Portland’s Disgraceful Anarchy
city-journal.org
city-journal.org
Anyway, I have to agree, we do live in a crime-ridden, feces smeared neighborhood.
But there's a couple of positives too. First, the crime is almost all non-violent. And, second, the city cleans up the poo very quickly, if you call them.
The cops manage where the homeless folks end up. They chase the homeless here, away from businesses north of Market and richer neighborhoods. Talk to enough cops and one will be honest about it.
Any time I hear how powerless the city is to do anything, I point out that they can't do anything about the total population, but they can and do ensure the bulk of the homeless population lives in SOMA. San Francisco does have a serious homeless problem, but it isn't due to a lack of government.
Quality of life on my block varies over time. Some months it is downright pleasant here; others, my street is an open sewer. I have a phone tree with some other nearby residents; through trial and error we've found a combination of calls to make that seems to reliably get action when things get awful.
OP: Consider coming to a "Better SOMA" meeting. That group actually has moved the needle. (There's just still a lot of gauge left for the needle to move across.)
It's not like you enact some anti-homeless policy and the homeless throw their hands up in disgust, defeated by the swift arm of the law, then pull a resumes out of their back pocket, and then land some middle-class job.
In my mini-Portland (Olympia WA), I observe the 100 or so "homeless" who hang out downtown. I bet the percentage is about 50/ 50.
P.S. : To be honest, I wish we cracked down on anti-social behavior in public generally, and funded a lot more public housing.
In response to the second one, the city may be taking a number of steps to fight homelessness. Shelters, mental health facilities, drug rehab programs, and counseling can all help the issue without relocation.
Also, I'm just not sure relocation is completely a bad thing. Portland is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, with rent being prohibitively expensive to the lower class unless several people congeal in a single apartment. Not everyone can do that. How is it bad if they are relocated to a cheaper part of the country?
Relocation does not solve the problem, it simply moves it. Yes, technically, mass-relocation of homeless could solve Portland's homeless problem, but it simply shifts the burden somewhere else.
Second, the article specifically mentions the mayor's inaction to utilize the police and to enforce a ban on tent cities. It doesn't talk about shelters, mental health facilities, drug rehab, or counseling.
Why didn't you argue against my point that the cost of living varies massively between regions? Why shouldn't we send homeless to a lower cost of living area?
Why shouldn't we send you somewhere that you don't want to live? They're people - not cattle.
Besides he did make a point against your argument. Why should people in Nebraska and Oklahoma and Idaho have to deal with the homeless of Portland? We've got our own homeless to take care of so you can keep yours, thanks.
But, generally, I've never come across a compelling argument or solution about homelessness.
> Why should people in Nebraska and Oklahoma and Idaho have to deal with the homeless of Portland?
Why shouldn't they have to deal with the homeless? Or why shouldn't homeless people be able to demand, and receive, free housing wherever they want? Surely some of the homeless in Portland now weren't born there. But even if they were – is there a real right to be able to live wherever one was born, forever, for free?
And surely some degree of economic efficiency should be considered. The more cheaply housing or other accommodation can be supplied the more can be helped. Certainly it seems ridiculous to provide free housing in the most expensive places.
I suspect there are no good answers, generally. Conflict is inevitable!
They already do, that's my point. The question is why should they deal with the homeless of Portland?
>Or why shouldn't homeless people be able to demand, and receive, free housing wherever they want?
I know you don't believe this, because if they could then they'd just demand housing in Portland.
>Surely some of the homeless in Portland now weren't born there. But even if they were – is there a real right to be able to live wherever one was born, forever, for free?
Perhaps we could widen the scope of the question and then you could answer it: Is there a real right to be able to live anywhere, forever, for free?
>And surely some degree of economic efficiency should be considered. The more cheaply housing or other accommodation can be supplied the more can be helped. Certainly it seems ridiculous to provide free housing in the most expensive places.
I actually don't agree on the economic efficiency. For all the whining about NIMBYs when it comes to real estate costs on HN, everyone's a NIMBY when it comes to the homeless. Besides like I said the point is contact (no matter how expensive that contact might be).
>I suspect there are no good answers, generally. Conflict is inevitable!
Of course - that's the point of contact. Contact -> Conflict -> Resolution. If your resolution is just to remove contact then I think you're failing on a societal level.
Are you not aware that homeless people don't live and die in the cities of their birth? That in fact the homeless aren't owned by any particular municipality?
> Is there a real right to be able to live anywhere, forever, for free?
Personally, no, of course no one has a right (a 'positive right') to anything as that would logically create an obligation on the part of someone else to provide it. Who gets to decide who's enslaved to provide everyone else with what's theirs by right?
> everyone's a NIMBY when it comes to the homeless
I don't think that's literally true and I think that's an important distinction. Someone would probably allow homeless people to camp on their property, were they allowed to do so.
But, just like the opposition to mobile home (RV) parks – tho considerably more intense! – there are vanishingly few places where living so 'rudely' is legal or even de-facto allowed. Even cities, like Portland, that do allow tent cities typically don't allow them to remain in the same place for decades.
Obviously, I'm not sure the relevance though. They may not be 'owned' by a municipality but they exist in one. Why should expensive areas be able to just export the homeless to cheap areas? If anything expensive areas like Portland have the tax base to take care of them better than rural Nebraska.
>Personally, no, of course no one has a right (a 'positive right') to anything as that would logically create an obligation on the part of someone else to provide it. Who gets to decide who's enslaved to provide everyone else with what's theirs by right?
Well you and I just fundamentally disagree but to engage here: By this token why push the burden of the homeless onto us Midwesterners? This makes it seem like you're putting on us either (1) the positive right to take care of them which you won't provide or (2) the ugliness of letting them die in the streets which you're unwilling to tolerate.
So once again, they exist in Portland, if you don't think they have a right to life, then they can die in Portland, we want no part of it.
Edit: since you've done this before on HN, I've banned this account for trolling. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the site rules in the future.
Don't get me wrong, the affected businesses are justifiably angry, but their anger is misdirected; sometimes the perpetrators of crime are not the root cause. In small part, maybe they are part of the root cause.
Based on the number of people moving there and the hype, I can't believe open defecation and rampant crime are tolerated? Is it really so bad? (And is it getting worse?)
Portland has established itself as a safe haven for homeless and down trodden folks due to it's mild weather, abundance of services, and general lack of enforcement. I've lived here under two mayor's and both have been horribly ineffective at tackling this issue. I'm not sure there is another downtown metro area as bad as Portland when it comes to homelessness.
I think the issue here is Portland used to be a small-ish "big city" and now it's a medium-ish city and the growth has happened incredibly fast. For people on the ground, it feels like everything's spiraling out of control. Growing pains and the challenges the come with being a major American city that people want to move to (both middle-class and transient groups) are to some extent inevitable. But I'm optimistic that progress can and will be made.
(But I could easily be wrong. As I said, I've only lived here for a few months.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
San Diego is dealing with a huge Hepatitis outbreak caused by open defecation around homeless encampments, 20 deaths last I looked.
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/sd-me-hepati...
...
> She added that, “the police came and then he came back four minutes later after they left.”
Yes: http://theloo.biz/
> The Institute's research seeks to develop and promote free-market ideas.
> [The institute] argued that the welfare state had fostered a culture and cycle of dependency that was to the detriment of both welfare recipients and the United States as a whole.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Poli...
It doesn't appear to me that the OP was saying anything about invalidation.
It's like saying on a Roy Moore post that the investigation was carried out by CNBC: it leads to Republicans invalidating any finding of the investigation. This default of ignoring any information from the Other Side is what almost got Roy Moore elected.
This us-vs-them mentality needs to be noted. The fact that this comes from a think tank does not immediately mean they don't raise a good point.
I was curious about who wrote it, and felt it was worthwhile to share what I found.
That being said, if one wishes to attack the article, I think a strong argument could be made that this is not real research, but a cherry picking of anecdotes that fit the existing viewpoint of the author. It may be true that crime is out of control in Portland, and that the homeless are to blame, but a more convincing argument for this could be made with real statistical research.
But, if you wanted to bet me I couldn't guess what Americans For Prosperity thinks of the tax bill without reading anything from them about it, I'd take that bet in a heartbeat.
You don't fix this by ignoring attribution or yelling at people for noting it. You also don't do so by attacking strawmen.
- Not only is life it too short to pretend outfits that exist to promote a particular agenda are, in fact, neutral arbiters this time around, but doing so is actively empowering bad actors arguing in bad faith.
Puzzle me this: a person you know to be con-artist wants you to do something. You can't figure out an angle, but it is a weird-seeming thing to ask.
Do you ignore what you know about this person in making your decision?
That all depends. When it's been hidden, I think it's essential to know the ethos of the organization that paid for the work to be done and disseminated. It isn't plain in the piece that it was brought to us by the Manhattan Institute, which is one of many think tanks producing "journalism" that has never, ever found a problem that the "free market" wasn't the precise cure for.
Context is super-important.
Anyhow: I quite dislike it when articles and arguments are dismissed with simple labeling tactics ("they said this other thing before, so what they say now carries no weight").
I should have written "dismissed" rather than "attacked".
My own suspicion is that this "research institute" hasn't really done true research into whether crime is out of control and the homeless are to blame. Maybe it really is out of control, but I suspect that the authors don't truly care to investigate, seeing as they simply chose some anecdotes that fit the views they have held for decades.
Sorry you're getting downvoted.
> Sorry you're getting downvoted.
Thanks for that.
So let's cut the crap and be real here, this article is basically propaganda. The entity responsible for producing it will never produce a politically unbiased article examining some critical issue because their raison d'etre is to produce politically biased articles. What you're saying is that it's on us an individuals to line by line refute all the crap propaganda that gets spewed out. There's no way to do that in the 21st century, there's too much information. We need to be able to attribute and write-off when necessary. This article was written by a right-wing think-tank who's explicit mission is to promote free market ideals? Why would I read that? You and I both basically already know what is in it and that the writer is a complete partisan.
In this case, the article is about homelessness, and I found it interesting to know that the institute has for decades held a fixed opinion on individual responsibility.
I have no idea whether the rest of the institute's positions could be neatly categorized.
Don't move here. Trust me. Stay in California. You think it's bad but you have no idea what happens here. Your children may be kidnapped by Sasquatch.
Did you know that meat might even be illegal in Portland by 2019? And they still listen to rock music, cassettes, and guitars. Don't move to Portland.
Disgraceful anarchists. Car hating thugs. Dirty homeless people. It's terrible. The author has no idea how bad it is.
They don't fluoridate water. You can't pump your own gas. They shut down roads for cars and only allow bikes. It's going to be illegal to drive your own car. You can't do anything to your property if there's trees in it.
And there's hippies. Real smelly granola types. They all smoke pot all the time.
Don't move to Portland. It'll ruin your life. The homeless are everywhere.