Running the City of Portland is hard work. But being able to work in a collaborative effort toward a common goal shouldn’t be.
Mayor Charlie Hales boldly declared last week that enforcing sidewalk laws against people experiencing homelessness — and we assume the mentally ill — wasn’t about homelessness at all. “This is about lawlessness,” the mayor proclaimed to the media.
Not one mention of the public health crisis on our streets or the lack of funding for homeless or mental health services. Nothing was mentioned about how the business community, residents, local government, advocates, social-service providers and law enforcement can work together to tackle these tough problems. Not a peep about an increased investment for rent assistance to target some of the hard-to-reach folks on our streets.
The message sent to the media and Portland was simple: We’re cleaning up lawless behavior that we’ve tolerated for far too long.
Street Roots and others saw years of hard work about how to frame this issue to get common Portlanders to engage in working together to solve homelessness flash before our eyes.
Then the police went out and swept homeless camps.
That’s not to say some camps shouldn’t be swept or at least addressed. People experiencing homelessness and poverty have a responsibility to care for their property and the property of others while maintaining an orderly environment. If there is open drug use, violence or people not picking up their trash, we expect the city to react.
The reality is these kinds of enforcement strategies happen all of the time in Portland, based upon complaints from residents and reports of crime. What doesn’t typically occur is a media strategy that devolves into a feeding frenzy over a debate about lawlessness, using the homeless as scapegoats.
Sitting quietly in the background are lobbyists for the business community who are pushing an agenda to government and the media that tourism is hurting and the business climate is threatened because of the visible homeless downtown.
Meanwhile, anyone walking through Portland’s core would see tourism and business booming.
What’s the solution?
The solution is to work together to develop strategies to increase our affordable housing stock, to increase rent assistance dollars for people on the streets, and to maintain targeted enforcement on people who are clearly out of line. The solution is not to enforce decades-old perspectives that research and history have shown do absolutely nothing to solve the problem of poverty and homelessness in urban America.
What Portland needs are leaders who listen to experts in the field and in government that have been successfully housing people for years.
Street Roots is ready to work alongside both traditional and non-traditional partners to get the job done. What we can’t do is sit on the sidelines and watch individuals and families in poverty be demonized in our community.
Housing stability makes economic and social sense. Everyone deserves to have a safe place to call home, regardless of circumstances, and everyone benefits when they do.