It's no surprise that homelessness in Multnomah County is on the rise. A new report released this week shows an eight percent increase in homelessness over the past two years. The number of people sleeping without a stable home is in the thousands, 4,625 to be exact, and those are universally considered undercounts.
A thirty-five percent increase in families with children, a 12 percent increase of U.S. Veterans and nearly half of the people counted without a safe placed to call home are people of color in a town known for being one of the whitest cities in America. This comes on the heals of a census report that shows a mass migration of people of color moving outside of the urban core.
What does this mean? Depending on what group, or institution you speak with, it could mean any number of things, for any number of reasons.
In the past two decades the U.S. has seen an unprecedented disinvestment in the middle class, and people experiencing poverty. The result is ongoing homelessness and poverty. After the slashing of housing programs at the state and federal level, a recession caused by the very institutions that we are told will lead us out this mess, and a foreign policy that has siphoned billions of dollars from the American people, we are left holding the bucket, pointing fingers at each other.
Is there a silver lining? Our politicians think so, especially in the context of getting re-elected. Clever one-liners and prepared messages take the place of informed action and leadership that truly moves the poverty agenda forward. We’re told to be patient and to listen, to build community and to understand that we are a city in transition. New development deals and tax-breaks will spur more growth. Living-wage jobs will be had. A good life waits in the wings.
In the meantime, poor and working people are getting screwed, and the bottomline is that if you don’t have the resources, the education or a living-wage job (which the majority do not) than you most likely don’t count, or just as important, you probably don’t vote.
A high-ranking City Hall insider once told Street Roots off the record that poverty and advocacy groups don’t really matter. We are great community partners, but we are calculated white noise that can be used for leverage to move an agenda forward, or simply be ignored. That person went on to rattle off other coalitions; people of color, police accountability groups, immigrants, etc. As troubling as that message was, it came through crystal clear and gave us insight into exactly what time of day it really was.
So should we really be scratching our heads at yet another increase in homeless figures? Or at the Census report showing the loss — and it is a damaging loss — of 10,000 people of color from Portland’s core? Should we be surprised that people don’t trust the system and the institutions positioned all these years as the answer? The number of homeless families in Multnomah County continues to increase year after year, while we sit stymied by a crisis of confidence.
New leaders must emerge, and we need to push current electives and bureaucrats to do more than hold down the status-quo, and to maintain a triage attitude toward the poverty that lays underneath each new development and next door to each emerging coffee shop or café. We are going to have to create that change ourselves. People lives depend on it.