Last week, Portland City Council might have set a speed record for shooting down one of Mayor Charlie Hales’ ideas. No sooner had the mayor filed an ordinance to extend the city’s housing “state of emergency” status by three years than commissioners began coming out against it.
“He’s unlikely to be comfortable with a three-year extension,” Sonia Schmanski, chief of staff for Commissioner Nick Fish, told the Mercury. “This is something of a surprise.”
“Commissioner Novick is open to an extension, but three years seems too long,” said Chris Warner, Commissioner Steve Novick’s chief of staff.
Similar statements emerged from the offices of commissioners Dan Saltzman and Amanda Fritz.
Now, council is much more in tune, according to Fish. Hales’ office has since introduced a new ordinance [PDF] that will extend the state of emergency by one year, not three. According to Fish, there’s unanimity around that proposal.
“We’ve settled on a one-year extension with six months reporting,” the commissioner said Tuesday, referencing a status report before council that the Portland Housing Bureau and county Joint Office of Homeless Services will be asked to give every six months. “I’m fine with that and I’m pleased there’s consensus.”
Assuming Fish is correct about that consensus, it’s easy to see why there’s an appetite to extend the emergency. The designation allows officials to overlook zoning rules when trying to site homeless shelters, and has sped up the creation of hundreds of shelter beds since the emergency was declared. One example: the 200-bed shelter at the former Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office headquarters and Northeast Glisan and 122nd, currently the largest shelter in the city.
Fish says a year-long extension will give Multnomah County new assurances as it looks to create more shelter space. (The county recently took on responsibility to house a new Joint Office of Homeless Services that the city helps fund).
Even so, the yearlong extension that might be approved today goes against what Portlanders were told when council declared an emergency last October. That emergency ordinance contained a provision allowing the emergency status to be extended only in six-month increments—a duration that far eclipsed other types of emergencies the city declares (for weather events or natural disasters).
It’s like America’s War on Terror – an emergency every year, that will continue to be renewed every year!
Emergency is the new normal. Wheeee!!!!
Nick Fish and the rest of the Mayor’s Council Supervisors, especially Housing Supe Dan Saltzman should’ve been reading George Orwell’s between-the-wars UK & Europe memoir of seeking employment on a wrecked island and a ‘continent’ in ruins titled: DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. The system of armories to house migrating hordes of job-seekers was what happens when a NATIONAL EMERGENCY is declared. Washington under both parties governed by the same Neo-Liberal E-CON policies hasn’t even declared HOMELESSNESS and RENTERS EMERGENCIES a NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT!
Now, imagine instead of MARKET FORCES causing U.S. and foreclosed families to be seeking shelter under bridges and in septic systems as the MERCURY’s News Editor Dirk Vanderhart so poignantly reported a couple of winters back in the classic piece of journalism tagging along with a census taker seeking to count the homeless beyond what our shelters can hold, A SOMBER CENSUS, imagine ISLAMIST FORCES caused U.S. such damage. Think we’d get some palettes of cash dropped from Hercules Transport jets like U.S. Forces dropped on Iraq to lubricate the invasion of 2003? Think the Corps of Engineers would’ve been building U.S. some armories and housing for our “internally displaced”? It’s all semantics.
Here’s the Empire City reporting on how well it locally handles their post-MARKET RATE building boom HOMELESS EMERGENCY:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/nyregi…
When Neo-Liberal Oligarch and former GOP now INDIE Mayor Mike Bloomberg waived the consecutive term limits for Mayor of Empire City and stood for a third consecutive term, that term Neo-Liberal E-CON that both parties of our Political Duopoloy pledge loyalty to was illustrated in another classic piece of long-form journalism published by Andrew Rice in NEW YORK MAGAZINE (c) December 1, 2013 revealingly headlined and sub-headed for easy cut and paste search online:
“Why Run a Slum If You Can Make More Money Housing the Homeless?
“One notorious real-estate family has converted its run-down buildings into for-profit shelters, paid for by the city. The going rent per cubicle: $3,600 a month.”
Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, rarely invited onto corporate-captured news broadcasts might simplify the Neo-Liberal E-CON formula this way:
PRIVILEGE PRIVATE INTERESTS OVER PUBLIC INTEREST and RESTRICT MARKET-CAUSED SOCIO-ECON PROBLEMS TO MARKET-BASED SOLUTIONS.
Mitch Ritter
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