I post here almost weekly trying to tell people when you build more hotels and services for the homeless you will get more of them.

No one ever wants to agree with me.

And when you force them to freeze to death, get sick and die, etc. you will get less of them.

'I' didn't force anyone to do anything of the sort.

I doubt you did either.

This is what happens when you get rid of cops like Chris Humphrey's. If you don't let PPB beat people to death for possibly urinating in public then how will you keep the homeless numbers down.

@D:
I used "you" in the same collective sense that you did.
You're probably obfuscating to distract from the ugly social-darwinist implications of your original statement.

Understood.

Doesn't make it any less true that the universe has seen to it that it's hard and dangerous to be homeless.

Trying to get a compassion-less government to change that fact will only end in failure and frustration, as you can see reflected by reality in this story.

As one who has a great deal of contact with the homeless population, trust me, people are moving to Portland because of our social services and many see these services as in entitlement. D hits it right on the mark.

While I wouldn't quite word it that way, I have to agree with D as well. Portland has become a city that hosts homeless from all over. Having lived through the Guiliani era in NYC (though I never voted for him) breaking up concentrations of homeless in specific pockets of the city not only helped the city immensely (including my block) but also helped the homeless themselves. By moving them to places that were better suited to accommodate them, there were many case studies of people finding jobs and being rehabilitated from drugs and mental illness. When you create concentrations of homeless like Portland has, you essentially sustain a homeless population instead of addressing the real problems.

Well, if there's we have any concern for people, we shouldn't take away the safety net until after we've really changed the underlying conditions that cause the problem. I would hope that we'd have sufficient hindsight on that from Clinton's gutting of welfare without make any real strides toward lifting people out of poverty (and at the same time the Fed was raising interest rates!). Taking away support systems to force people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps has never worked. Not sure whether anyone here is proposing that, but it's not clear what alternatives are being suggested.

*if we have*

'Taking away support systems to force people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps has never worked.'

Don't know how you could possibly quantify that.

But government creating larger and more expensive 'support systems' over the past 50 years in the Great Society war-on-poverty has increased poverty exponentially.

There was nothing "ugly" about the social-Darwinist implications of what D said. To the contrary I'd say it was fairly accurate.
We ought to do a better job of getting the word out that it is cold and rainy 9 months out of the year here and it's really not a great place to camp out.

Well, D, you at least can put your "no one ever wants to agree with me" thing to rest. Not surprisingly, there's no shortage of critics of the supposed welfare state, even though it was mostly dismantled long ago. The Great Society programs of liberalism mostly went away decades ago, but that hasn't stopped supposed conservatives from using them as a bogeyman to make political careers.
And of course I can't quantify my earlier statement that it never works to make it harder for people to survive in order to force them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It's a broad historical observation. It didn't work under Hoover, Clinton didn't succeed in helping the poorest sectors of society, etc. If you have a counterexample, I'm all ears.

The Great Society programs were not the cause of poverty. During the last 50 years, the great american job has disappeared, state mental health care has disappeared, and there is a chronic reaction to any type of social safety net. There is a population of chronically homeless people who belong in longterm mental health care to make room for homeless people who could make the transition back to self sufficience.

1. It IS hard to be homeless, which is why no one would ever choose it. Sometimes you're stuck long enough that it seems better and easier than fighting with three hundred other people for a job, but no one chooses it initially.

2. The far majority of the homeless in PDX were raised in Multnomah County. This isn't a problem of people coming from outside, this is our own, home-grown crisis. This is why the remarks by Sarah are spot on.

3. The Bud Clark Commons-- a great program, BTW-- housed 130 individuals. The low number of homeless (taken on the coldest season of the year) is more than four thousand. And some think we shouldn't provide more services?

The fact is Multnomah County creates more homeless people than it helps. And then after they create them, they blame them and harass them and arrest them because of their homelessness. Rather than pointing fingers at the homeless just try to imagine if you were in that position, in this economy, what would YOU do?

Steve Kimes
Pastor of Anawim Christian Community, a church of the homeless.

Seems like a good time to recall the 2001 City Council hearing on Dignity Village. After hearing speaker after speaker talk about how homelessness is just a lost job or medical emergency away for so many people in this country, Commissioner (and later Mercury mayoral endorsee) Jim Francesconi told a perplexing story of going downtown with his wife to enjoy a nice meal and a nice bottle of wine, and offered: "I'll never be homeless -- I've got money."

[cue a City Council Chamber-full of homeless folks and activists roaring in anger, while Commissioner Charlie Hales looks on in bemused disbelief]

To be fair, I believe Francesconi was trying to make the point that the city should be focusing on creating jobs with their income streams, instead of formalizing a homeless camp. But it was a great example of how so many people in this country who should know better don't fully understand the complexities of this problem (including immediate needs and long-term drivers).