Understanding the homeless crisis and what we can do about it - Part 3

Our Compassion Actually Enables the Homeless Crisis to Continue

This is Part 3 of a series of posts titled, Understanding the Homeless Crisis In Portland and What We Can Do About It.

In Part 1 I presented three misconceptions about homelessness that are commonly believed. If you are interested in reading this post, click here: 3 Misconceptions.

In Part 2 I introduced three reasons why homelessness in Portland is twice the national average:

1. Permissive public policies inadvertently encourage homelessness to thrive

2. Our compassion actually enables our homeless crisis to continue

3. Applying the wrong solution to the problem

I explained that there are six public policies in Portland that cause homelessness to flourish. If you are interested in reading this post, click here: 6 Public Policies.

In today’s newsletter, I present the second reason why the homeless thrive in Portland: Our Compassion Actually Enables the Homeless Crisis To Continue.

What do I mean by enabling? Enabling refers to helping someone in such a way that rather than solving the problem, it is, in fact, perpetuating the problem.

An example of enabling is Multnomah County distributing for free 22,000 tents and more than 69,000 tarps to the homeless at a cost of more than $2 million over the past two years. 3 By their actions, Multnomah County is perpetuating the homeless crisis.

Multnomah County is proposing to spend $255 million4 this fiscal year on the homeless which represents $48,776 per homeless person ($255 million ÷ 5,2285). This does not include the homeless budgets for Washington and Clackamas counties, the City of Portland, or other municipalities within the Portland area. The homeless services budgets in the Portland metro area would likely approach $100,000 or more per homeless person.

Portland also has a very compassionate population. We not only fund bond measures that help the homeless we also financially support 325 nonprofits that help the homeless in the Portland area.

Unfortunately, our generosity, vis-a-vis government spending, and public donations, enables the homeless to live on our streets.

A homeless woman named Wendy was interviewed in January of 2023. 7 Her interview went viral. Wendy said being homeless in Portland is a “piece of cake.” She went onto say, “That’s probably why you’ve got so many out here because they feed you three meals a day and you don’t have to do s--t but stay in your tent… or if you smoke a lot of dope, you can do that.”

What I think Wendy was trying to say is, benefits for the homeless in Portland are generous. But I strongly disagree with her. Life on the street is not a “piece of cake.” Life on the street is a living hell as evidenced by these statistics:

• 75 percent of the unsheltered homeless are addicted to drugs and alcohol8

• 78 percent have a mental illness 8

• 72 percent of homeless women and 30 percent of homeless youth have been raped9

• Homeless people die on average 22 years earlier than those in the general population10

No one should be subjected to these types of conditions. Above all, we need to be compassionate towards the homeless. However, the most compassionate thing we can do is address the underlying causes of their homelessness, and by doing so, return them to stability so they are no longer homeless. But the question that begs to be answered is this: “When does compassion cross over the line and become enabling? There is a fine line between the two and I believe our elected officials by their generosity are perpetuating the homeless crisis, not solving it. Enabling the homeless to live on our streets only prolongs their suffering.

In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court adjudicated a case on pornography.  When asked to define pornography, Justice Potter Stewart stated, “I know it when I see it.” The same is true with enabling. There is a bill before the Oregon State Legislature proposing to give homeless people $1,000 a month for twelve months. If passed, that bill is an egregious form of enabling; rather than solving the problem of homelessness, it perpetuates homelessness on our streets.

An unintended consequence of our permissive policies & generous benefits

The migration of the homeless to Portland is another unintended consequence of Portland’s permissive policies and generous benefits. Based on Multnomah County’s 2019 Point in Time homeless census, 53 percent of Portland’s unsheltered are “Homeless Upon Arrival.” Two-thirds of these individuals have arrived in Portland from outside of Oregon. With the passage of Measure 110 in 2020, which legalized small amounts of hard drugs, it is quite likely that the percentage of homeless from out of state has only increased.

A recent conversation with an executive director of a nonprofit that helps the homeless confirms these out-of-state statistics. She indicated that well over half of those they serve moved here from other states and many of them were given one-way bus tickets to get here.

In summary, Portland is generous towards the homeless in services provided and has the ideal policy conditions to encourage the homeless to sleep on our streets, feed an addiction, and commit property crimes to survive, with little or no law enforcement to change behavior. And that is why we have a growing, festering homeless crisis in Portland.

In my next post, I will identify the real causes of homelessness. Of all the reasons cited for homelessness, which do you think could be described as the precursor to homelessness? I think the answer will surprise you.

Footnotes

3 Multnomah County purchased more than 22,000 tents for homeless in recent years, Jim Redden, Portland Tribune, December 8, 2022, https://www.opb.org/article/2022/12/08/multnomah-county-purchased-more-than-22000-tents-for-homeless-in-recent-years/

4 Multnomah County budget puts $255M toward homeless crisis, by Rebecca Ellis, OPB, May 28,2022.

5 Tri-county Point in Time Count numbers, shared regionally for first time, show shifts in homelessness, Multnomah County, May 4, 2022.

6 Rose City Resource, a Street Roots publication, 2020

7 Portland woman claims it’s a “piece of cake” to be homeless in city https://www.foxnews.com/media/Portland-woman-claims-piece-of-cake-homeless-city, by Taylor Penley, January 3, 2023

8 Janey Rountree, Nathan Hess, and Austin Lyke, “Health Conditions Among Unsheltered Adults in the U.S.” Policy Brief, California Policy Lab, October 2019, p.9.

9 Rates of violence against the homeless are worse than you think, Gov1 by Lexipol, Megan Wells, April 20, 2020. https://www.gov1.com/public-safety/articles/rates-of-violence-against-the-homeless-are-worse-than-you-think-PZ7QgDNA4F2MXDwf/

10 Center for Health Impact Evaluation, “Recent Trends in Mortality Rates and Causes of Death Among People Experiencing Homelessness in Los Angeles County,” County of Los Angeles, Department of Public Health, October 2019.