Even Portland now is banning camping, part of the West Coast retreat | Hacker News Reader

Even Portland now is banning camping, part of the West Coast retreat

seattletimes.com

26 pointswallflower21 comments

"Even Portland"? Ted Wheeler has been trying to ban camping, or taking steps to effectively circumvent county and state attempts that prohibited him from banning camping, for _years_ now. He's been gunning for it for both of his terms and keeps failing to get anywhere.

First of all, Portland tried to regulate daytime tent camping in 2016. It failed after six months. Wheeler ran for mayor that year saying he would solve homelessness; through both of his terms, it's gotten steadily worse.

The current camping ban idea first came up in 2022: https://apnews.com/article/health-ted-wheeler-oregon-portlan...

He then proposed 1,000-person indoor mass shelters in 2022. That failed when the state refused to fund it, with everyone from homeless advocates to commissioners who endorsed him having predicted that it would at best fail and at worst exacerbate the problem: https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2022/02/portland-mayor-now-s...

He experimented with closing a homeless campsite at a public park for plans to build pickleball courts and a skate park: https://nypost.com/2022/11/03/portland-mayor-ted-wheeler-rem...

(It didn't work; the camps predictably returned within months: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVnVnMeKcfQ)

He tried to enact his camping ban and build state-funded outdoor concentration camps staffed by the National Guard in 2023. The state and county refused to fund them: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2023/03/portlands-mass-t...

The current ban proposal was first drafted after that failure. Due to the lack of anyone wanting to be associated with the plan, Wheeler planned to spend $27 million of city's own funds on three of his own designated outdoor shelter cities: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2023/02/mayor-ted-wheele...

(While all of that was happening, the city under Wheeler has had near-weekly police-backed camp sweeps, a prototype for the ban where city contractors tear down the camp, confiscate property, and offer shelter options that don't have capacity or are often unsuitable for families, the mentally ill, or people with addictions. Some people have been relocated dozens of times: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-hom...)

The proposed law issues fines with or without jail time if you refuse to accept a shelter offer. But even now there aren't enough shelter beds for the people who are already voluntarily seeking them: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/portland-mul...

So homeless people will end up going to jail one way or another. They can't afford housing, so they sure as shit can't afford lawyers. What does Oregon also have a chronic shortage of? Public defenders, which Oregon doesn't employ but contracts out (with caseload maximums): https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/01/24/record-numbers-of-peop...

And if one can't be provided in seven days, a federal court rules that the offender has to be released: https://www.opb.org/article/2023/11/09/oregon-public-defende...

A lot of this is also being pushed by one commissioner who's aggressively and loudly seeking the mayor's office and using this law to get attention: https://www.opb.org/article/2024/04/17/camping-ban-portland-...

(He's also maybe the least politically savvy guy to run for this office here in a while, which is already a stupendously low bar: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/rene-gonzalez-trimet-...)

His first proposal would've given the mayor total control over the ban, which would be himself if he wins the election: https://www.wweek.com/news/2024/04/17/gonzalez-seeks-to-put-...

(And we know he'll fit in great as mayor because his proposal failed two days later: https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2024/04/19/gonzalez-pares-ba...)

Anyway, the mayoral and commissioner efforts have been so poorly received for so long, with no improvement in sight, that voters threw the entire city government charter out the window in 2022 in favor of ranked-choice voting and a more traditional city council system: https://www.portland.gov/transition/news/2022/11/9/portland-...

That won't solve any problems, but fuck if anyone here seems to know what would.

(Did I mention that Oregon is a "kicker" state? As in we get individual tax refunds when the state has a budget surplus? There's been one every two years since 2014. The state never has the money to house the homeless, whether in or beyond Portland, except for the _$10 billion_ returned over the last 10 years — $5.6 billion this tax season alone, most of which wasn't even claimed as of a month ago — because this incompetent state legislature can't budget to save its fucking life.)

Sounds like we have a systemic problem where just growing the economy wont fix the wealth gap for basic shelter.

I think this gets to a larger national economic issue: things aren’t great for most people, and when things get really bad, you move somewhere nice.

The many programs developed to tackle homelessness have been built around specific budgets/goals/KPIs, and are not able to handle the continuous migration of people with nowhere to go, and inherently political. I’m sure most politicians mean well.

Sure, migration trends, especially for CA say otherwise.. but there is a large swath of people that governing bodies are bad at tracking.

TLDR: another example of poorly designed government intervention due to misunderstanding of the dynamics behind the process (homelessness)

> poorly designed government intervention due to misunderstanding of the dynamics behind the process (homelessness)

Major drive is easy to understand, just cross the border and you are homeless on full support. Millions did with the help of dems, future voters. No language, no jobs, no skills. Of course they will vote for free food if they get this option. I.e. for dems, which was the whole idea.

Are you saying that most of the homeless are immigrants? And that immigrants are somehow allowed to vote?

Are you saying that the open border is unintentional and somewhere between Trump leaving and Biden taking office (probably the moment the "kids in cages" became "minor detention facilities") the border patrol suddenly became incompetent?

How about answer the question instead of asking something irrelevant?

Its poorly designed for a reason: it does not address the wealth gap, exacerbated by landlord price fixing and.home ownership by corporate speculators.

Fundamentally the core problem is that no one wants to spend the money to get real traction on these issues, which would require create affordable housing, and even more expensive than that treatment beds for persons enduring drug addiction. The additional problem of course being that there’s a shortage of doctors and nurses to work at hypothetical treatment centers that don’t exist.

So because no one wants to spend any money the only option left is harm reduction measures because they’re more affordable.

Problem being of course is that harm reduction is no solution in its self, and the point is merely to prevent death while people await the aid of actual solutions.

There is now a voter backlash against harm reduction because no one sees anything improving and they’ve been convinced by disingenuous media that it was harm reduction itself that was the problem, not the complete disinterest in building affordable housing and treatment beds.

Voters need to wake up and recognize that they need to pay for solutions. I don’t expect this will happen however. Opposition parties will slag the status quo and say they’ll do other things, but then immediately do nothing once in power when they realize the cost. Been seeing it my whole life living here.

I don’t think what’s happening in west coast cities is going to be solved by paying for anything - whether it is housing or rehab or whatever. A lot of people at these unsanctioned encampments are anti social and want that lifestyle of drug addiction. They refuse services and also refuse to work. They don’t care about taking up spaces meant for other things, or destroying public bathrooms, or stealing, etc. If they’re facing no consequences they’ll keep impacting everyone else. I know this isn’t true about everyone but I would say it’s true of many. I’m no longer a believe in the compassion first approach and now think a tough approach is more effective, even if it’s not perfect.

People aren't born like this, and a solution of "wait for them to die" seems neither effective nor humane.

The heritability of substance abuse disorders is around 0.5

For some people, they are indeed "born like this".

> People aren't born like this, and a solution of "wait for them to die" seems neither effective nor humane.

Fair enough, but giving other people's money to government entities who have been failing to deliver on these issues since before I was born does not seem like an effective solution either.

It might be cheaper to help people than to imprison them. What else is there?

I think measures like this one are basically intended to push the problem elsewhere. Make it someone else's problem.

That is the only option:

https://twitter.com/kaseyklimes/status/1632096902022832130?t...

> Voters need to wake up and recognize that they need to pay for solutions

I'm a middle-class nobody from a poor background, I own a single-story 3-bedroom, 2 bathroom house. I pay $18,000 a year in property taxes on my house. I pay an additional 8.5% sales tax on everything I buy locally. I pay tens of thousands of dollars every year in income taxes.

Just how much more do I need to pay? Why should we trust that giving the government even more money will solve the problem, when every previous experience shows that they spend massively while barely impacting the problem?

Tbh the public is already overpaying severely with the status quo in terms of constantly paying for emergency services call outs.

Many experts have said that money would be saved by housing people instead of letting people unhealthily sleep outside and then spending money on emergency medical care.

Spending more money on capital projects like housing, if that means a pull back on high operating cost emergency services, then that is more financially sustainable than the status quo.

All I know is that the status quo isn’t solving the problem and spending less isn’t going to work.

Completely agree. It's a maddening conversation because this is fundamentally what the defend the police movement is about. Meat heads with a 6 months of training and a gun are the correct solution to almost no problems, yet occupy some of the largest budgets our cites and states have. Then we pass more and more laws to empower the meat heads and continue to wonder why nothing's working.

> Many experts have said that money would be saved by housing people instead of letting people unhealthily sleep outside and then spending money on emergency medical care.

To be fair, most of those experts are consultants, non-profit leaders, government employees, or talking heads who have a financial and reputation stake in a very particular type of solution, so I'd take that with a gigantic grain of salt.

These same types of experts have been trying to solve housing issues since at least the 1950's with more and more money being spent and little to show for it. If anything, the problems seem to be getting worse.

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