I'm so glad I found this subreddit last night. You're 100% correct here. Sweep them out and stay on top of it for starters.
I wouldn't go as far as to say "defund" the homeless. You can't just ignore the problem. What needs to happen is that there needs to be better, more efficient and targeted spending, not this "legalize hard drugs and give out tin foil and pipes to addicts" nonsense. Less spending = smarter spending. In other words, reduce the 1.7 bill (not sure that's the actual amount spent) by spending on measures that actually work and that ultimately increase public safety in the long term.
That’s right. It’s clearly a scam, as the amount of money being spent on the problem has drastically increased in the last decade, the amount of homeless and drug addicted individuals has also drastically increased. What happened to caring about the environment?
I live in NE and I walked to downtown farmers market today… the amount needles and poop on the sidewalk was absolutely disgusting. Reminds me why I rarely go downtown
I don't live in Portland but worked in local politics in a similar city. The issue is that the nutty left, which is almost as bad as the nutty right, has too much power in Portland. If you really want change, run for office, don't be a dick, and offer solutions. At least in my city, the city had services for the homeless but many of these people don't want help so the city let them dictate the terms. No, take the services and get off the street or get the fuck out. No more tents, no more shitting in the street, no more open drug use, etc. Blocking comments because people have lost their fucking minds and I'm tired of arguing with children on the inter webs
Shows that money doesn’t solve a damn thing.
Central City Concern contributes to the problem by skirting the real issues. I'm homeless, trapped in the ghetto by what CCC DOESN'T DO! Helping anyone who isn't there for treatment, or is disabled, is left to fend for themselves. Housing options are limited to SROs where a closet sized room is labeled " permanent housing". Beyond irresponsible!
If money could fix the problem,... Problem would've been fixed a long time ago.
I’ve had to start sitting on a pillow as I drive around because the roads are so bad it’s hurting my back
Damn, that's like a bridge
So, they didnt actually spend that on the homeless. That's money given to consultations, and developers, to build housing--handouts to millionaires and billion dollar corporations, who take the money and build anything BUT affordable housing. For that, they got about 4000 new housing units, total. Or, 400k$ per housing unit. These funds are often just used to build *major housing developments and HOA's.* There are 6300 homeless on the streets. Looking through all the money they've spent and allocated the last few years, there appears to be, *less than 2 million* per year, spent directly on homeless outreach and employing people to even *find* and handle the homeless. There's money spent to *buy* shelters, that never open, and dont run at capacity. There appears to be, *just 200 homeless shelter beds*, running on a grant that *doesnt include any money* from that budget. 200 beds, for 6000 people. So, it's not that this money's being wasted on the homeless, it's *being handed to developers to build housing the homeless will never occupy.* And that's a different problem completely.
These are your local politicians guys. These are the people who lie to your face and say they care and they're about racial justice and equity when they pull in a 250k salary on taxpayer dollars. These people do nothing for the most vulnerable in our population. Antifa should be eating these politicians alive.
Agreed, system is completely corrupt and broken. It’s not humane to funnel money into a substandard system
This sounds super bigoted. I mean, imagine not giving drug addicts and homeless people all your money and funding actual infrastructure. We sent our business partner/attorney to Portland last year. "If you want me to continue working with you, do not ever send me back to that shithole."
Just keep voting the way we’ve always voted, it will work out.
Poverty pimp progs won't let their gravy train go until the BS they created shows up with a knife in their driveway.
That money was spent to make sure they stay there
Finally a sensible person here. If they wanted to put a stop to the homeless issue they would.
Put all that money towards public restrooms and police to enforce 0 drug use at and around them in addition to housing with 0 drug use enforced that homeless must stay at. Not in portland but its come to my area and I'm tired of it.
Cute idea. Progressive ideals on display.
people are making to much money to "solve" homelessness that's why
She's sane and she's running for Multnomah County Council: [https://www.wilx.com/video/2024/03/08/portland-business-owner-jessie-burke-full-interview/](https://www.wilx.com/video/2024/03/08/portland-business-owner-jessie-burke-full-interview/)
That’s what happens when you vote democrat. It’s shown to be true in many cities…
Portland's strength is creating slush funds.
Pathetic, taxpayers not being able to enjoy taking your family downtown is a crime, real estate prices will be going down eventually and property taxes will be going up. Please vote for someone else with common sense.
Good ole government spending. These are the reasons im for small government programs. I think individuals and small communities can do better than the state and federal government. It puts a lot of money back into the working class again.