“Martin v. Boise and Grants Pass v. Johnson have prevented cities from punishing people for sleeping in public spaces when they have nowhere else to go.”
Super complicated issue on the West Coast where homelessness is a giant problem.
Portland in particular has an issue with the “nowhere else to go” part of the equation as there are OFTEN places for people to go, but they choose not to for a variety of reasons:
“Every night, roughly 260 shelter beds for Portland homeless aren’t being used”
The sanitation and safety issues of campsites on public property are costing cities money they don’t have, for people who aren’t paying taxes to fund it.
https://www.portland.gov/homelessnessimpactreduction/cleanup
“In 2019 the program collected an average of 500,000 pounds of trash near campsites each month. That monthly total increased to 650,000 pounds in 2020. In March 2021, work teams removed a record 818,560 pounds of garbage.”
for people who aren’t paying taxes to fund it.
Yeah, no fucking shit man. Homeless people don’t have the money to pay for things. Everyone has the right to exist and it’s entirely reasonable to collect taxes and use them to pay for things that are a net benefit to everyone, like sanitation services for homeless people. Unless you want to help dismantle the entire system that allows money to get funneled into the hands of a few people who then hoard it like dragons, leaving everyone else to make do collectively on the ever-shrinking fraction of the GDP that’s left, how about you grow some empathy and punch up instead of down?
260 beds isn’t anywhere near enough to shelter every homeless person on the streets, whether in Grants Pass or Portland, which aren’t the same place, by the way. The mention of this is especially disgusting when you consider that 260 beds is clearly not nearly enough to solve a homelessness issue for a city and it only serves to falsely lay blame on the homeless. Even if you’re staying in a shelter, you’re still homeless; they aren’t a solution in themselves. Shelters are generally poorly maintained, unhygienic, and unsafe. They’re a good place to get all your shit stolen, too. Have you ever been to a homeless shelter? They aren’t nice places to be, plus they have all sorts of ridiculous and overly-restrictive rules and policies that have to be followed. Given Portland’s homeless population, 260 beds is a total drop in the bucket anyway, so treating that as an available solution that people aren’t using is incredibly disingenuous because most of them are being used and there still aren’t nearly enough to shelter everyone, even if they were actually worth staying in. Since you brought up Portland, I’ll talk a bit about Portland, but don’t forget that this story is about Grants Pass, where about a third of all residents pay more than half of their incomes on rent, making Grants Pass one of the most rent-burdened towns in Oregon.
KGW, like most MSMs, tends to have a slant against homeless people, loyally parroting whatever the police and mayor, Ted Wheeler, tell them without a lick of journalistic analysis. They love whining about the homeless at every opportunity they can, but I never see them report on those killed by hypothermia as a direct result of frequent and brutal police sweeps, or when the homeless are often outright murdered by class terrorists.
Instead of doing anything meaningful about the homelessness crisis, Portland invests all of its money into increasing the police budget and putting up anti-homeless architecture instead of tackling rampant rent inflation, or lack of access to mental health treatment, or developers only building luxury apartments, etc. They’ve experimented with some alternatives, such as little clusters of tiny, one-room shelters, but not in sufficient amounts to make any meaningful difference. Their policies don’t actually reduce homelessness at all, it just squeezes those in a tough situation even harder and criminalizes the poorest among us.
You also left out the main fact of the matter that Grants Pass literally outlawed being homeless. Down on your luck and living on the streets? Congratulations, you’re also a criminal now. That’s outrageous. It is now illegal to be too poor. How this could be justifiable in anyone’s mind is shocking to me.
How this could be justifiable in anyone’s mind is shocking to me.
The thought process is generally “these people are homeless because they do drugs. Drugs have no place in our society. They’re better off in prison or dead”.
I disagree with this opinion but it’s the opinion people have. Personally, I think they should ban thc drug tests that check for non phychoactive metabolites (in all jobs) and then see if people still fall to fentanyl. This would give everyone that’s going to do drugs anyway a healthier but still effective alternative. It might just work. It’ll cut down on alcohol abuse too.
A place to go with strings attached is not a place to go. Being required to abandon your partner, your pet, or your property is not tolerable to all. Being vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse in a “place to go” also makes it the opposite of that. A curfew? These aren’t children.
In most cases it’s “no drugs, alcohol, or weapons” that’s the barrier to entry.
In most cases
That’s a pretty bold claim. Got any evidence for it?
Living in Portland and reading interviews with tweaked out homeless people for 4 years?
I sympathize with your annoyance, but your comment is a thinly veiled attack on the homeless because you’re annoyed with them.
You say, they choose not to for a variety of reasons: But then list all the problems with homeless people rather than the problems with shelters. You also make a point about how they don’t pay taxes. Which might not be true, btw. Some homeless people work. Also, most homeless people paid taxes for decades before becoming homeless. And, many more, are elderly women whose husband’s paid taxes for decades while they raised the kids.
I could go on. The articles actually do talk about the safety and sanitation issues inside the shelters, for example. Which is a major reason people choose not to go. Imagine being packed into beds like sardines with people who suffer from chronic mental illness and aren’t getting appropriate treatment? Would you feel safer in that room, or out in the woods by yourself?
The reasons people choose not to go to a shelter are wide and varied, but the most commonly stated is “I want to be free!” which reads as “I can’t bring my drugs and booze!”
See the article I linked:
“I couldn’t do it,” said Cooper, sitting next to a shopping cart filled with his sleeping bag and other belongings. “Being out here, it’s freedom.”
“I prefer to be outside because that way I can get up and move,” Varner said, while resting in the grass at Sewallcrest Park. “I can sleep in a nice area.”
A KGW survey of 100 people living in tents in Portland found 89% would rather stay in a tent over a shelter.
“I think that shelters are too temporary and there’s too much stimulation. I’m high functioning autistic. I just couldn’t. It’s not something for me. There’s too much going on,” he said.
I read that article. You cherry picked it just now. See my previous comment. I edited it to be more clear.
I provided all the quotes from the actual homeless people in the article.
But cherry-picked.
“I don’t want to go to a shelter,” explained Dave Cooper, an unhoused Portlander who sleeps outdoors at Sewallcrest Park in Southeast Portland or other public spaces.
Cooper said shelters aren’t a viable option because of concerns over privacy, personal safety and a strict curfew.
“I couldn’t do it,” said Cooper, sitting next to a shopping cart filled with his sleeping bag and other belongings. “Being out here, it’s freedom.”
A 2019 survey of 180 people experiencing homelessness in Oregon, conducted as part of an Oregon Statewide Shelter Study by Oregon Housing and Community Services, found that the top barriers for using shelters were personal safety and privacy concerns, restrictive check-in and check-out times and overcrowding and unsanitary conditions.
Emphasis mine.
It would have been very easy for you to link the reasons in your original comment, or even your first reply to me, had that been your intention.
And I get it, homelessness is annoying. But homeless people aren’t the issue. The article goes on to talk about some ways to make shelters more livable for homeless people as well as paths towards permanent housing, both are good solutions. And, if we can empathize with why people are choosing campsites over shelters, maybe we can find a fix instead of complaining like you did here about them trashing things without paying taxes.
The sanitation and safety issues of campsites on public property are costing cities money they don’t have, for people who aren’t paying taxes to fund it.
Which, I already pointed out, is a bullshit argument to begin with. Be annoyed if you want to be annoyed. But maybe next time just say that instead of going all NIMBY.
