Jane, a pseudonym, is a young single mom with a small child and no local family support system. When she was fired from a local fast food restaurant for attendance issues due to a lack of childcare, she could not afford to keep a home, finding only tenuous housing after her eviction because a few local labor leaders took turns housing her and her child. She did not drink or do drugs, and had no mental illness history.
Or consider Sally—also a pseudonym. When she first moved to the city, she told me, “I made $16 per hour. The stress of giving 60 percent of my income to afford a crappy studio was considerable. I don’t think the average person understands how few resources are available to keep folks from becoming homeless in the first place.” She now has a full-time city job, but still struggles to make rent. “The fear of homelessness shapes the way I move through the world now.”
Jane and Sally are the true faces of the vast majority of the city’s homelessness. Yet, their emblematic stories don’t register with most of the media nor the sea of politically ambitious candidates who ran for Portland’s city government because it doesn’t fit the drumbeat of the hyped blame-the-victim narrative about homelessness.
Let’s get this straight: Homelessness is not rooted in addiction or mental illness. Those can be effects of homelessness.
The math is simple: to rent a two-bedroom place in Portland, the minimum wage should be just shy of $39 per hour. In a city in which the minimum wage is $15.95 per hour, it’s hardly surprising that working people struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Portland is not special—the minimum wage is too low in virtually every major city to pay for quite modest shelter. Sobriety doesn’t pay the rent.
Indeed, if you want to know the typical story of homelessness, or the threat of losing one’s shelter, don’t go to a recovery treatment center. Instead, reflect on what happened over the past year, on the picket lines of workers at our public schools, New Seasons, Fred Meyer, the city’s Water Bureau, Oregon Health & Science University, Starbucks, Boeing, Amazon, and Portland State University, to mention just a few struggles by people to get a fair paycheck. These workers are the heart and soul of the city who, every day, are trying to eke out a modest livelihood to pay rent.
So, why is the core issue of economics not the central issue in the homeless debate? Why does Mayor Wilson’s promise to “end” homelessness embrace shelter-centric rhetoric, but neglect any conversation about wages?
Because having a serious discussion about the dynamics of homelessness means confronting the people who run our city: the elites, the wealthy, and the business leaders who foster homelessness by robbing people of the fruits of their labor. It’s easy to point to addiction or mental illness, because it’s a no-lose, cynical pitch to voters who want Portland to be “what it used to be,” which translates into “just get rid of those people and their tents.”
It’s a lot scarier for most politicians, especially those who groveled for business support in the recent election, to take on powerful economic interests and speak the undeniable truth touching on every aspect of our city: We live with a bankrupt economic system that, every single day, chokes our communities, draining our wallets and poisoning our air. The very same captains of industry, and their lieutenants, who squeeze livelihoods for workers simultaneously buy off politicians to win, for example, a back-door deal permit for Zenith Energy to move dangerous crude oil through the city. It’s all about profit.
Homelessness also exposes the virtually meaningless “progressive” label. “Progressive” was a term that socialists/communists/left-wingers embraced years ago to avoid being red-baited, especially in the labor movement. In Portland, anyone can embrace the “progressive” mantle. In fact, in the city’s elections, folks billed themselves as “progressives,” “pro-labor,” or “environmentalists” while, for the sake of winning, they were quite happy to let polluters, anti-union companies and, especially real estate interests, finance or support their campaigns from behind a wall of secrecy via United for Portland, the business political action committee.
The path forward, then, cannot view homelessness as a stand-alone crisis. We have to embrace a broader vision that replaces economic deprivation and exploitation with a full-throated championing of higher incomes for regular folks, including a significant hike in the minimum wage and unabashed support for union organizing. It won’t be a return to a Portland of the past. And that would be a good thing.