Good citizens are the riches of a city.
That’s what’s engraved at the base of Skidmore Fountain, at the direction of C.E.S. Wood, who had the fountain designed by his good friend Olin Warner, and it’s unclear to me if that’s something he (Wood) was known for having said, and chose to memorialize, or merely an epigram composed for the purpose; it doesn’t so much matter. The saying’s firmly fixed, to him, to the city, to history, to the fountain, to us, so much so that when it came time for me to stage a political debate in the epic, in the storied civic temple of the City Club of Portland, I made sure to build the victor’s rebuttal around that very motto:
(Said fictional debate, and I mention this, I indulge in this detail, because it will turn out to have been somewhat germane, is between the candidates for mayor, the one of them our smoothly corporate cipher, the challenger, who’s not so much based on as representing the place and role in the political firmament of former mayor Sam Adams, and Sam Adams is the label of a once microbrewery gone successfully corporate, and so the challenger’s named Killian, since Killian’s is the label of another microbrewery, ditto; his opponent, the older skool incumbent, rather more directly based on also-former mayor Vera Katz, is, of course, named Beagle, and so.)
—Anyway. So much for the riches of a city.
City Council Passes $27 Million Budget Package to Fund Homeless Encampment Plan
Portland City Council voted 3 – 0 Wednesday morning to approve a controversial budget package that lays the groundwork for a plan to criminalize street camping and build mass encampments to hold unhoused Portlanders by 2024. Both city commissioners Carmen Rubio and Jo Ann Hardesty were absent for the morning’s vote. (According to council staff, Hardesty is on a planned vacation and Rubio is out sick.)
The details of the “mass encampments” the plan speaks of are somewhat in flux: ranging from holding a thousand people each (that version would’ve been maintained by National Guard “security specialists”) to maybe a hundred each, at the start, let’s see; the most generous reading of the plan in its current state would be enough to hold 750 people, total.
The most recent point-in-time count of those experiencing homelessness in the TriMet area? 6,633 people, on the night of January 26, 2022.
I suppose providing some “official” place to camp for ten percent of the people affected counts as just about the equivalent of a Band-aid® in dealing with a homelessness problem?
—Of course, the mass encampments aren’t really there to provide official places to put anyone. The camps are there to provide a fig leaf to allow for the most important provision of the plan: the criminalization of unsanctioned street camping. —In 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of Martin v. Boise, in which the Ninth Circuit found it was a violation of the Eight Amendment to jail, fine, or cite individuals for doing what they could not otherwise avoid doing: if a city does not provide places for those without homes to sleep, it cannot persecute them for sleeping without a home.
But hey, the City of Portland can now say. We’ve got these camps, or will, soon enough. You have legally sanctioned options you’re electing not to exercise; we may now criminalize your behavior. So! GO—MOVE—SHIFT—
This ghastly disaster was yeeted from the public sphere back in February, when it was originally trial-ballooned in a blue-sky memo by none other than said former mayor Sam Adams, now a top aide to our current mayor, Ted Wheeler: “a plan to end the need for unsanctioned camping,” he said, but also, “This is not a proposal, this isn’t even a plan,” and “This is Sam Adams putting concepts out there, looking for discussion.”
“That idea would never fly with us,” said City Commissioner Carmen Rubio at the time, “and if true, I hope that would be a nonstarter for the mayor.” And City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said, “Based on what has been reported, this half-baked plan is a nonstarter.”
Welp, elections have consequences, and so it would appear does a national pre-election campaign of screaming fearmongering as regards CRIME and the need for LAW AND ORDER; that which was roundly shouted down in February is officially if hastily proposed in October and approved, with preliminary funding, by a 3 – 0 vote of our five-member council, in November. “These resolutions do not criminalize homelessness,” insisted City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who, along with Commissioner Mingus Mapps and Mayor Ted Wheeler, voted for the plan, and of course, he’s right; they merely criminalize homelessness anywhere he’d otherwise have to see it.
But that 27 million dollars has to come from somewhere. The budget as approved cuts (among other line items) 8 million dollars from the city’s allotment to the Joint Office of Homeless Services, and threatens to cut another 7 million more. Gutting the JOHS threatens shelters that currently provide a couple-hundred beds and rent-assistance programs that support another fourteen hundred or so people not currently experiencing homelessness.
Oh, well. Guess we’re going to need a bigger mass encampment.
Yes, Portland has an issue with homelessness. Not unlike every other city in the country. Yes, one might even refer to it as chronic. The solution is simplicity itself: you give people homes. An answer so self-evident should not require proof, but it has been proven, over and over again, from Houston to Finland: housing comes first. But our good citizens, or at least the ones currently in office, are criminally stunted in their political imaginations; our riches in that regard are, sadly, depleted. Salt & Straw is threatening to leave downtown, for God’s sake! We must be seen to be doing something. Once it’s swept away, out of sight, and business has returned to what we might remember as having been normal, then we can turn our meagre attentions to the longer term. You’ll see.
But. Until then—
