Obviously, the city would have to regulate sidewalk use reasonably according to time, place, and manner.

Solution: allow unlicensed soliciting on sidewalks, but *only* for one's own personal benefit. No commercial soliciting without a license, which would also allow BOLI to investigate the employers of the professional panhandlers working for Greenpeace, MercyCorps, Children International, etc.

Aggressively ticket business owners with unlicensed A-boards or sidewalk cafes. That's where the money is. I doubt panhandlers have fine money, but the Goodmans or Ted Papas do.

Are Facebook groups the new online petitions?

A completely ineffectual way of vaguely showing displeasure with something.

Robbing more from businesses will be a poor revenue stream it after they've all been driven from downtown.

That lawerly wisdom aside, the statement "This is not about the homeless, or targeting anyone" does not exactly tell me our officials have anything near a clue.
It is PRECISELY EXACTLY OBVIOUSLY about targeting the homeless and aggressive panhandlers.

This is tangential but interesting. Portland ranks 46th in the US for the ratio of jobs to jobless. 1 job opening for every 7 unemployed! http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/unemployme…

Nasty. I don't think that corrects for those who have exhausted their unemployment or the homeless.

Also I remember reading a few years ago that Portland is a homeless youth mecca (can't remember where, maybe the Merc or WW?) with people from all over the US migrating to the city during the summer. A lot of the homeless youth are runaways from abusive or absent homes.

Last point (tangential still): most entry level jobs require an address or at least some id which reminds me of my favorite quote, "why do I need ID to get ID, if I had ID I wouldn't need ID."

It is hard as it is to get a job when you have experience, education, work ethics, skills. The 7 people competing for the one job are people who have worked before (hence the unemployment), I can't even fathom getting a job without those traits!

..."talking with the city's homeless commissioner, Nick Fish"...

What, doesn't the city pay him enough for him to afford to buy or rent or something? I mean, it is good that we've got a man of the street in city hall, but seriously, you'd think he could at least get a basement like Jason Wurster.

Wow,
looks similar to the one they had before this one... the one that they stopped enforcing because the judge ruled it to vague... (IIRC)
the best answers are affordable housing and jobs...
and enough with the tripe about the homeless guy out front causing the lack of jobs in Portland. the fact that someone in Gresham has to drive all the way downtown and then pay for expensive, hardly existent parking to shop in a mall that is more expensive than the one near his house is the problem... every business in the Downtown core of Portland pays a mandated tax, collected by the city for the PBA... get rid of the PBA and its extra tax for services that the city already provides and businesses would have more money to hire more people...

Graham,
as for "Facebook Organizing" it allows a few things.

first, it lets people who don't have time or effort to be part of a major effort to be part of the campaign... and have access to low impact actions like eating lunch outside (which I am going to do with some friends!)

second, it reaches people through a new media, which people tend to respond to (for instance, about 500 people attended various Netroots Nation functions this year using the online game Second Life)

third, its low cost. I am not sure how much time Chris as put in to the facebook group but outside of quick responses it seems to be a one man show... one man that got 175 voices (so far) in to the conversation that wouldn't normally be there.

"Tech Organizing" is really interesting to me, Twitter was huge in the recent events in Iran, SMS has been popular with different organizing groups, Text messages, Instant Messages, Emails, all have been used as a "key ingredient" in the last few years for one organizing effort or another.

@Patrick I wasn't dispariging online organzing. I know how it works. I'm balls deep in web 2.0. The joke was on online petitions and signing up for groups not creating much in the way of tangible results.

I also think that Facebook is a shitty platform for organizing because almost all events and groups on Facebook require outside users to login or create an account to see the content. That is a really crappy methodology for getting your message out there. I refuse to have a Facebook account, so I can't see that group's message. Really it's all #facebookfail

Thanks Patrick! The 187 people that have joined so far are able to agree that the Sit/Lie law needs to stay dead. I think just knowing that 187 other people agree with you on a basic concept is helpful and encourages people to participate further in the process and track the progress of the fight against the law. It is a useful way to communicate ideas to each other and organize. It is a great tool because it costs nothing except a few minutes of time, and we lack the formal organization and money of the PBA.

But Graham is right in one important way: The Facebook group is not an end in and of itself. The goal is to educate people about the status of the law and Mayor Adams' dubious efforts to revive an ordinance that should stay dead. The other goal is to let the council know that people are paying attention. I hope the group is helpful in getting the message to the policy makers. In part it's being able to go to city council and say that X number of people think this law is a bad idea. It's also helpful to encourage people to individually contact the city council and tell them to knock it off. The wall on the Facebook group lets people discuss the issues and track the news stories. The picnic is just for fun and hopefully people who wouldn't normally spend an hour sitting on the sidewalk or bench in downtown will get out and get a new perspective on downtown.

(I do have to wonder though whether Graham feels that leaving comments on the Mercury blog counts as civic involvement? Or is it just 'A completely ineffectual way of vaguely showing displeasure with something' )

The group is just a means to an end, not the end itself. I hope others can join us and support ending this very poorly thought out public policy.

"No commercial soliciting without a license, which would also allow BOLI to investigate the employers of the professional panhandlers working for Greenpeace, MercyCorps, Children International, etc."

Except those aren't commercial solicitations.

@chris I would say that leaving comments on /b/town would technically count as "civic involvement", but it isn't why I do it.

If you're the admin for that Facebook group, you would be well served by changing the settings so that the group's page is visible to people who aren't logged into Facebook. One of my biggest pet-peeves are people who attempt to market their event or group through Facebook, but make their group opaque through the ass-backwards default privacy settings.

Wait, so under the new system Ghost Pirates are OK but fine Mexican eateries are not? Nuts to that.

atomic: Read the story. The Mexican eateries are fine, what they have to leave clear, (and they are,) is the doorway. It is just that there is a table in the foreground of the picture.

Regardless of what they come up with, I wish they'd at least be honest. This is clearly about targeting the homeless. Not all homeless, but there's no question that this program is aimed at a population of people that just so happens to be 95-100% homeless. It's frankly insulting to pretend otherwise.

I don't have to "read" some big city "article" to know what an MS paint red x means. It means no tacos. The green check means yes ghosts. Completely unacceptable.

I've never been to the taco place, but I will say I like the miniature golf course. :-)

Mercy Corps doesn't have canvassers anymore and I take offence to people calling them "professional panhandlers." They're just trying to get the word out about worthy causes. I hate the pushy canvassers as much as the next guy but let's not lump all canvassers into the "evil" pile, Mercy Corps' canvassers, when they were still on the streets, were the most polite canvassers I've ever encountered.

I think this demonstrates that you cannot sit or lie on the MAX tracks. That seems reasonable enough.

Pencil tool!

Actually, implementing a 10 foot rule would probably eliminate much of the problem, as I imagine a lot of the front doors are within 20 feet of each other.

jackson1541, I think the problem that a lot of people have with canvassers is that their tactics are invariably coercive, and therefore kind of questionable on the morality front.

you've been poisoned, I don't disagree that some canvassers are questionable. I had one canvasser (can't remember from what org) who approached me about renewable energey (which I already purchase from PGE) and when I told him I was in a hurry he said something to the affect of "well just go ahead and keep killing the planet then". But just because there are some that are annoying like that doesn't make them all bad. In one of my conversations with a Mercy Corps canvasser, I had a intellectually interesting conversation with them about Iraq, at the end of which they asked if I'd be interested in donating to their monthly giving program. I wasn't interested but they wished me a good day with a smile and thanked me for the conversation. There is such a thing as a "good" canvasser, maybe just not enough I admit, but they do exist.