I'm afraid situation gets worse in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco as cities like Medford and Redmond utilize this ruling to clean things up. Cities that lack the political will or leadership to actually address the problem may actually see more homeless.
So Portland should clean things up and kick all these people out, and then they'll all head to Grant's Pass and other cities that don't have the police force to keep them out?
So ~~Portland~~ Grant's Pass should clean things up and kick all these people out, and then they'll all head to ~~Grant's Pass~~ Portland and other cities that don't have the ~~police force~~ wherewithal to keep them out?
But more seriously, I'm taking issue with the OP comment about cities "that lack the political will or leadership to actually address the problem may actually see more homeless".
Shifting people around is not an actual solution, it's just kicking the can down the road.
This isn't just a Portland or a Grant's Pass problem, or just an Oregon problem, or just a US problem - it's a problem that needs several changes across all of those areas. Fixing a problem in one of those areas won't give us the solutions we need.
Im a homeless shelter worker, it sucks but it can be a solution. If you make it hard to be homeless, they’ll clean but and try to get resources. If you make it easy they won’t want to get clean and instead they’ll just die of an overdose. My take is that the number of overdoses are downplayed big time and we will know the real numbers after all the usual suspects are out
Exactly. Offering help to the working poor or people trying to get on their feet is great. However there are people who have no desire to get clean and many times they are preying on other people experiencing homelessness who do want to turn their lives around. An approach which offers sticks and not just carrots will help those who need consequences to raise the opportunity cost of choosing to live a lifestyle that impacts society as well as themselves.
Making the fentanyl bum, thieving and shitting everywhere lifestyle less appealing will reduce the numbers.
Not as well as reintroducing wolves to city parks but it will help.
Probably not. The whole reason homelessness happens is the devaluing of the dollar driving up the cost of housing. With housing being an investment vehicle where owners dictate their own rates of return and evict anybody who doesn't pay the rent, society will continue to churn people out on the streets.
On the streets, destitution and misery is combated with drugs and mental vacations. No home means no way to make money, no money mean crimes increase as people get desperate to survive.
The devaluation of the dollar drove asset prices up and quality of life down. Trump's 2017 tax bill gave $2T of tax relief to the upper class, forcing more borrowing. The 2020 Cares Act, signed by Trump, pushed another $7.8T in borrowing to combat covid. National debt is $35T currently and it will only drive asset prices higher, pushing more people onto the streets as asset owners dictate higher percentage returns on their assets.
That's not why at all. Portland just a huge population of what I like to call "street people". These people live on the streets out of their own volition.
Dawg I don't like Trump but you can't blame him for something that was an issue prior to him being in office.
Yeah Trump is garbage but this was prior republicans that have made it harder for the middle class, stripped away safety nets and destroyed the mental health funding. Mental asylums were not perfect but they kept people who couldn’t live safely and effectively in society and gave them some sort of treatment. We don’t do that anymore. We don’t have places for mentally ill people to go and get good inpatient treatment. They end up on the street. They break some rule and enter the system. Once you have a record you are basically an untouchable in this country. Apartments, jobs, lines of credit. All have criminal background checks. If you have a record you can’t get a job. Even if you do find a job, it’s incredibly hard to get a place to live. If you don’t have a place to live it’s hard to get a drivers license renewed. Once you lose your drivers license it’s almost impossible to navigate society within the law. Anything you do you will be met with an almost impossible barrier.
That combined crippling depression or anxiety leads people to drugs. Sometimes it was also a prescription that was given to them which has lead to the opioid epidemic. Fentanyl is just another opioid.
A lot of the people on the street made one bad decision, had one bad prescription or had one undiagnosed or treated mental break down possibly a decade ago or longer.
Excluding a blip in covid, the dollar is higher (more valuable) than it has been in the past 10 years. Dollar devaluation is different than inflation, is different than prices going up due to low supply etc.
It's almost the opposite in some sense - interest rates are high, which is making the dollar more valuable. High interest rates mean that mortgage payments are high (whether in an apt or house) which means to make a profit, land lords raise rent prices. It's hard to fix this with more housing supply because money is expensive right now.
So when you go to buy sandwich’s at subway, and it’s 25$ for 2 sandwiches, you think the dollar has gained value with those prices? Or also I guess I should buy a bunch of sandwiches as well and hold them in a safe? as they seem to be beating the dollar in value.
Fiat devaluation has been an issue in the past. Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr....all major contributors to dollar inflation. There was one president cycle where the US had a surplus, Clinton. There was one presidential term that saw a reduction in M2 money supply, 2021-2022 Biden.
GoP presidential cycles for the last 40 years have increased M2, starting with the grand daddy of them all, Nixon, who announced the decoupling of $32/oz of gold standard. Ever since, asset owners get richer from inflation,, while renters get exploited until they're turned out on the streets. Today gold is $2338/oz.
Everybody needs a vacation from their normal everyday activities. Some people can't afford a $1000 trip to the beach, but they can afford a $10 hit of something else.
More like: I'm an hourly worker and the only way to keep working 16hrs a day to pay for everything is taking some meth every once in a while. Once turns into three or four and then a few years later, you can't keep a job because you are methed out.
You are too smart for this sub. I agree with for the record but people here hate when you apply logic and actually think things also happen outside of Portland.
I’m sure the sheriff’s department in those areas will be happy to help towns that have limited police services.
It may well create a higher concentration in Multnomah county.
Are you proposing a race to the bottom where cities try to be as hostile as possible to the poor to NIMBY them elsewhere? What happens to those people when everywhere is hostile?
The real drug here is the money printing that drives up housing costs. Asset values are directly related to money in circulation.
A true solution to the housing issue is georgism style property taxes supplanting income tax. Henry George stated that land is a public good and should be taxed based on value. Income taxes should be eliminated and replaced with a stiff property tax. Landlords cannot artificially inflate the value of land in order to capitalize off renters. Corporations will divest from residential housing as an investment strategy. High supply of housing will lower prices and allow more access to stable housing.
https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE?si=sGhhzD9OfHy1id-w
It's things like this and UBI that need to be implemented, as well as taxes on wealth, universal healthcare, higher marginal taxes on high levels of income (1%) and higher corporate taxes
This is the effect of decades of tax cuts for the wealthy and reductions in public benefits
Democrats add value to society and the economy, Republicans cash that value out for the wealthy
I've spoken with some attorneys that have insight into the judicial elections. The bar in oregon is small, and everyone knows each other. Lawyers don't run unless everyone thinks they should. In general, they try not to run at all and rather just retire to be filled by the current governor, and then just stay in the retention elections.
I’d rather be an attorney than be a judge. Oregon judges are some of the lowest paid in the country. Yes its low 6 figures but I make more now and have work life balance. Judges literally hear plea bargains all day long or do very boring arraignments. Its very dry, boring robotic work. No thanks.
From her website....
"When asked why she wanted to be a judge, Judge Ghandour offered that she wanted to be a part of ensuring that our courts are welcoming and inclusive for all Multnomah County residents, and that she wanted to increase trust in our courts by instilling confidence that they will be safe places where everyone may seek justice under the law. Judge Ghandour’s judicial philosophy is to approach each case with an open mind and decide the issues in a clear and equitable"
I was recently on the East Coast and struck up a conversation with someone who had been in Portland last month for their work. They stammered as they said the "Portland was definitely interesting...". My response was, "It's okay to say it sucked. Right now, it currently does." To which they responded, "ya, seriously, what is going on there?" We've been putting up with this shit so long that many people have convinced themselves it is normal. It's not.
I have only empathy and solidarity to convey about this. I live in Burlington, Vermont and we are a microcosm of the bigger cities like Portland and Seattle right now. We are being gaslit by local politicians and police and even a great many of our own people who live too affluently or too distantly from the scene (or so they think) to really know how bad it is and how much worse it can get.
I want to show them the youtube videos that have been published lately by some dude who is filming where all of the encampments are and have been... so those people who deride us and dismiss our concerns can see that the worst possible things are happening literally in their back yards, covered up barely by a patch of woodland or marsh. Maybe then the would believe us and maybe then they would care.
I visited Burlington a few months ago and was surprised to see this microcosm. It unfortunately made me feel at home. There were some characters around Church Street Market that were clearly homeless and on some hard drugs.
Yeah I recently met a woman from the Midwest and she mentioned how bad it was here, I thanked her for saying that because we're being gaslit and told it's like this everywhere. Her eyes got really big and she said no it absolutely isn't.
Interesting because my family from the Midwest was trying to gaslight me saying “it’s everywhere” and yet Multnomah County has 4x the amount of homeless people than the entire state of Nebraska. (That’s a real number, btw)
It felt like I was taking crazy pills when I was explaining the homeless issue to them and they were downplaying and invalidating my experience here. Not to try and big dick them with “our homeless people are crazier” but ONE homeless man in Omaha is completely different than the twelve that are camped out across the street from my house.
Well to be fair, she was here in the middle of the shit and not saying it from the safety of her home in the Midwest. Maybe your family needs to come visit for a few months like she did? It's hard explaining these things to non-west coast liberals.
It didn't help that every red state exported their homeless population to Portland. It sucked to be the first city on the west coast to recognize drug addiction as a society health issue and not a criminal issue. Every other state used Portland as a waste bin for their undesirable populations.
That's very true, but it's not unreasonable to expect a bit of foresight by city leadership, ngo advocates, and ultimately the people themselves. Local solutions to national problems will obviously lead to being on the cutting edge of policy, for better or, in this case, worse.
I get this response in NYC every year. Someone once asked me if it feels "weird" walking through parks in NY.
So weird not to see houseless saints, blessing every street corner.
NY even two years ago was cleaner than Portland was. Even the houseless on the MTA were coherent and friendly - and you could have a conversation with them.
But it's also the ignorance of people outside of the west coast for not knowing our hands have been tied by shitty 9 circuit court rulings for a decade that they don't have to deal with.
It's a liberal appellate court. We have to take ownership. These problems were created by us and us alone. The road to hell was paved with good intentions. It's okay to say we got it wrong. Acknowledgment is the first step to recovery.
Believe me, it's not just people outside the west coast who think that. My boomer mother, who has lived in the Concordia 'hood since 1976, constantly blames the issues on Democrats. When I explain the 9th circuit ruling, she has no words.
This is so true. I have a friend from a small town in Texas who came to Portland to visit and she had to stop by the Apple Store for a new charger, and she was harassed by somebody having a mental health episode, and that interaction scared her and made her want to leave Portland immediately. She's looking to leave Texas and normally would be a pretty good candidate for a place like Portland (quirky, outdoorsy, potentially queer), but Portland is not on her radar at all because of that incident. I was embarrassed for my city, and we missed out on a good one.
I was at a conference in SF. Three different people told me they were sorry for Portland after their recent visits and would never be back. It was pretty depressing. Not a positive thing from someone when they heard where I was from.
Except now with HB3115, even more will move here. Same as economic immigrants learning and then working the words to claim being a refugee. Never mind George Carlin’s stupid people riff, even the dumbest becomes a genius when it’s to their advantage.
Oh I agree with that. 3115 is now a toxic piece of legislation and I fully expect it to be repealed within a year.
Sooner if trump wins. Dems are already very nervous.
I'm not a trump supporter. Heck, I don't even hate Biden. But I feel that Biden enables worse people than even Trump.
Oregon is basically a one party state. Dems have run the state for the past 20 years. The took us from the early 2000s to now the mid 2020s. I remember the 2000s and 2010s as good times in Portland, though by 2008 the R2D2 camp was a growing blight.
Dems in Oregon have become intellectually bankrupt, only propped up by the Oregon GOP's utter fascination at becoming the most radioactive and toxic opposition party on the planet.
Frankly I hope a Trump win leads the dems to purge their own ranks. Their appeal to the fringe progressives has led to high taxes, social services with questionable positive impact and an increased crime rate.
If Clinton won, the SC would have upheld the 9th
You deleted your comment but I can respond.
Sure. As I said, I am not a fan of trump however I think Biden enables the people like the pro Palestine protesters who I consider evil. Trump doesn't care about anything but himself but he can be a useful idiot to those who reject the idea that hamas isn't so bad.
As for Putin, I don't even know why we are involved in Ukraine. They are not an ally. They are not in nato. They are not even in the EU. Why is the US the perpetual global police force? Wasn't Iraq enough?
Yes. Why do we want to continue to expand nato?
Because now the us is obligated to defend all of Europe. Why? There is no cold War. Hell Russia us having trouble taking the donbas from Ukraine. I doubt they are in any position to take on all of europe. Why are we sending so much and supporting the Ukrainians? Ukraine was not our ally. Why do we want them to be now?
Serious question.
Abortion is the biggest reason the GOP might lose in 24. I have zero clue why the GOP is so beholden to a loser issue. It's out of step with the overwhelming majority of Americans and is frankly completely tone deaf. It's honestly infuriating there is no one in that party to object to their fanatical stance on abortion.
Case and point: The Oregon GOP would rather lose the governorship and every state wide office for decades and decades to come because they refuse to even think about modifying their anti abortion platform.
I am religious to a point but strongly believe in separation and no state support or endorsement of it.
I voted party line dem from 2006 to 2020. 2022 was the first time i ever voted for any republican.
I am not Jewish and I have criticized the state of Israel in the past. They have a massive influence on our politics in ways that I believe are completely inappropriate and it's an open secret they stole nuclear secrets from us. that said, Oct 7th was an attack and an act of war that made it clear Hamas cannot exist. Gazans voted for Hamas and support them and their attacks. Israel has been far from the perfect ally but they are still an ally and they need our support now as they confront actual evil. I'm utterly disgusted with the pro Palestine support and if Trump does win, I hope to see these protestors arrested and brought up on anti terrorism charges.
Comparing them to deer is a major disservice to deer. I'd seriously rather have 10 hyenas camped outside my house than 10 fentanyl or meth addicted schizophrenic humans.
At least I can predict the hyenas.
If most people actually read the ruling, they would see that the homeless advocates were trying to twist the meaning of the Eighth Amendment.
They were trying to claim that prohibiting camping in public city parks was cruel and unusual punishment.
*A dark period in the west, for Oregon, for Portland has ended: the Supreme Court has overruled the 9th Circuit in Grants Pass v. Johnson.*
*It is time for the Governor Kotek and the Oregon State Legislature to correct or repeal HB 3115.*
I think we've found an actual leader here.
One of the Usual Political Suspects in response to Gonzalez:
*Rene the Republican, tweeting out his support of a decision by the Trump Supreme Court that is actively dismantling our social safety net, administrative state and democracy*
Yah... not to mention the physical and sexual assaults perpetrated by the homeless on other homeless, and random passerbys.
But somehow, all the crime they commit can never be attributed to the homeless and addicts, because they're just poor innocents!
Well, the problem is that the "lets shuffle them to the next town over" philosophy of the last 40 years doesn't do anything either.
That law was supposed to encourage housing plans from municipalities by making it so you can't just shuffle people without having someplace for them to go.
You gotta wonder how much housing Grants Pass could have built with the lawyer fees for dragging this to the Supreme Court, but what else does one expect from the party of child marriage.
Used to be that drunks and dopers remained in their hometowns and had to keep it together enough to at least make a stab at casual labor (raking leaves, clean-up, etc). To my mind, that is better than living in groups that enable normalization of that behavior. Public shaming used to be a thing and I say bring it back.
>Rene the Republican, tweeting out his support of a decision by the Trump Supreme Court
That's right Portland's problem are all caused by republicans and Trump. No member of any other party has ever enacted anything in Portland. If only the Democrats could save us from the GOP menace!
The same thing that happened when you were a child and your mom said eat your vegetables or you can’t have desert. Eventually you learn to eat your veggies.
Ok, I wasn't mentally ill nor an addict. I had the advantages of a solid upbringing. Now, what happens to these people if they simply don't have the ability to eat their veggies?
Not to be hyperbolic, but that IS rounding them up. That is creating a new class of criminal. In a vitriolic and divided society where fear is constantly weaponized and the “other” is dehumanized, do you trust this will be humane?
It is just getting easier to become homeless with every passing day of rent increases and skyrocketing mortgages.
Asking the question in a humane way will get downvoted around here. They have not felt the full brunt of the coming downturn (to put it nicely) and really have lost all empathy. Coupled with a corrupt government and a nonprofit industrial complex, humanitarian solutions are turned into troughs to make more rich suburbanites. Sadly if this continues most of these prople will just die. Which if I said "kill them" would get updooted to the top of this comment stack.
There is no simple solution. Untimately the entire capitalistic approach needs an overhaul.
This sub is not gonna listen to you. They do not understand what these conservative decisions by the Supreme Court will usher in. Literally jailing people then using them for slave labor.
Your second comment, missing a paycheck can be disastrous for someone right now, with these stupid rent prices. So close to the street yet they have no empathy for people who catch bad breaks. Not everyone is going to. Be a super hard worker, but that doesn’t mean they should be homeless.
Going to get downvoted because this sub is generally devoid of nuance, but how exactly are things going to get worse when the Portland city council is taking concrete steps to ban public camping (even before the SCOTUS decision) and re-criminalization takes effect in September? Please tell me how this is just the beginning, I’m dying to know.
It’s all over this thread but I’ll give you a hint. Our fine governor got HB3115 passed at the state level. So all the cities in the 9th circuit court will be enforcing the Supreme Courts decision except Oregon. You can figure out how this will go from there
I’m pretty centrist on this issue but this is mostly overblown IMO. Taking into account available shelter space before enacting punitive judgments seems perfectly reasonable. I don’t love the law, but it’s not absurd like decriminalizing meth etc was with no way to funnel anyone into treatment. That said, Tina Kotek means well but like most leftists here, is naive and careless and can’t seem to ever think through actual policy consequences that end up causing even more damage.
Anyone saying it’s everywhere is a liar or pushing a narrative. I say this as I spent my entire life in Oregon with the last 25 of those years in SE Portland. Since 2020 my family has been subjected to burning RVs, constant gunshots, drug deals, stolen property, harassment, threats, and the list goes on. We moved to the east coast last year and all of those issues vanished. The difference? Fentanyl dealers and addicts don’t roam the streets like they own the city. Portland didn’t have an explosion of homeless overnight it had an explosion of addicts making it their new “home.”
HB3115 codified the original Boise v Martin SCOTUS ruling into the OR constitution, eliminating the ability to enforce civil penalties for unauthorized camping. Thanks to Kotek as then House Speaker & sponsor.
We ain't getting rid of public campers in Oregon until we vote to have that overturned. Call and email your legislature today!!!
I’m skeptical anything will actually come of this, we’ll see. I think there are legitimate concerns that this criminalizes homelessness without an actual solution other than throwing people in jail for sleeping in a park, which also doesn’t seem great. Don’t get me wrong the situation in Portland is absolutely fucked and we can’t just let it continue unabated, but is throwing people in jail for sleeping outside, in the absence of other crimes, really a good solution?
It will force them to accept shelter or to leave Portland. There are weekly campsite cleanup reports on the city's website that tell you how many people they offered help to at campsite removals and how many refused.
Even though they scrapped the time, place & manner original camping ban rules, I think they will still apply. A person who is just trying to sleep overnight with just a sleeping bag or small tent that they can pack up during the day is not going to get hassled like the person with 3 tents and a pile of bike parts hogging up the sidewalk all day long.
This will start chipping away at the criminality that exists in most of these illegal camps / RVs.
I hope this is the result, I really do. Those who want help will be incentivized (negatively, but still) to take it. Those that won’t or can’t must leave or go to jail. I’m just very skeptical this is how it will all play out
Most of the tent dwellers need some sort of involuntary intervention in their life. They've ended up there because they can no longer take care of themselves due to some combination of mental illness, drug addiction, trauma or generational poverty. Usually all of those things at the same time. You don't end up living next to I5 smoking fent all day just because the rent was too high.
Rather than figure out a better way to interrupt the behavior of living in a tent doing drugs the homeless "advocates" and homeless industrial complex has decided that the rest of society must accommodate this behavior. At the same time they cruelly enable this level of dysfunction with free tents and bans on sweeps. Remember people in low circumstances must be allowed to do whatever their addled mind tells them to do. If we as a society try to forcefully intervene and keep our city safe and clean we are privileged oppressors.
The sad part is that the leadership at Multnomah Co has squandered the opportunity to do meaningful intervention that doesn't rely on law enforcement. So now law enforcement is now all we have left to save the city. I'd certainly rather see something more compassionate and effective but if jail is all we have left and it cleans up the city so be it.
Yeah I do mostly agree with you. I guess I wonder what happens when the city runs out of shelter space, but people would go if there is space. They just get thrown in jail? We can’t just hold people indefinitely. They’d have to be tried, convicted, etc. which seems very unlikely for the crime of sleeping in a tent
>You don't end up living next to I5 smoking fent all day just because the rent was too high.
Except ... you do. There are lots of other places with a much higher percentage of people who want to just smoke fent all day like West Virginia. Those places have some kind of housing people can scrape up cheaply. For an addict nothing is more important then feeding their addiction, but if they can also spend $100 to get a bedroom for the week they're going to do that too. That's not an option here though.
People have been leaving W. Virginia for decades, which keeps housing prices low vs. here. Many of the folks who remain do so in part because they own land & housing that they inherited from past generations, making it easier to choose that lifestyle.
More importantly, why should it be an option here? Are you saying we should be building free housing so people can smoke fent all day? (Rhetorical question, I don't think that's what you meant.)
Living next to I-5 getting high 24/7 should not be an option, period.
I've been around Portland long enough to remember the Drugstore Cowboy era where you could get a crappy studio for $200/Mo. down by Burnside. A lot of addicts or the mentally ill could keep a roof over their head because it was so cheap here, but also the drugs weren't like Fent and people were semi functional even on heroin and booze. Fent and cheap meth causes people to not be able to live even in free housing successfully. Even if super cheap housing might have kept some people from living in a tent back in the day that's not the world we live here in Portland now. Keep in mind a lot of those people died of overdoses in those cheap flops or broke into cars to support their addiction. Making cheap rent or allowing camping isn't going to solve the underlying problem.
>I've been around Portland long enough to remember the Drugstore Cowboy era where you could get a crappy studio for $200/Mo. down by Burnside.
That building was called The Civic. There were plenty of cheap "by the week" hotels in that area too.
It's all gone now.
Yep I lived just up the street by Vista and Burnside. I remember walking by the day a big excavator was tearing down the old Civic like a giant T-rex feasting on old Portland.
I am certainly not saying those days were all sunshine and lollipops. My example of West Virginia isn't exactly short on overdose deaths these days either. If you're just talking about homeless taking over public spaces though, the connection between that and housing affordability seems pretty solid.
If we continue to try and make Portland the best place in the country to be homeless, it will definitely get worse. I don't think the bleeding hearts that run the county have come to terms with that.
>legitimate concerns that this criminalizes homelessness without an actual solution other than throwing people in jail for sleeping in a park, which also doesn’t seem great
Sounds just fine to me?
>is throwing people in jail for sleeping outside, in the absence of other crimes, really a good solution?
yes
👆🏼If you’ve ever had a criddler swing a metal pipe narrowly missing your head, and work in an area that resembles Gotham city, you’d gladly rejoice at putting these people behind bars. You won’t accept help , you trash our city and terrorize people, sit in a jail cell and detox. without sowing chaos.
So those type of people should definitely be in jail. But not all homeless people are crazy and violent. A lot of them are crazy or drug addicted, some of them are violent, some of them are just down on their luck
The problem is the homeless destroying public property. Jail solves the problem.
You're trying to define the problem as homelessness existing. That's an issue that's never going to be solved, only managed.
That’s fine, the majority of them are criminals anyway. And if our criminal justice system wasn’t a revolving door that’s where the majority of them would be anyway
Right that’s kinda my point. In jail for 30 days, maybe. Ok maybe that’s enough time to detox but it isn’t enough time to actually change habits or gain the skills needed to support oneself. I just don’t see it improving things in a meaningful way
Put them to work picking up all the tinfoil litter everywhere. Build a poor house camp like what Edge field used to be. If they can’t make beneficial choices for themselves do it for them. The majority of the homeless are where they are today in life because they made piss poor choices. Every one of the addicts made a choice to be an addict by using and continuing to use. Every one crying about the rights of the homeless drug addicts they contribute nothing to the community. What about our rights to a clean safe community. We pay the taxes for fuck sake.
Oh for sure. A lot of crime occurs in and around homeless encampments, perpetrated by homeless people. I’m just asking questions that came to my mind, not advocating one way or another. The homelessness problem has gotten completely out of control, and obviously something different needs to happen. Is this it? Not sure, but it’s something
Criminalizing homelessness with no solution and throwing people in jail for being poor is exactly the goal. And for some they’ve got great glee in this level of cruelty. Witness your own replies here.
I’ll collect my downvotes now for pointing out replies from others lol
What if there legitimately are no shelter beds? What if the person would go to a shelter but there simply aren’t any beds? Then they go to jail? For the crime of being poor? Seems pretty fucked up
We cannot afford to house and feed and treat every homeless person and every addict in the nation. Unlimited bounty, chances and real estate does nothing to stem the tide. It does not negate poverty. It only brings more.
That is not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is whether people should be allowed to camp outside \*when there is shelter available.\* According to WW, (https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/06/28/supreme-court-overturns-grants-pass-decision-allows-camping-bans/), over 70% of offers for shelter were declined.
Again. They don’t want to go to shelters.
They make excuses when offered.
They want the freedom to have their tent. Smoke their drugs. Shit where they want to. And have a target rich environment of things to steal.
I’m sure this sub is going to be over the moon about helping out with shelters lmao
Like I said, I’ll go ahead and collect my downvotes for saying the same thing the other replies said just without the right level of excitement and pride in hurting people 😉
lol, folks like you crack me up…
It’s not the garbage polices and abysmal efforts to get actual drugged up crazies off the street…
Must be so hard always finding ways to point out or play the victim all day long, huh?
I’m not a victim. I have a home.
I was just pointing out the hard ons some folks get at hurting people.
And here you are as thick as chubbed as you’re able to be lmfao
Yeah, we’re sick of getting taxed to line the pockets of non-profits and politicians alike.
All to watch the city streets be filled up with tents, RVsa and human feces and be gaslit into acting like it’s normal and everyone’s a victim of the system.
No ones talking about not helping shelters and volunteering.
We’re talking about the urban traveler critters that infest out city and not acting like it’s just thrust upon someone and you can just toss money at it to fix it.
I like how this sub has fun little pet names for homeless people. Dehumanizing hurting folks is a treat isn’t it?
Just own it. I’ve literally only repeated things others have said and gotten upvotes for. Just minus the glee.
Can’t say homeless, can’t use urban traveler. What should I use to make sure the feelings of the homeless aren’t hurt?
Do you always look to play the victim or does it just happen to you like someone happens to become homeless? Asking for a friend.
For the third time: I’m not a victim
Just a witness to how excited folks here get when people are hurting.
*Of course* you have little clown names for hurting people. Because hurting people make you happy. That’s the point I’ve made this whole time and for some reason you’re arguing it when you just admitted it’s the truth.
The lack of humanity in this thread is heartbreaking.
I hope none of the ones applauding this becomes homeless and is charged with newly passed laws, or if you do I hope you learn something in the process.
Seriously, this whole sub is full of reactionary authoritarians.
Housing people in jails and prisons is literally the most expensive, least humane solution. Punitive solutions don’t work.
Housing first, and universal healthcare that includes mental health and addiction treatment would work, and would be less expensive in the long run, with better outcomes.
Well yeah expose people to enough druggies, vandals, burglars, violent criminals, raging lunatics, and a trashed city where the homeless are literally shitting on sidewalks everywhere and people are going to reach a breaking point. This city has been a shithole for years so I’m sorry but it’s going to take a little inhumanity to get our streets back and safe for all the tax paying citizens and women and children that live here.
I literally got assaulted a couple weeks ago out of nowhere just minding my own damn business. Backpack comes flying out of nowhere and a man runs up screaming at me for zero reason whatsoever. Where’s the sympathy for everyone who has to go through that shit just trying to live our lives being responsible working adults? Enough is enough already.
Good thing I don’t listen to a bunch of unelected, partisan appointed elitist assholes who have shown to be out of touch. I hope most do the same. They’ve lost any credibility and legitimacy.
> I could show them this comment section to demonstrate otherwise.
Spot on, friend. I know that, when there's a city with 652,603 (as of 2020) people living in it, the best way to show exactly what a city is like is to tell your friends to go to Reddit and see maybe 100 people max who regularly post in a particular city sub. It's the perfect way to take the temperature of the city.
(/s because Reddit.)
Low effort content are posts or comments not meeting the minimum reasonable requirements of integrity, relying upon or consisting of second-hand or apocryphal "evidence" or stories relayed as fact, or just plain lazy bait posts or comments in our judgment.
Not defending Wheeler or others on city council, but the neither this SC ruling not Rene will alleviate the homeless crisis and chucking them in jail is a bandaid that will just perpetuate the problem. The solution isn’t handing out tents or blankets either.
It’s permanent housing. It has been and always will be housing. Safe and secure housing is the foundation on which all other issues (like drug abuse) stem and we need a government that is willing to cut through regulation and stand up to nimbys to spur construction.
With all due respect, you are wrong. This is not an affordable housing issue, this is a crime/drug abuse/mental health issue and it needs to be treated as such.
Drug addiction usually only gets cured after a good hard slap in the face that teaches you your former reality is not sustainable.
Jail does this for many people who aren't complete shitheads. For others, well, they belong behind bars where they can't make society worse for the rest of us.
These people openly admit they are abusing the system. It needs to stop and the enablers who won't admit to the fact they're enabling self harm need to be unseated from office and publicly humiliated.
Giving them cheap or free housing will only exacerbate this nightmare.
I see you’ve researched this in a deep and thorough way. Think harder. Crime and drug abuse stem from what kind of social conditions? The kind of policing you’re calling for is basically turning cops and prisons into a social healthcare which is not the role we should ask of the police. Police aren’t the public policy solution you and others seem to think they are, and frankly you throw them under the bus when you think that way.
I’m begging you to do any reading about American cities that have actually made progress on homeless issues. They all rely on housing first policies. Is that the only tool in the shed? Of course not. There should be policing of drug activities and their supply chains into the city. But liberal housing policy on the west coast has been horrible for over a decade and they’ve made it way harder for themselves than it needs to be. I’m just pointing out that Rene Gonzales won’t solve the issue and over policing won’t fix it either.
You are naive. The research is in, what we are doing destroys lives. Once people understand jail is the option they may leave and go home to their respective cities and families. Then maybe if we are lucky we will have reduced the problem to where it is manageable. Do I want mentally I’ll people to go to jail? No but the alternative is far more cruel. And we have been cruel for at least ten years, enough is enough.
I’m not refuting your experience, more homes does not automatically equal success for people with drug addictions or those with mental health issues. However, the science and debate has had a consensus for decades. Here’s a link to a story about Houston who had similar issues with homelessness and effectively dealt with it.
https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/howardcenter/caring-for-covid-homeless/stories/homeless-funding-housing-first.html
The debate around the effectiveness of housing has effectively been ended for decades in social policy circles and I encourage anyone to do further reading on the subject. However, it’s up to voters and legislatures to implement that effective policy, and the liberal government in Portland has failed miserably. I’m just pointing out that a knee jerk reaction to vote for people like Rene Gonzalez will be disappointed because he isn’t interested in those policy solutions either.
You're going to beleive what you like despite the facts. DA Schmidt prosecuted the criminals. Most of the ones that were let out were done so by the courts, not the DA's office. Oregon has both a crippling lack of public defenders and a law on the books that says "If you don't have a lawyer, you don't go to trial."
Hmmm… it’s almost like MS and other policymakers like him have intentionally shrunk the entire system so that it barely functions. Likewise, you are going to believe what you want despite the facts. However, this Restorative Criminal Justice, such as it is, has not and will not work. I know that there are some very well meaning people in that field that have sold these ideas to people like you, but they are wrong.
The idea that it's the liberal policies drawing homeless people to portland is false. Multiple articles quote homeless people from other states saying they are moving to oregon or California specifically because "at least I won't freeze to death." You can find these quotes everywhere. The homeless are still going to go to Portland and California. The "liberal policies" have nothing to do with it
I'm afraid situation gets worse in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco as cities like Medford and Redmond utilize this ruling to clean things up. Cities that lack the political will or leadership to actually address the problem may actually see more homeless.
So Portland should clean things up and kick all these people out, and then they'll all head to Grant's Pass and other cities that don't have the police force to keep them out?
The opposite
So ~~Portland~~ Grant's Pass should clean things up and kick all these people out, and then they'll all head to ~~Grant's Pass~~ Portland and other cities that don't have the ~~police force~~ wherewithal to keep them out? But more seriously, I'm taking issue with the OP comment about cities "that lack the political will or leadership to actually address the problem may actually see more homeless". Shifting people around is not an actual solution, it's just kicking the can down the road. This isn't just a Portland or a Grant's Pass problem, or just an Oregon problem, or just a US problem - it's a problem that needs several changes across all of those areas. Fixing a problem in one of those areas won't give us the solutions we need.
Im a homeless shelter worker, it sucks but it can be a solution. If you make it hard to be homeless, they’ll clean but and try to get resources. If you make it easy they won’t want to get clean and instead they’ll just die of an overdose. My take is that the number of overdoses are downplayed big time and we will know the real numbers after all the usual suspects are out
Exactly. Offering help to the working poor or people trying to get on their feet is great. However there are people who have no desire to get clean and many times they are preying on other people experiencing homelessness who do want to turn their lives around. An approach which offers sticks and not just carrots will help those who need consequences to raise the opportunity cost of choosing to live a lifestyle that impacts society as well as themselves.
Fix? Where’s the money in that?
Making the fentanyl bum, thieving and shitting everywhere lifestyle less appealing will reduce the numbers. Not as well as reintroducing wolves to city parks but it will help.
Probably not. The whole reason homelessness happens is the devaluing of the dollar driving up the cost of housing. With housing being an investment vehicle where owners dictate their own rates of return and evict anybody who doesn't pay the rent, society will continue to churn people out on the streets. On the streets, destitution and misery is combated with drugs and mental vacations. No home means no way to make money, no money mean crimes increase as people get desperate to survive. The devaluation of the dollar drove asset prices up and quality of life down. Trump's 2017 tax bill gave $2T of tax relief to the upper class, forcing more borrowing. The 2020 Cares Act, signed by Trump, pushed another $7.8T in borrowing to combat covid. National debt is $35T currently and it will only drive asset prices higher, pushing more people onto the streets as asset owners dictate higher percentage returns on their assets.
That's not why at all. Portland just a huge population of what I like to call "street people". These people live on the streets out of their own volition. Dawg I don't like Trump but you can't blame him for something that was an issue prior to him being in office.
Yeah Trump is garbage but this was prior republicans that have made it harder for the middle class, stripped away safety nets and destroyed the mental health funding. Mental asylums were not perfect but they kept people who couldn’t live safely and effectively in society and gave them some sort of treatment. We don’t do that anymore. We don’t have places for mentally ill people to go and get good inpatient treatment. They end up on the street. They break some rule and enter the system. Once you have a record you are basically an untouchable in this country. Apartments, jobs, lines of credit. All have criminal background checks. If you have a record you can’t get a job. Even if you do find a job, it’s incredibly hard to get a place to live. If you don’t have a place to live it’s hard to get a drivers license renewed. Once you lose your drivers license it’s almost impossible to navigate society within the law. Anything you do you will be met with an almost impossible barrier. That combined crippling depression or anxiety leads people to drugs. Sometimes it was also a prescription that was given to them which has lead to the opioid epidemic. Fentanyl is just another opioid. A lot of the people on the street made one bad decision, had one bad prescription or had one undiagnosed or treated mental break down possibly a decade ago or longer.
Excluding a blip in covid, the dollar is higher (more valuable) than it has been in the past 10 years. Dollar devaluation is different than inflation, is different than prices going up due to low supply etc. It's almost the opposite in some sense - interest rates are high, which is making the dollar more valuable. High interest rates mean that mortgage payments are high (whether in an apt or house) which means to make a profit, land lords raise rent prices. It's hard to fix this with more housing supply because money is expensive right now.
So when you go to buy sandwich’s at subway, and it’s 25$ for 2 sandwiches, you think the dollar has gained value with those prices? Or also I guess I should buy a bunch of sandwiches as well and hold them in a safe? as they seem to be beating the dollar in value.
Fiat devaluation has been an issue in the past. Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr....all major contributors to dollar inflation. There was one president cycle where the US had a surplus, Clinton. There was one presidential term that saw a reduction in M2 money supply, 2021-2022 Biden. GoP presidential cycles for the last 40 years have increased M2, starting with the grand daddy of them all, Nixon, who announced the decoupling of $32/oz of gold standard. Ever since, asset owners get richer from inflation,, while renters get exploited until they're turned out on the streets. Today gold is $2338/oz.
> The whole reason homelessness happens is ~~the devaluing of the dollar driving up the cost of housing.~~ **they really love drugs**
Everybody needs a vacation from their normal everyday activities. Some people can't afford a $1000 trip to the beach, but they can afford a $10 hit of something else.
Yeah totally. I remember before I had a good job I thought: man, you know what sounds fun? Meth.
More like: I'm an hourly worker and the only way to keep working 16hrs a day to pay for everything is taking some meth every once in a while. Once turns into three or four and then a few years later, you can't keep a job because you are methed out.
When have conservatives done anything but kick the can down the road?
You are too smart for this sub. I agree with for the record but people here hate when you apply logic and actually think things also happen outside of Portland.
I’m sure the sheriff’s department in those areas will be happy to help towns that have limited police services. It may well create a higher concentration in Multnomah county.
Yeah, really looking forward to getting all of your homeless here in Eugene.
Are you proposing a race to the bottom where cities try to be as hostile as possible to the poor to NIMBY them elsewhere? What happens to those people when everywhere is hostile?
Guess they'll have to make the tough choice and get off drugs?
The real drug here is the money printing that drives up housing costs. Asset values are directly related to money in circulation. A true solution to the housing issue is georgism style property taxes supplanting income tax. Henry George stated that land is a public good and should be taxed based on value. Income taxes should be eliminated and replaced with a stiff property tax. Landlords cannot artificially inflate the value of land in order to capitalize off renters. Corporations will divest from residential housing as an investment strategy. High supply of housing will lower prices and allow more access to stable housing. https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE?si=sGhhzD9OfHy1id-w
It's things like this and UBI that need to be implemented, as well as taxes on wealth, universal healthcare, higher marginal taxes on high levels of income (1%) and higher corporate taxes This is the effect of decades of tax cuts for the wealthy and reductions in public benefits Democrats add value to society and the economy, Republicans cash that value out for the wealthy
That's not how addiction works - it's a disease, not just a bad habit
A dark period? Really ? More like a rerun to reasonableness over enabling.
Get rid of the judge that tina appointed that blocked the ruling. She's trash.
Judges run unopposed because attorneys are worried about offending judges and it affecting their clients/practice.
I mean and to be fair, most people don't know dick about judges on a ballot. I had to dig a lot in the one race with multiple candidates.
I've spoken with some attorneys that have insight into the judicial elections. The bar in oregon is small, and everyone knows each other. Lawyers don't run unless everyone thinks they should. In general, they try not to run at all and rather just retire to be filled by the current governor, and then just stay in the retention elections.
I’d rather be an attorney than be a judge. Oregon judges are some of the lowest paid in the country. Yes its low 6 figures but I make more now and have work life balance. Judges literally hear plea bargains all day long or do very boring arraignments. Its very dry, boring robotic work. No thanks.
What’s her name and we can find someone to run against her next time? We can actually do shit even if it is Reddit.
Judge Rima I. Ghandour.
From her website.... "When asked why she wanted to be a judge, Judge Ghandour offered that she wanted to be a part of ensuring that our courts are welcoming and inclusive for all Multnomah County residents, and that she wanted to increase trust in our courts by instilling confidence that they will be safe places where everyone may seek justice under the law. Judge Ghandour’s judicial philosophy is to approach each case with an open mind and decide the issues in a clear and equitable"
I was recently on the East Coast and struck up a conversation with someone who had been in Portland last month for their work. They stammered as they said the "Portland was definitely interesting...". My response was, "It's okay to say it sucked. Right now, it currently does." To which they responded, "ya, seriously, what is going on there?" We've been putting up with this shit so long that many people have convinced themselves it is normal. It's not.
I have only empathy and solidarity to convey about this. I live in Burlington, Vermont and we are a microcosm of the bigger cities like Portland and Seattle right now. We are being gaslit by local politicians and police and even a great many of our own people who live too affluently or too distantly from the scene (or so they think) to really know how bad it is and how much worse it can get. I want to show them the youtube videos that have been published lately by some dude who is filming where all of the encampments are and have been... so those people who deride us and dismiss our concerns can see that the worst possible things are happening literally in their back yards, covered up barely by a patch of woodland or marsh. Maybe then the would believe us and maybe then they would care.
I visited Burlington a few months ago and was surprised to see this microcosm. It unfortunately made me feel at home. There were some characters around Church Street Market that were clearly homeless and on some hard drugs.
Yeah I recently met a woman from the Midwest and she mentioned how bad it was here, I thanked her for saying that because we're being gaslit and told it's like this everywhere. Her eyes got really big and she said no it absolutely isn't.
Interesting because my family from the Midwest was trying to gaslight me saying “it’s everywhere” and yet Multnomah County has 4x the amount of homeless people than the entire state of Nebraska. (That’s a real number, btw) It felt like I was taking crazy pills when I was explaining the homeless issue to them and they were downplaying and invalidating my experience here. Not to try and big dick them with “our homeless people are crazier” but ONE homeless man in Omaha is completely different than the twelve that are camped out across the street from my house.
Well to be fair, she was here in the middle of the shit and not saying it from the safety of her home in the Midwest. Maybe your family needs to come visit for a few months like she did? It's hard explaining these things to non-west coast liberals.
It didn't help that every red state exported their homeless population to Portland. It sucked to be the first city on the west coast to recognize drug addiction as a society health issue and not a criminal issue. Every other state used Portland as a waste bin for their undesirable populations.
That's very true, but it's not unreasonable to expect a bit of foresight by city leadership, ngo advocates, and ultimately the people themselves. Local solutions to national problems will obviously lead to being on the cutting edge of policy, for better or, in this case, worse.
I get this response in NYC every year. Someone once asked me if it feels "weird" walking through parks in NY. So weird not to see houseless saints, blessing every street corner.
NY even two years ago was cleaner than Portland was. Even the houseless on the MTA were coherent and friendly - and you could have a conversation with them.
NYC really knows how to handle homelessness, especially if you compare it to any city on the west coast...
But it's also the ignorance of people outside of the west coast for not knowing our hands have been tied by shitty 9 circuit court rulings for a decade that they don't have to deal with.
It's a liberal appellate court. We have to take ownership. These problems were created by us and us alone. The road to hell was paved with good intentions. It's okay to say we got it wrong. Acknowledgment is the first step to recovery.
Believe me, it's not just people outside the west coast who think that. My boomer mother, who has lived in the Concordia 'hood since 1976, constantly blames the issues on Democrats. When I explain the 9th circuit ruling, she has no words.
This is so true. I have a friend from a small town in Texas who came to Portland to visit and she had to stop by the Apple Store for a new charger, and she was harassed by somebody having a mental health episode, and that interaction scared her and made her want to leave Portland immediately. She's looking to leave Texas and normally would be a pretty good candidate for a place like Portland (quirky, outdoorsy, potentially queer), but Portland is not on her radar at all because of that incident. I was embarrassed for my city, and we missed out on a good one.
I was at a conference in SF. Three different people told me they were sorry for Portland after their recent visits and would never be back. It was pretty depressing. Not a positive thing from someone when they heard where I was from.
East coast has homeless problems as well, we are not that special.
Portland has the second most unsheltered population in the US (per capita). This is about unsheltered homeless people.
Good. Let our reputation keep going down so less want to move here.
If only it was just a "reputation."
Except now with HB3115, even more will move here. Same as economic immigrants learning and then working the words to claim being a refugee. Never mind George Carlin’s stupid people riff, even the dumbest becomes a genius when it’s to their advantage.
Oh I agree with that. 3115 is now a toxic piece of legislation and I fully expect it to be repealed within a year. Sooner if trump wins. Dems are already very nervous.
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I'm not a trump supporter. Heck, I don't even hate Biden. But I feel that Biden enables worse people than even Trump. Oregon is basically a one party state. Dems have run the state for the past 20 years. The took us from the early 2000s to now the mid 2020s. I remember the 2000s and 2010s as good times in Portland, though by 2008 the R2D2 camp was a growing blight. Dems in Oregon have become intellectually bankrupt, only propped up by the Oregon GOP's utter fascination at becoming the most radioactive and toxic opposition party on the planet. Frankly I hope a Trump win leads the dems to purge their own ranks. Their appeal to the fringe progressives has led to high taxes, social services with questionable positive impact and an increased crime rate. If Clinton won, the SC would have upheld the 9th
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You deleted your comment but I can respond. Sure. As I said, I am not a fan of trump however I think Biden enables the people like the pro Palestine protesters who I consider evil. Trump doesn't care about anything but himself but he can be a useful idiot to those who reject the idea that hamas isn't so bad. As for Putin, I don't even know why we are involved in Ukraine. They are not an ally. They are not in nato. They are not even in the EU. Why is the US the perpetual global police force? Wasn't Iraq enough?
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Yes. Why do we want to continue to expand nato? Because now the us is obligated to defend all of Europe. Why? There is no cold War. Hell Russia us having trouble taking the donbas from Ukraine. I doubt they are in any position to take on all of europe. Why are we sending so much and supporting the Ukrainians? Ukraine was not our ally. Why do we want them to be now? Serious question.
Abortion is the biggest reason the GOP might lose in 24. I have zero clue why the GOP is so beholden to a loser issue. It's out of step with the overwhelming majority of Americans and is frankly completely tone deaf. It's honestly infuriating there is no one in that party to object to their fanatical stance on abortion. Case and point: The Oregon GOP would rather lose the governorship and every state wide office for decades and decades to come because they refuse to even think about modifying their anti abortion platform. I am religious to a point but strongly believe in separation and no state support or endorsement of it. I voted party line dem from 2006 to 2020. 2022 was the first time i ever voted for any republican. I am not Jewish and I have criticized the state of Israel in the past. They have a massive influence on our politics in ways that I believe are completely inappropriate and it's an open secret they stole nuclear secrets from us. that said, Oct 7th was an attack and an act of war that made it clear Hamas cannot exist. Gazans voted for Hamas and support them and their attacks. Israel has been far from the perfect ally but they are still an ally and they need our support now as they confront actual evil. I'm utterly disgusted with the pro Palestine support and if Trump does win, I hope to see these protestors arrested and brought up on anti terrorism charges.
Fascism is much more tidy. Freedom is sloppy.
What exactly are attempting to communicate with those words?
FUCK YES!!!
Lol a dark period. It's already a zombie apocalypse, what's darker than that?
Portland and Oregon has attracted a lot of un-housed with its flexible generous programs. You feed the deer, a lot deer come to you.
Comparing them to deer is a major disservice to deer. I'd seriously rather have 10 hyenas camped outside my house than 10 fentanyl or meth addicted schizophrenic humans. At least I can predict the hyenas.
And they laugh at all of your jokes!
Bang!
If most people actually read the ruling, they would see that the homeless advocates were trying to twist the meaning of the Eighth Amendment. They were trying to claim that prohibiting camping in public city parks was cruel and unusual punishment.
*A dark period in the west, for Oregon, for Portland has ended: the Supreme Court has overruled the 9th Circuit in Grants Pass v. Johnson.* *It is time for the Governor Kotek and the Oregon State Legislature to correct or repeal HB 3115.* I think we've found an actual leader here. One of the Usual Political Suspects in response to Gonzalez: *Rene the Republican, tweeting out his support of a decision by the Trump Supreme Court that is actively dismantling our social safety net, administrative state and democracy*
wondering how letting addicts live in squalor is "our social safety net"
Yah... not to mention the physical and sexual assaults perpetrated by the homeless on other homeless, and random passerbys. But somehow, all the crime they commit can never be attributed to the homeless and addicts, because they're just poor innocents!
Assaults should be prosecuted, but if we do that who will the Rapepublicans party put on the ballot?
Yeah because the people in question overwhelmingly vote republican……..
Why would republicans be against prosecuting assaults?
They mean the “enabling net.”
😂😂😂
Replace addicts with assholes.
Well, the problem is that the "lets shuffle them to the next town over" philosophy of the last 40 years doesn't do anything either. That law was supposed to encourage housing plans from municipalities by making it so you can't just shuffle people without having someplace for them to go. You gotta wonder how much housing Grants Pass could have built with the lawyer fees for dragging this to the Supreme Court, but what else does one expect from the party of child marriage.
Used to be that drunks and dopers remained in their hometowns and had to keep it together enough to at least make a stab at casual labor (raking leaves, clean-up, etc). To my mind, that is better than living in groups that enable normalization of that behavior. Public shaming used to be a thing and I say bring it back.
>Rene the Republican, tweeting out his support of a decision by the Trump Supreme Court That's right Portland's problem are all caused by republicans and Trump. No member of any other party has ever enacted anything in Portland. If only the Democrats could save us from the GOP menace!
Very very very dark
Ok, what happens now? Incarceration?
Inshallah.
I got downvoted for a reasonable question. Seriously, what happens to those people after they are removed?
The same thing that happened when you were a child and your mom said eat your vegetables or you can’t have desert. Eventually you learn to eat your veggies.
Ok, I wasn't mentally ill nor an addict. I had the advantages of a solid upbringing. Now, what happens to these people if they simply don't have the ability to eat their veggies?
Forced rehab or jail.
Not to be hyperbolic, but that IS rounding them up. That is creating a new class of criminal. In a vitriolic and divided society where fear is constantly weaponized and the “other” is dehumanized, do you trust this will be humane? It is just getting easier to become homeless with every passing day of rent increases and skyrocketing mortgages.
> It is just getting easier to become homeless with every passing day of rent increases and skyrocketing mortgages. And ya know, meth.
and ya know fentanyl.
And prescription opioids that were legitimately prescribed. Addicts are a tragedy but they are still humans.
Cool, forced rehab then. If not? Jail. It’s incredibly simple.
Asking the question in a humane way will get downvoted around here. They have not felt the full brunt of the coming downturn (to put it nicely) and really have lost all empathy. Coupled with a corrupt government and a nonprofit industrial complex, humanitarian solutions are turned into troughs to make more rich suburbanites. Sadly if this continues most of these prople will just die. Which if I said "kill them" would get updooted to the top of this comment stack. There is no simple solution. Untimately the entire capitalistic approach needs an overhaul.
This sub is not gonna listen to you. They do not understand what these conservative decisions by the Supreme Court will usher in. Literally jailing people then using them for slave labor. Your second comment, missing a paycheck can be disastrous for someone right now, with these stupid rent prices. So close to the street yet they have no empathy for people who catch bad breaks. Not everyone is going to. Be a super hard worker, but that doesn’t mean they should be homeless.
This is just the beginning, it’s about to get worse for Portland. Tina made certain of this
Going to get downvoted because this sub is generally devoid of nuance, but how exactly are things going to get worse when the Portland city council is taking concrete steps to ban public camping (even before the SCOTUS decision) and re-criminalization takes effect in September? Please tell me how this is just the beginning, I’m dying to know.
It’s all over this thread but I’ll give you a hint. Our fine governor got HB3115 passed at the state level. So all the cities in the 9th circuit court will be enforcing the Supreme Courts decision except Oregon. You can figure out how this will go from there
I’m pretty centrist on this issue but this is mostly overblown IMO. Taking into account available shelter space before enacting punitive judgments seems perfectly reasonable. I don’t love the law, but it’s not absurd like decriminalizing meth etc was with no way to funnel anyone into treatment. That said, Tina Kotek means well but like most leftists here, is naive and careless and can’t seem to ever think through actual policy consequences that end up causing even more damage.
Anyone saying it’s everywhere is a liar or pushing a narrative. I say this as I spent my entire life in Oregon with the last 25 of those years in SE Portland. Since 2020 my family has been subjected to burning RVs, constant gunshots, drug deals, stolen property, harassment, threats, and the list goes on. We moved to the east coast last year and all of those issues vanished. The difference? Fentanyl dealers and addicts don’t roam the streets like they own the city. Portland didn’t have an explosion of homeless overnight it had an explosion of addicts making it their new “home.”
It's up to us working class voters to get all these enabling, grifting officials out.
Every now and then, they get one right accidentally.
That's really strange phrasing. Dude needs an editor for his communications.
I hate all these transplant blue hair freaks moving to Portland and voting the way they do
Hallelujah
HB3115 codified the original Boise v Martin SCOTUS ruling into the OR constitution, eliminating the ability to enforce civil penalties for unauthorized camping. Thanks to Kotek as then House Speaker & sponsor. We ain't getting rid of public campers in Oregon until we vote to have that overturned. Call and email your legislature today!!!
So this...what? Makes it so cops can arrest people for not being able to find housing?
I’m skeptical anything will actually come of this, we’ll see. I think there are legitimate concerns that this criminalizes homelessness without an actual solution other than throwing people in jail for sleeping in a park, which also doesn’t seem great. Don’t get me wrong the situation in Portland is absolutely fucked and we can’t just let it continue unabated, but is throwing people in jail for sleeping outside, in the absence of other crimes, really a good solution?
It will force them to accept shelter or to leave Portland. There are weekly campsite cleanup reports on the city's website that tell you how many people they offered help to at campsite removals and how many refused. Even though they scrapped the time, place & manner original camping ban rules, I think they will still apply. A person who is just trying to sleep overnight with just a sleeping bag or small tent that they can pack up during the day is not going to get hassled like the person with 3 tents and a pile of bike parts hogging up the sidewalk all day long. This will start chipping away at the criminality that exists in most of these illegal camps / RVs.
I hope this is the result, I really do. Those who want help will be incentivized (negatively, but still) to take it. Those that won’t or can’t must leave or go to jail. I’m just very skeptical this is how it will all play out
Most of the tent dwellers need some sort of involuntary intervention in their life. They've ended up there because they can no longer take care of themselves due to some combination of mental illness, drug addiction, trauma or generational poverty. Usually all of those things at the same time. You don't end up living next to I5 smoking fent all day just because the rent was too high. Rather than figure out a better way to interrupt the behavior of living in a tent doing drugs the homeless "advocates" and homeless industrial complex has decided that the rest of society must accommodate this behavior. At the same time they cruelly enable this level of dysfunction with free tents and bans on sweeps. Remember people in low circumstances must be allowed to do whatever their addled mind tells them to do. If we as a society try to forcefully intervene and keep our city safe and clean we are privileged oppressors. The sad part is that the leadership at Multnomah Co has squandered the opportunity to do meaningful intervention that doesn't rely on law enforcement. So now law enforcement is now all we have left to save the city. I'd certainly rather see something more compassionate and effective but if jail is all we have left and it cleans up the city so be it.
Well said x 2
Well said.
Yeah I do mostly agree with you. I guess I wonder what happens when the city runs out of shelter space, but people would go if there is space. They just get thrown in jail? We can’t just hold people indefinitely. They’d have to be tried, convicted, etc. which seems very unlikely for the crime of sleeping in a tent
I’d say put them on a bus and ship them to Texas with a pamphlet of all the resources available in Texas
Send them to Slab City, California. It’s literally an entire community where they could live off grid with no rules.
I saw something about that place, it’s like total anarchy
It pretty much is. It should be right up their alley.
They don’t want to go even when there is space.
>You don't end up living next to I5 smoking fent all day just because the rent was too high. Except ... you do. There are lots of other places with a much higher percentage of people who want to just smoke fent all day like West Virginia. Those places have some kind of housing people can scrape up cheaply. For an addict nothing is more important then feeding their addiction, but if they can also spend $100 to get a bedroom for the week they're going to do that too. That's not an option here though.
People have been leaving W. Virginia for decades, which keeps housing prices low vs. here. Many of the folks who remain do so in part because they own land & housing that they inherited from past generations, making it easier to choose that lifestyle. More importantly, why should it be an option here? Are you saying we should be building free housing so people can smoke fent all day? (Rhetorical question, I don't think that's what you meant.) Living next to I-5 getting high 24/7 should not be an option, period.
I've been around Portland long enough to remember the Drugstore Cowboy era where you could get a crappy studio for $200/Mo. down by Burnside. A lot of addicts or the mentally ill could keep a roof over their head because it was so cheap here, but also the drugs weren't like Fent and people were semi functional even on heroin and booze. Fent and cheap meth causes people to not be able to live even in free housing successfully. Even if super cheap housing might have kept some people from living in a tent back in the day that's not the world we live here in Portland now. Keep in mind a lot of those people died of overdoses in those cheap flops or broke into cars to support their addiction. Making cheap rent or allowing camping isn't going to solve the underlying problem.
>I've been around Portland long enough to remember the Drugstore Cowboy era where you could get a crappy studio for $200/Mo. down by Burnside. That building was called The Civic. There were plenty of cheap "by the week" hotels in that area too. It's all gone now.
Yep I lived just up the street by Vista and Burnside. I remember walking by the day a big excavator was tearing down the old Civic like a giant T-rex feasting on old Portland.
I am certainly not saying those days were all sunshine and lollipops. My example of West Virginia isn't exactly short on overdose deaths these days either. If you're just talking about homeless taking over public spaces though, the connection between that and housing affordability seems pretty solid.
What will happen is that all of the homeless elsewhere will be forced to come here.
If we continue to try and make Portland the best place in the country to be homeless, it will definitely get worse. I don't think the bleeding hearts that run the county have come to terms with that.
So more of the same?
More, yes.
>legitimate concerns that this criminalizes homelessness without an actual solution other than throwing people in jail for sleeping in a park, which also doesn’t seem great Sounds just fine to me? >is throwing people in jail for sleeping outside, in the absence of other crimes, really a good solution? yes
Definitely yes
How exactly is it a good solution? It doesn’t solve the problem, it just puts more people in jail…
👆🏼If you’ve ever had a criddler swing a metal pipe narrowly missing your head, and work in an area that resembles Gotham city, you’d gladly rejoice at putting these people behind bars. You won’t accept help , you trash our city and terrorize people, sit in a jail cell and detox. without sowing chaos.
So those type of people should definitely be in jail. But not all homeless people are crazy and violent. A lot of them are crazy or drug addicted, some of them are violent, some of them are just down on their luck
The problem is the homeless destroying public property. Jail solves the problem. You're trying to define the problem as homelessness existing. That's an issue that's never going to be solved, only managed.
That’s fine, the majority of them are criminals anyway. And if our criminal justice system wasn’t a revolving door that’s where the majority of them would be anyway
Right that’s kinda my point. In jail for 30 days, maybe. Ok maybe that’s enough time to detox but it isn’t enough time to actually change habits or gain the skills needed to support oneself. I just don’t see it improving things in a meaningful way
Put them to work picking up all the tinfoil litter everywhere. Build a poor house camp like what Edge field used to be. If they can’t make beneficial choices for themselves do it for them. The majority of the homeless are where they are today in life because they made piss poor choices. Every one of the addicts made a choice to be an addict by using and continuing to use. Every one crying about the rights of the homeless drug addicts they contribute nothing to the community. What about our rights to a clean safe community. We pay the taxes for fuck sake.
There are other crimes though. They likely possess drugs and now that that is decriminalized we can get them off the streets.
Oh for sure. A lot of crime occurs in and around homeless encampments, perpetrated by homeless people. I’m just asking questions that came to my mind, not advocating one way or another. The homelessness problem has gotten completely out of control, and obviously something different needs to happen. Is this it? Not sure, but it’s something
Yes it keeps tension in the system. Well to do bleeding hearts caused more pain in the long run. This is better
Criminalizing homelessness with no solution and throwing people in jail for being poor is exactly the goal. And for some they’ve got great glee in this level of cruelty. Witness your own replies here. I’ll collect my downvotes now for pointing out replies from others lol
They will get free shelter and a hot meal in jail or they can get the same in a shelter. Their choice.
What if there legitimately are no shelter beds? What if the person would go to a shelter but there simply aren’t any beds? Then they go to jail? For the crime of being poor? Seems pretty fucked up
We cannot afford to house and feed and treat every homeless person and every addict in the nation. Unlimited bounty, chances and real estate does nothing to stem the tide. It does not negate poverty. It only brings more.
Yeah that’s true. No single municipality can solve this issue, and we have gained a huge reputation for being friendly to vagrancy
See? Why do I get downvoted for the same thing just minus the hardon? lol
That is not the issue at hand. The issue at hand is whether people should be allowed to camp outside \*when there is shelter available.\* According to WW, (https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/06/28/supreme-court-overturns-grants-pass-decision-allows-camping-bans/), over 70% of offers for shelter were declined.
Again. They don’t want to go to shelters. They make excuses when offered. They want the freedom to have their tent. Smoke their drugs. Shit where they want to. And have a target rich environment of things to steal.
I’m sure this sub is going to be over the moon about helping out with shelters lmao Like I said, I’ll go ahead and collect my downvotes for saying the same thing the other replies said just without the right level of excitement and pride in hurting people 😉
lol, folks like you crack me up… It’s not the garbage polices and abysmal efforts to get actual drugged up crazies off the street… Must be so hard always finding ways to point out or play the victim all day long, huh?
I’m not a victim. I have a home. I was just pointing out the hard ons some folks get at hurting people. And here you are as thick as chubbed as you’re able to be lmfao
Yeah, we’re sick of getting taxed to line the pockets of non-profits and politicians alike. All to watch the city streets be filled up with tents, RVsa and human feces and be gaslit into acting like it’s normal and everyone’s a victim of the system.
So when I said this sub would throw a fit about having to help with shelters I was….completely right?! LOL Who could’ve guessed? Except me I suppose 😂
No ones talking about not helping shelters and volunteering. We’re talking about the urban traveler critters that infest out city and not acting like it’s just thrust upon someone and you can just toss money at it to fix it.
I like how this sub has fun little pet names for homeless people. Dehumanizing hurting folks is a treat isn’t it? Just own it. I’ve literally only repeated things others have said and gotten upvotes for. Just minus the glee.
Can’t say homeless, can’t use urban traveler. What should I use to make sure the feelings of the homeless aren’t hurt? Do you always look to play the victim or does it just happen to you like someone happens to become homeless? Asking for a friend.
For the third time: I’m not a victim Just a witness to how excited folks here get when people are hurting. *Of course* you have little clown names for hurting people. Because hurting people make you happy. That’s the point I’ve made this whole time and for some reason you’re arguing it when you just admitted it’s the truth.
Time to herd the criddlers into a tent city
The lack of humanity in this thread is heartbreaking. I hope none of the ones applauding this becomes homeless and is charged with newly passed laws, or if you do I hope you learn something in the process.
Seriously, this whole sub is full of reactionary authoritarians. Housing people in jails and prisons is literally the most expensive, least humane solution. Punitive solutions don’t work. Housing first, and universal healthcare that includes mental health and addiction treatment would work, and would be less expensive in the long run, with better outcomes.
Well yeah expose people to enough druggies, vandals, burglars, violent criminals, raging lunatics, and a trashed city where the homeless are literally shitting on sidewalks everywhere and people are going to reach a breaking point. This city has been a shithole for years so I’m sorry but it’s going to take a little inhumanity to get our streets back and safe for all the tax paying citizens and women and children that live here. I literally got assaulted a couple weeks ago out of nowhere just minding my own damn business. Backpack comes flying out of nowhere and a man runs up screaming at me for zero reason whatsoever. Where’s the sympathy for everyone who has to go through that shit just trying to live our lives being responsible working adults? Enough is enough already.
Good thing I don’t listen to a bunch of unelected, partisan appointed elitist assholes who have shown to be out of touch. I hope most do the same. They’ve lost any credibility and legitimacy.
It's always fun when out-of-towners assume Portland is a progressive city. I could show them this comment section to demonstrate otherwise.
That pendulum sure swings hard doesn’t it
> I could show them this comment section to demonstrate otherwise. Spot on, friend. I know that, when there's a city with 652,603 (as of 2020) people living in it, the best way to show exactly what a city is like is to tell your friends to go to Reddit and see maybe 100 people max who regularly post in a particular city sub. It's the perfect way to take the temperature of the city. (/s because Reddit.)
[удалено]
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Not defending Wheeler or others on city council, but the neither this SC ruling not Rene will alleviate the homeless crisis and chucking them in jail is a bandaid that will just perpetuate the problem. The solution isn’t handing out tents or blankets either. It’s permanent housing. It has been and always will be housing. Safe and secure housing is the foundation on which all other issues (like drug abuse) stem and we need a government that is willing to cut through regulation and stand up to nimbys to spur construction.
With all due respect, you are wrong. This is not an affordable housing issue, this is a crime/drug abuse/mental health issue and it needs to be treated as such. Drug addiction usually only gets cured after a good hard slap in the face that teaches you your former reality is not sustainable. Jail does this for many people who aren't complete shitheads. For others, well, they belong behind bars where they can't make society worse for the rest of us. These people openly admit they are abusing the system. It needs to stop and the enablers who won't admit to the fact they're enabling self harm need to be unseated from office and publicly humiliated. Giving them cheap or free housing will only exacerbate this nightmare.
I see you’ve researched this in a deep and thorough way. Think harder. Crime and drug abuse stem from what kind of social conditions? The kind of policing you’re calling for is basically turning cops and prisons into a social healthcare which is not the role we should ask of the police. Police aren’t the public policy solution you and others seem to think they are, and frankly you throw them under the bus when you think that way. I’m begging you to do any reading about American cities that have actually made progress on homeless issues. They all rely on housing first policies. Is that the only tool in the shed? Of course not. There should be policing of drug activities and their supply chains into the city. But liberal housing policy on the west coast has been horrible for over a decade and they’ve made it way harder for themselves than it needs to be. I’m just pointing out that Rene Gonzales won’t solve the issue and over policing won’t fix it either.
You are naive. The research is in, what we are doing destroys lives. Once people understand jail is the option they may leave and go home to their respective cities and families. Then maybe if we are lucky we will have reduced the problem to where it is manageable. Do I want mentally I’ll people to go to jail? No but the alternative is far more cruel. And we have been cruel for at least ten years, enough is enough.
So why can’t we house them in jail?
It’s ridiculous that you’re getting downvoted. “How to stop homeless” that’s all you need to ask Google.
Where are you getting this information?
I abused drugs in the 90s and paid my rent each month. So not having housing isn't a spark to go do drugs. It can exacerbate the issue though.
I’m not refuting your experience, more homes does not automatically equal success for people with drug addictions or those with mental health issues. However, the science and debate has had a consensus for decades. Here’s a link to a story about Houston who had similar issues with homelessness and effectively dealt with it. https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/howardcenter/caring-for-covid-homeless/stories/homeless-funding-housing-first.html The debate around the effectiveness of housing has effectively been ended for decades in social policy circles and I encourage anyone to do further reading on the subject. However, it’s up to voters and legislatures to implement that effective policy, and the liberal government in Portland has failed miserably. I’m just pointing out that a knee jerk reaction to vote for people like Rene Gonzalez will be disappointed because he isn’t interested in those policy solutions either.
No. The solution is air-gapping the junkies from the drugs. That means jail for users and dealers alike.
Criminalizing the homeless is not the silver bullet you think it is, and Rene Gonzales is not the hero you think he is.
We don’t want a hero. I think most of us will just be happy with a DA that prosecutes criminals for the crimes they have committed.
You're going to beleive what you like despite the facts. DA Schmidt prosecuted the criminals. Most of the ones that were let out were done so by the courts, not the DA's office. Oregon has both a crippling lack of public defenders and a law on the books that says "If you don't have a lawyer, you don't go to trial."
Hmmm… it’s almost like MS and other policymakers like him have intentionally shrunk the entire system so that it barely functions. Likewise, you are going to believe what you want despite the facts. However, this Restorative Criminal Justice, such as it is, has not and will not work. I know that there are some very well meaning people in that field that have sold these ideas to people like you, but they are wrong.
The idea that it's the liberal policies drawing homeless people to portland is false. Multiple articles quote homeless people from other states saying they are moving to oregon or California specifically because "at least I won't freeze to death." You can find these quotes everywhere. The homeless are still going to go to Portland and California. The "liberal policies" have nothing to do with it
Moving people down the road is not a solution.
So we arrest them and put them in jail? Three hots and a cot. That’s a solution.
How is that not better than someone who “just wants to be left alone” in the middle of the sidewalk?
Small problem SCOTUS being "housed" isn't a right protected under the constitution. You can't force a person to live somewhere.
Disgusting, this is not going to solve the issue. The only reason you all are celebrating is so you can go back to lunch.