Skip to main content
In the Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life, the despairing do-gooder George Bailey is shown a vision of the miserable hellscape his hometown would become had he never been born. Multnomah County officials have their own George Bailey complex—overlooked, unthanked, subject to abusive tirades—but no guardian angels to show what difference they’ve made. Well, call us Clarence, because last week we acknowledged that the county’s spending on homelessness has been effective by several measures (“Home Stretch,” WW, Dec. 3). If not for rent assistance, some 12,656 households would have lost their homes. You see, Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, you really had a wonderful life. Now, when do we get our wings? Here’s what our readers had to say:
florgborgle, via Reddit: “Sure, I’ll give the county some additional credit for doing a better job with stuff like rental assistance. I think what this overlooks, though, is the persistence of untreated drug and mental health issues within the street homeless population and the county’s seeming unwillingness to deliver stronger interventions. The ludicrously expensive deflection center performance is a good example of underdelivery by the county.”
Seems2Me, via wweek.com: “Setting aside the housing and emergency shelter components, one thing that seems like a missed opportunity is identifying definable subgroups of homeless people. People who have never used drugs or alcohol, have no criminal record, have worked all their lives, but got old with no savings, are a different group from many single moms escaping domestic violence, who are different from chronically addicted chronically homeless, chronically criminally inclined, and so on. What are the different groups? What do the people who make up the subgroups need? In my experience, they have different recovery paths.
“Also, we know that the longer people are homeless the more people get worn down, and they begin to look the same.”
TheMagicalLawnGnome, via Reddit: “That’s great, the MultCo is 7% more efficient in certain types of programs (rough figure mentioned in the article).
“But the larger problem is that this doesn’t have a major impact on overall outcomes.
“Per the article, there’s three times as many homeless landing on the streets as there are people being housed.
“And as the statistics from the recent camp sweeps under [Mayor Keith] Wilson have shown, a very substantial number of people refuse shelter when offered, and many also have outstanding warrants or criminal violations.
“Seven percent more efficiency isn’t going to solve the problem. It requires a paradigm shift, a completely new approach to solving the problem. It’s going to require housing, sure, but also reforms to involuntarily commitment laws, and criminal justice reform for repeat indigent offenders.”
Yoshimi917, in reply: “We are fighting a forest fire with a garden hose. This is a national problem and all we have is measly municipal funds. We will never be able to solve this problem entirely on our own. I don’t think the city/state/taxpayers can afford to involuntarily commit every user who shows up from bumfuck Mississippi.
“The current actions that local governments are taking seem to all be steps in the right direction. Don’t let perfection stop us from progress.”
Harley Leiber, via wweek.com: “All well and good. Lots of money is being spent. But people are still sleeping outside rain or shine. Additional shelter beds will help, of course, but there are other cosmetic things that can be done to ameliorate the problem and build public support for a problem that isn’t going away anytime soon. Some of that money needs to be allocated to aggressive street cleanup and trash disposal. That service needs to be city- and countywide, coordinated, and well managed. We shouldn’t see piles of garbage from vacant homeless encampment anywhere in the city or county, sitting there for weeks or months on end. People can be put to work getting this garbage picked up and disposed of without a lot of bureaucratic red tape over whose responsibility it is. A hotline should be established for residents to call and alert officials to the area or address where the litter has accumulated. This isn’t rocket science. It’s a public health and safety issue. In the meantime, the homeless experts can continue to argue over what works and what doesn’t, who should be funded, and for how long, etc.”
Correction
Due to an editor’s error, last week’s edition of Murmurs incorrectly stated that Portland’s population is 2.2 million. That’s the population of the metro area. The city of Portland’s population is about 635,000. WW regrets the error.
Letters to the editor must include the author’s street address and phone number for verification. Letters must be 250 or fewer words. Submit to:
P.O. Box 10770
Portland, OR 97296
Email: amesh@wweek.com
