You’ve been on pins and needles all afternoon, Blogtown, so here’s what we know about the new $1 million homelessness initiative Mayor Charlie Hales unveiled today (along with City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, Multnomah County Commissioner Jules Bailey, police officials and social service providers):
It looks largely like he said it would: As I noted earlier, Hales allocated more than $1 million to an “intensive street engagement and clean-up initiative” in this year’s budget, and laid out a bare bones description of what it would amount to.
That’s all on the table. The mayor’s pitching a pilot program that resembles an effort the city tried late last year with people sleeping under I-405. The city will spend $924,000 launching a small army of social service workers—from Cascadia Behavioral Health, the Urban League of Portland, and the Native American Rehabilitation Association (NARA)—at the people “who have the greatest barriers to housing,” by which he means the people most likely to tell social service workers to screw off.
Hales and his various partners in this effort make the case these organizations are uniquely qualified to tackle this issue. They say the Urban League and NARA can marshall outreach workers more likely to identify with people with backgrounds and racial demographics that might make them distrustful of white people.
On top of all this, money’s going to Central City Concern, which will be running “cleanup routes” five days a week, according to Hales’ chief of staff, Josh Alpert.
All those resources are actually going to target a tiny fraction of Portland’s homeless. The goal for the pilot project is that 50 “households” find housing—a minuscule number compared to the thousands of people sleeping on the street. I asked about that, and Hales launched into a defense you got the sense he’d prepared. “You might say ‘Thats a pretty expensive effort, to focus almost $1 million of services on 50 households,” Hales said, pivoting to the cleanup efforts under I-405 last year. “When we focused that effort onto some of the key individuals on the street, not only were those folks housed, the side effects of those folks having large encampments went away.”
“It’s expensive,” Hales continued, “but not compared to the alternative.”
There are some new twists. Hales is promising two new daytime storage sites where homeless people can leave their stuff—one under the Burnside Bridge, the other on the Central Eastside. The storage areas will have dumpsters, a large cargo box, and a sharps container for used needles—what the mayor calls “very basic humane services.”
The sites have firm costs estimates ($50,000 overhead, $5,600 a month for operations) but the exact location remains in question—particularly the Central Eastside site. In fact, Hales office is already sparring with businesses and neighbors in that district over the proposed move of homeless rest area Right 2 Dream Too. It could be in for a similar fight in its ambitions for a storage area, but Hales correctly pointed out there’s already plenty of homelessness in the district, and that a trash repository and storage area is “better than the status quo. We’re going to keep moving by increments to a place where people have sanitation and habitation.”
The mayor’s got someone you can call about homelessness besides his office. As you well know, the Mercury‘s fond of tedium, and so periodically sifts through the transcribed voicemail messages left with the mayor’s office. They are invariably full of people mortified by some encampment or another.
Now, in a stroke of maybe-genius, Hales has a better number for them to call. He’s conceived a “one-point contact system” where “the public can report behavior-based issues associated with the houseless population.” Basically, you’ll be calling a guy in the city’s Office of Management and Finance (OMF) who already pulls the strings on the city’s campsite cleanup program.
Speaking of which, none of this alters current enforcement. Hales made that clear. Police will still sweep problem camps. City bureaus will still call in private contractors and inmates to clear out rubbish, and nothing about this new pilot even reaches the problematic sites near the Springwater Corridor multi-use path.
Hales made a point of saying multiple times that “sleeping is not a crime,” without touching the fact that, under city law, camping and erecting structures in order to sleep is a crime, and the city’s been known to arrest people for it. (City staffers frequently draw a distinction between “entrenched” or problematic camps and more “low impact” sites when talking about which campers are ticketed.)
Veterans are taken care of, officials say.
This may not last. The $1 million the mayor allocated to this project was one-time money, and Hales was clear today that it’s a “pilot project.” No guarantee it’s going to continue beyond this fiscal year (ending in June).
Hales is dusting off his stump speech. He took a couple moments before broaching the main point this afternoon to tick off a list you’re likely to hear a lot of as May approaches. He said there are things that keep him up at night, but they’re not opportunity in the city (new jobs!), or the budget ($49 million surplus this year, much of it not directly attributable to city officials!), or police use of force (it’s way down, he says!). “Those things don’t keep me up, anymore,” Hales said today. “Homelessness does.”
It was a savvy and brief digression, at a time Hales is clearly focusing on the political landscape in next year’s mayoral primary. As first reported by the Oregonian today, the mayor had coffee with State Treasurer Ted Wheeler this morning. Wheeler’s looking at a run at the mayor’s seat, and polling indicates the former Multnomah County chair could be a strong challenger.
“We talked about all kinds of things including politics,” said Hales, who wasn’t giving up any easy information about the meeting. I asked if he asked Wheeler to coffee because of his potential political ambitions, and Hales said yes, though he said he didn’t learn Wheeler’s intentions. “It was a very friendly conversation.”
so we are paying around 20000 per person annually to house people, what is the plan to just get them apartments at Burnside 26.
Sounds about right. There’s possibly costs for mental health services, physical health services and medications, immunization for kids, disability issues, addiction issues, food, clothing, basic education or training, the actual housing they’ll find for these people, application fees and deposits, paying the social workers, outstanding warrants, debts, unpaid fines, who knows. Being poor is expensive.
The irony is this won’t make a damn difference in the end.
Except in our pocketbook.
I’ve been harping on complimentary storage space continually. Now, there is no excuse for obstructing the sidewalks during the day. There are many storage companies all over town. Contract with several of them. Don’t go building anything new. Hand out vouchers. Open up the public fucking restrooms at night, too.
Idiot. herding people and telling them where to go is what causes problems in the first place. People having the freedom to disburse as is necessary in ways that do not create pressure on each other but also generates a sense of community and safety in numbers is why they come to Portland – NOT because “it has resources”. Simply put, it is autonomy which is not found in other cities.
Now he’s going to wast a fortune on something he and his creepy “culturally diverse” hipsters do not understand? You do know your talking about what is a predominately white hobo population no?
YOUR STREET SWEEPS STARTED THE PROBLEMS – things were good and these streets were full of love before that.
SOLUTION: stop wasting money on affordable housing that does not work as it is just a smaller version of the same way of isolated, unsustainable, and costly life that led people here in the first place. Instead create something which is simply conducive to another way of life. Pack a warehouse full of bunk beds and rent them for $200-$300/ month. No all day lines, curfews, and disrespect found in a mission, just truly affordable places to be and to store your stuff and have a sense of community without it being broken up by police. Every homeless situation I’ve been in shows me people get along great so long as they have a decent place to sleep and their autonomy in tact.
HALES = two faced showboat. Every move you make has developers interest written all over it. Partitioned infrastructure gives them leverage not us. Think about it; this would even introduce a market solution which PULLS RENTAL PRICES DOWN for the middle class.
I’ve spent the last three years walking my dog and interacting with some of the homeless people that frequent Colonel Summers Park. The problems are easy to identify, sadly not so easy to fix. The proposed pilot misses the mark in my opinion.
My observations:
1. You sleep in the park because everybody has to sleep sometime and someplace! The police, as the mood strikes or when instructed it, move you on, but where to? The next park perhaps, the cops don’t over think the pointlessness of this exercise, they just tell you, that you just can’t sleep here. And so you’re stuck in this hamster wheel coming back to the original park in a few days time.
2. Needle use is widespread, ask the police about tackling that and all they want to know is “Have you seen anyone sleeping in the park after 10pm?” I point out children playing barefoot over there and hypodermics over there, there is a shrug of disinterest because, and I quote “Drug use is widespread”.
3. There isn’t much to do all day except drink cheap beer, smoke cigarettes and weed, and go ‘canning’ to raise money for tomorrows beer and smokes. One day is much the same as the next when you’re on the streets.
4. If you’re lucky enough not to be an outright alcoholic or a mainlining drug user then you’re probably angry at most everybody, and suffering from perpetual depression about the shitty hand you’ve been dealt or have dealt yourself. Either way, booze and weed seems to temporarily lift many from the drudgery and monotony of sleeping under a tree on a daily basis. Winter is coming and it will get cold. Insert Morrissey lyrics here.
5. A respite seems to be the SE-based charitable establishments that offer food, showers and clothing. Folk savvy enough to know a gift horse when they see it, seem to arrange their days to take advantage of the hot meals.
6. Local residents paid a lot of money for their homes and want to take full advantage of the ridiculous property hikes in SE. So the last thing they want is a homeless person, spelling of piss, sleeping on their beautifully trimmed front lawn. They may themselves drink PBR straight from can and smoke weed, but they do it from the safe confines of their Craftsman house because they work and pay taxes and contribute blah blah blah.
7. Having public restroom open 24/4 would at least stop most people from relieving themselves in the bushes. Installing sharps boxes in the bathrooms would remove some of the needles from the park. Said bathrooms need to be more open, both for ventilation and to dissuade people from camping out in them at night.
8. You can’t help everyone and not everyone wants help, but those that do should be given halfway home options that don’t involve tons of hoops.
9. My biggest concern is the disillusioned rebellious young kids who hang about the park at dusk, they start smoking cigarettes over by the children’s play area and some get drawn into the circle of hard core substance abusers seated near the toilets.
10. Lockers under the Burnside Bridge? Homeland Security funds helped fence off critical and vulnerable areas from potential terrorist strikes, like under bridges on major US transportation arteries. Lockers were removed from all US airports for a reason. Do I have to spell it out?
11. The homeless of Portland need an advocate with a voice downtown. I don’t believe that person exists today.
Cheers Nigel
bowlieweekender@gmail.com
ID is required to rent storage space and many homeless are missing ID. The US Border Patrol has been ordered to ignore illegal immigrants. Greyhound Buses are loaded with illegals. There have been reports of Chinese nationals speaking in Chinese while wearing Mexican Army uniforms. If The City helps the homeless to obtain copies of their birth certificates in order to apply for Oregon ID, might Portland be inadvertently enabling Homeland Security to nest terrorists in the US?
He can legalize sleeping all he wants, but the right to congregate autonomously is what made Portland unique for the homeless. He breaks up people sleeping en masses with no respect for the fact that people do it for safety in numbers as well as a sense of community for those who likely need it most.
@Nigel: it used to be a much more peaceful crowd downtown – the punks took over after Hales made his moves. Sure they were there, but they were a minority and kept their problems to themselves, now they own downtown. as for addiction, having a sense of community and freedom to congregate actually helps. I’ve seen multiple people go downhill since things started changing a couple years agol