Portland Has A Moment Of Clarity. Spoink!

I found this in my archives and don’t know why I didn’t post it at the time. Portland had a moment of clarity last year, that its socialist agenda regarding homelessness wasn’t working, then cognitive dissonance took away the sting of defeat!

‘Not safe anymore’: Portland confronts the limits of its support for homeless services

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By Angela Hart for the Los Angeles Times, 21 June 2022

Alcoholics have a phrase for that: “moment of clarity”.

Michelle Farris never expected to become homeless, but here she was, sifting through garbage and towering piles of debris accumulated along a roadway on the outskirts of northeast Portland. Farris, 51, has spent much of her adult life in Oregon and has vivid memories of this area alongside the lumbering Columbia River when it was pristine, a place for quiet walks.

Now for miles in both directions, the roadside was lined with worn RVs and rusted boats doubling as shelter. And spilling out from those RVs, the trash and castoffs from this makeshift neighborhood also stretched for miles, making for a chaos that unnerved her.

“Look at all this garbage out here — it used to be beautiful nature, but now it’s all polluted,” she said, as the stench of urine and burned rubber hung in the damp air. “The deer and river otters and beavers have to live with all this garbage.”

Humans do too, including herself specifically, but won’t somebody please think of the rodents!

“Portland makes it really easy to be homeless,” said Cindy Stockton, a homeowner in the wooded St. Johns neighborhood in north Portland who has grown alarmed by the fallout. “There’s always somebody giving away free tents, sleeping bags, clothes, water, sandwiches, three meals a day — it’s all here.”

Portland’s homelessness problem now extends well beyond the downtown core, creating a crisis of conscience for this fiercely liberal city that for years has been among America’s most generous in investing in homeless support services. Tents and tarps increasingly crowd the sidewalks and parks of Portland’s leafy suburban neighborhoods. And the sewage and trash from unsanctioned RV encampments pollute the watersheds of the Willamette and Columbia rivers.

Funny how those eco-terrorists never show up where they’re actually needed. Maybe they shouldn’t glue themselves to the floors of air-conditioned luxury car showrooms instead of taking selfies hip-deep in illegal raw sewage dumps.

Even while reflecting on their ills, many of the [drug-addicted] squatters remarked on the surprising level of services available for people living homeless in Portland, including charity food deliveries, roving nurses, used-clothing drop-offs and portable bathrooms — even occasional free pump-outs for their RV restrooms, courtesy of the city.

Giant disposal containers for used syringes are strategically located in areas with high concentrations of homeless people. Red portable toilets pepper retail corridors as well as some tony family-oriented neighborhoods. In parts of the city, activists have nailed small wooden cupboards to street posts offering up sundries such as socks, tampons, shampoo and cans of tuna.

It’s like an entire city of crazy cat ladies. Complete with parasites.

The city offers a textbook example of the intensifying investment. In 2017, the year Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat, took office, Portland spent roughly $27 million on homeless services. Under his leadership, funding has skyrocketed, with Wheeler this year pushing through a record $85 million for homeless housing and services in the 2022-23 fiscal year.

Voters in the broader region of Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties in 2020 approved a tax measure to bolster funding for homelessness. The measure, which increases taxes for higher-income businesses and households, is expected to raise $2.5 billion by 2030.

Wheeler rejects claims that Portland has attracted homeless people to the region with its array of day-to-day services.

Ah, Dilbert. If anything shows the GAE fangs better than the FDIC proclaiming bailouts for ((everybody except you)) after yet another Lehman Brothers-Current Year fuckup, heedless of its own, explicitly stated duties, it’s the speed and totality at which the Dilbert comic was Canceled for its author’s one, single, informed complaint against Groids.

“And, you know, is that our fault?” he said, calling for more state and federal investment. He pointed to “a foster care system that delivers people to the streets when they age out,” and a prison system that releases people without job training or connections to community services.

The end goal is cradle-to-grave government institutionalization of the entire population. Wheeler know this, but his voting-public chumps think they’re just being nurturing.

Neither side actually wants a solution to the homeless problem, ex. “you get more of what you subsidize”.

South of the Columbia River in an industrial section of north Portland, not far from Delta Park’s bustling soccer and softball complex, another RV encampment lines a side street that juts off the main drag. Many of the camp’s inhabitants have parked here for years and are protective of their turf. Group leaders hold down the numbers — no more than 20 or so RVs. And they enforce tidiness rules, sometimes using physical force, so as not to draw undue attention from city code enforcement.

“We’ve maintained a symbiotic relationship with the businesses here,” said Jake Caldwell, 38, who lives in an RV with his girlfriend, Sarah Bennett. “We keep it clean and orderly, and they let us stay.”

The better homeless camps happen to be the ones in which male authority figures “keep it clean and orderly”, even in defiance of “official” government. Same as it ever was.

[They] and others consider themselves lucky to have scored an RV, which even broken down can cost a few thousand dollars. One camp dweller said he bought his using unemployment funds after losing his job in the pandemic. Caldwell and Bennett, who both use and deal heroin, said they purchased theirs with help from drug money.

Not that “male authority figure” is very impressive here. Homeless isn’t the only thing being subsidized by the Portland government.

[Residents] feel Portland’s charm ebbing, as the lives of the unhoused collide with the lives of the housed.

“This used to be the most beautiful, amazing city — now people’s houses and cars are getting broken into, and you can call 911, but no one is going to come,” said TJ Browning, who chairs the public safety committee for the Laurelhurst Neighborhood Assn.

“We’re a progressive city, I’m a progressive, but the worst part is I can feel the compassion leaving,” she said. “I recognize people are self-medicating mental illness with drugs, but so many people like me just don’t care anymore. We want the criminal element out, even if it means taking people to jail.”

“I want to believe!” she cried. “Make reality go away so I can believe!”

Like many residents interviewed, Browning is a longtime Democrat who has watched in dismay as her liberal values give way to frustration and resentment. And she understands the good intentions, spawned by liberal policies, that brought Portland to this tipping point.

At long last, they realize…

The problem is not so much the policies, in theory, as it is how they play out in Portland’s broader reality.

Drug users stay out of jail, but Oregon has too few drug treatment programs and no easy way to mandate participation. Advocates for the homeless ardently protest efforts to roust the encampments, arguing that people have nowhere else to go.

And cuts to police services have left housed residents feeling they are on their own to deal with the repercussions.

Nonsense! If any of those upset residents commits a crime against those homeless psycho drug addicts, particularly the crimes of self-defense or vigilantism, they’ll quickly discover that the police have NOT abandoned them after all!

Regardless, all is not well in the Land Of Weird. Some of the faithful are having doubts.

“I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I find myself wondering if we need to elect Republicans,” [resident Cindy] Stockton said. “We’ve been Democratic-led for so long in this state, and it’s not getting us anywhere.”

Browning, in Laurelhurst, described a similar transformation: “I look in the mirror and I see a hippie — but a hippie wouldn’t be advocating for more police.”

“I wonder, what the hell happened to me?”

Something something “mugged by reality”.

Meanwhile, others of the faithful retained their… uh, faith.

A former car salesman, Bixel, 41, said his free fall into homelessness started after he got addicted to painkillers prescribed for a shoulder tear sustained while playing softball at Delta Park nearly 20 years ago. He progressed from Vicodin to OxyContin to heroin, a cheaper habit that his wife also took up. Life spiraled as he wrecked his car and racked up felony convictions. Over time, the couple lost their jobs, their home and custody of their three young children.

“I went from painkillers after the accident to addiction taking over my life,” he said.

But Bixel hasn’t given up on himself. He thinks with the right opportunities — a job, a landlord willing to take a chance on him — he could find the motivation to get clean again.

“My wife and I, we’re looked at like scum now,” Bixel said.

You ARE scum, Bixel. You’re irresponsible and so out-of-control that even a Marxist hellpit knew that your kids weren’t safe with you. Now instead of facing your problems, you’re contentedly wallowing in squalor waiting for the government to save you from yourself.

“But honestly, this is also one of the best things that has happened to me. I used to look down at homeless people for not having a job, and if somebody asked me for change, I’d say, ‘I worked hard for this.’

“Now, if someone asks me for a cigarette, I’ll give them two.”

That is why socialists keep creating these nightmares. Government is their God, a God that they want to guarantee a safe path through life no matter what happens. The idea that somebody else might use that institutional generosity for selfish purposes, does not register with them. Let alone the idea that government might have its own reasons for agreeing to play God at your expense.

The realization being forced upon Portland is not merely that they cannot build enough housing to make the homeless problem disappear. It’s that their religion of an all-powerful State cannot be a replacement for either God or family. Some will die in their denial but others, if not discovering God’s existence, at least are discovering the devil’s existence and looking for an alternative.