Portland will begin enforcing its ban on homeless camping on public property on Nov. 13, according to Mayor Ted Wheeler.
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I understand the overwhelming need to do something about the problem with the unhoused. Making their existence fundamentally illegal isn’t going to solve anything.
My only guess is they hope to drive people away and make them someone else’s problem.
Are we doing that thing where one word sounds icky so we change it to a new word that will eventually sound icky?
Unhoused already sounds worse.
I think there’s room for discussion on the best term.
I choose unhoused because they often have homes, whether it’s tents or a broken down car or something else entirely. Calling them homeless denigrates the accommodations they’ve created for themselves on the edges of society.
This is the progressive equivalent to thoughts and prayers from conservatives. A meaningless gesture that makes the user feel better and that’s about all it does for solving the real problem of getting legitimate help for homeless folks that allows for some accountability on their part and starts cleaning up the city for the rest of the population to use again.
The popular term for that is euphemism treadmill.
They need to sleep in the doorways of government buildings. Gotta keep Portland weird!
South Park perfectly summarized it like a decade ago. Every state is unwilling to do ANYTHING for the homeless, so they just try to get them to go somewhere else, up to and including putting them on buses with one way trips out of state.
it’ll push many to stealth camping setups. same problems in the end
Good.
There needs to be real solutions. Forced rehab, and publicly owned housing, and nobody from the city to the state to the federal level are talking about those things.
We need the equivalent of a GI Bill to entice people to become healthcare workers that will have to deal with basically some of the worst elements of human society - and anyone arguing that point has probably never had an addict for a sibling or parent. Addicts need love, but some addicts are hard to spend any time around. Alcohol and meth top that hard-to-be-around category.
Do all of those things exist in Portland? Or are they just making homelessness illegal with no avenues of escape.
Last I checked they aren’t making homelessness illegal. They are banning camping during the day, which unfortunately is needed because campsites quickly become biohazards. Source: had disgusting, expanding camp in front of my house for 25 months - including 2 deaths, 2 ODs, 5 stolen cars, a bunch of recovered stolen property and 2 DV incidents where I thought one woman was being murdered.
No one is saying homeless camps are good. Making it illegal to camp during the day means homeless people need to pack up everything they own every day and carry it around, or be arrested. It does absolutely nothing to solve the problems that create homeless people and only makes their lives more difficult.
You’re right, and it sucks, but so do ever-expanding homeless encampments. If you actually visit Portland you’ll be like 😬. It’s one thing to discuss it in theory, but something entirely different to experience it and have to live around it. I’m empathetic towards homeless people and have been homeless myself before. It’s an absolutely awful situation to be in, especially as an adult without a support network. But there’s an endurance limit for a city, and Portland is well beyond that limit.
Dude I live like 5 mins from downtown east side Vancouver, aka the area world famous for it’s homeless and drug addiction crisis. Yeah no shit it sucks to be around people like that, that has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re talking about.
Making homelessness illegal does not solve homelessness, it scatters the problem. Vancouver’s new mayor did a street sweep and wow wouldn’t you know it, homeless people are still homeless, they’re just more spread out now. You say you’re empathetic towards them but you’re advocating for a “solution” that solves absolutely nothing.
Stop doing mental gymastics to rationalize these ridiculous tactics.
If they don’t move for weeks, months or years, it turns into a biohazard, period. People that live here are tired of it and I’m not waiting for the mythical public housing and wraparound services to exist before I say start the sweeps. Sorry not sorry.
If you’re tired of it then advocate for actual solutions. How fucking gutless do you have to be to condone shit like this because you feel icky being around homeless people.
Tell me how that advocacy had worked out for you., and how many hours of day you spend doing that work.
Edit: oh yeah, crickets
Can’t believe you got down voted for common sense
Is forced rehab a thing? Can you rehab someone who isn’t willing? Genuine question.
Unfortunately no, which is why most of them end up spiralling out of control and committing suicide or ending up on the street.
Homeless Ban
You guys ever tried not being homeless?
When the police are called to enforce this rule, will they yell STOP EXISTING at homeless citizens?
No, but they will still try to make them stop existing.
This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do now that the city has provided ample affordable housing for everyone and social care to help people overcome difficulties that should never have lead to them sleeping rough in an advanced society with easily enough wealth for everybody.
As near as I can tell, the city is totally OK with them sleeping in the rough, so to speak, as long as its from 8 PM to 8 AM.
They don’t want people lolling around the sidewalks out of their minds on fentanyl from 8 AM to 8 PM.
Oh look, someone that doesn’t live in Portland and doesn’t have bullet holes in their home from homeless folks having a free market dispute in the street.
Bravo take - I definitely agree that we should just fully transition to open street sewers to better accommodate our unhoused.
Surely there’s a difference between camping and living in a tent
Calling homeless people campers is a textbook case of doublespeak.
Yeah, this is “prohibits camping on all public property between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.”
So at 8PM, feel free, set up camp. Just be ready to be gone by 8AM.
Passed out on the sidewalk at 2 PM because of fentanyl? Not allowed.
This will make downtown much nicer and outer neighborhoods (like Lents) much crappier, because there’s no way this is going to be enforced evenly
Definitely. First priority will be outside city council homes.
Last priority will be Foster/Powell/Division.
People have to be on the ball reporting it. I report cars I think suspicious as abandoned (9/10 they are) and campsites the same day I see them post up.
I lived in SE Portland for years. There was a psychotic person camping on our street who me and neighbors reported many, many times. Police did stop by a couple times to offer her a women’s shelter or a hotel room, but she refused. So I mean, reporting is good and all, but it’s clearly not enough.
Oh I get it, things were especially bad when Jo Ann Hardesty, and her predecessor Chloe Eudaly, were in charge of PBOT. They would simply deprioritize or not respond to those reports at all. Had our coward mayor just removed them from PBOT leadership things wouldn’t have been as bad for as long.
Nowadays, PBOT responds within 2-3 days. You can see on the city’s arcgis map where reports are, how long they’ve been there and how many duplicate reports there are.
“camping” ban. They really need to form their own communities large enough to scare the tyrants away when they come knocking.
Yes, I’m sure a couple of them will sober up long enough to organize. Good call.