What Portland needs is real leadership on the homeless and housing front to develop a permanent funding source to give people a safe place to call home. Many of us working in the trenches are working to make that dream a reality and looking at a variety of ways to develop those resources.
The quickest way of killing momentum for such an effect is creating a sideshow that targets one specific population of people experiencing poverty such as panhandlers.
Street Roots gets it. Some media outlets, business and tourism groups don’t like panhandlers and the poor in the downtown core. What we don’t understand are the efforts to tackle poverty downtown using decades-old scare tactics that do little to actually address the problem at hand.
We have seen an overwhelming growth for the middle- and upper-class in downtown, the Pearl, South Waterfront, and the inner eastside of Portland. We have some of the highest rental occupancies in the nation. We have a growing equity gap both economically and racially in our city’s core. We are recognized nationally as one of the coolest cities in the country. What more does the business community want?
Blaming the homeless and panhandling for a poor business climate on the heels of a recession, even in the midst of a vibrant and growing downtown, is foolish and dogmatic. No one is listening — or are they?
Mayor Charlie Hales recently convened a “Homeless Task Force” to talk about panhandling and homelessness. The group was made up of civic and business leaders, law enforcement and homeless service providers. It’s unclear what the task force’s future will be.
The Portland Business Alliance’s efforts to change state laws that would have made it legal to create stricter sidewalk laws to target the poor failed in Salem.
So what are the next steps? It’s anyone’s guess. If it were up to Street Roots, we would ask the business and tourism community to partner with government to think creatively on how their constituents could help create and maintain revenue for mental health and homeless services downtown.
The issue of panhandling is an issue of free speech. The issue of panhandling in relation to the poor has been a distracting issue in Portland for 30-plus years, and nationally dating back to the early 20th century. If you want fewer people begging, especially individuals who are the hard to reach population, then we need to develop the resources it takes to support giving people an opportunity to be successful.
If we are to be successful moving forward, we need to create an environment where everyone at City Hall, the business community, housing bureau, government partners, providers and those in the trenches are all looking at big picture strategies to address these problems. There’s no better time than the present.