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Jan 11, 2016 at 1:51 pm
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PO Box 86208, Portland, OR 97286
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econoline brought up an interesting quandary. The city wants private citizens to follow their City Code & Charter. It's not like this is the only encampment placed in the city, so it's a ubiquitous issue. In fact, R2D2 was entirely created by flaunting multiple code and zoning regulations in order to be built. If a developer built a building without a permit, they'd be in some serious trouble.
How can a city be run when some people follow the law and others don't? Does the city even have any legal grounds to go after private citizens if they do not fairly apply their rules throughout? Should we have separate rules for the housed and non-housed?
Not that I agree with fining the homeless into staying homeless, but broadly speaking, my casual observation leads me to wonder that we have very separate rules for the homeless in the city. Homelessness is a point of understanding, it's not a reason to pretend they are entirely immune from oversight and enforcement and compliance. It's not necessarily a reason to not enforce rules or codes of any kind of the homeless and enforce them stringently on other people.
A city cannot be run on such ambiguous law and enforcement. We all need to know what the rules are.
Honestly, our city is just stupid. Flat out. I've always figured that people reaching that station in life running a city must be smarter than me. But I'm coming to the conclusion that these people are actually stupid. No sense of cause and effect or human nature. Purely reactive to every situation, surprised by everything. Incompetent and totally ineffectual.
I've actually concluded that government politics, at least local issues, could be entirely run by a simple computer program. At the very least, the city needs a simple flow chart to help them figure some stuff out.
Crime and trash is an assumption. FR has trash cans, a bath room and people to keep the peace. They aim to be good neighbors. Sorry that you assume otherwise, but it isn't true.
Donald Trump threatening to use his power and influence to deport millions of people is much worse behavior than leaving trash on the ground when there's nowhere else to put it.
If you want a civil society, provide civil resources. A country that can spend six squillion dollars a year on military funding can sure as hell provide *at least* year-round public toilets, we're just choosing not to spend our money that way, because 'bootstraps'. Which is a damn shame, and a total failure of imagination.