Former Portland native here: it hasn’t worked. I was back just a year or two ago and 5th ave near the waterfront was overrun with homeless openly shooting up and accosting folks.
All the food carts across from the building where I used to work left, the Indian buffet restaurant closed, walking up around 10th near the Target to check out other restaurants I loved many I saw many barricaded former businesses.
The city used to be beautiful. It used to be vibrant and bustling with people and tourists and working professionals but when I was there last retracing my steps as if I was working and living there again it was not the Portland I remember. It’s disheartening.
That’s not to say I’m blaming the homeless or those addicted to substances or dealing with mental
Health problems. I’m not. I believe in helping people when they can’t help themselves. But allowing open drug use, camping in front of businesses, etc., doesn’t do much for said businesses and people to invest in your city leaving you with less tax revenue to help these very same folks with.
>That’s not to say I’m blaming the homeless or those addicted to substances or dealing with mental Health problems. I’m not.
You probably should blame them. They let their personal problems collectively spiral out of control so badly that they became society's problem, and an entire city was degraded because of it. Blame can still be assigned to the pitiable.
Addiction and the like has a genetic component. Also we, as a society, voted to stop investing in services like mental institutions or publicly available and affordable healthcare... so yeah sure blame the victims: they at one point had their faculities but now some are so far addicted they don't act as you or I would expect but in service of their addictions or afflictions.
Most things have a genetic component. Blame doesn't disappear because someone was more predisposed towards something. For instance, men are generally more predisposed to violence than women. Any sane person would agree there is a likely a genetic component to this fact. But if a man beats his wife, we still can and should blame him, even if it were true that with different genetics he would not have beaten his wife. (or more realistically, with different genetics he would have likely never married the same woman.)
I think we are in agreement here. What I was responding to was your seemingly lack of interest in solutions only commenting about still being able to blame folks for decisions they made whereas I think if we are going to spend we should spend to take folks off the streets and get them help or further remove what is seen as a blight to an otherwise beautiful city.
The streets and parks and business fronts are not camping areas.
It sounds like we agree more than I originally understood. I do care about treatment, and despite what my comment might have suggested, I think blame should be wholly separate from punishment or remediation. I don't care particularly if we spend a lot of time blaming drug addicts, only if we get the streets cleaned up, and their lives improved.
I really don't know where American ""progressives"" (they're sociopaths imo) got the idea that harm reduction and decriminalization involves just letting people rot (and shoot up) in the streets and just releasing people on no bail. That is not done in any of the places these people use as positive examples of the policy working.
This happened on such a scale that I can't help but wonder if the results as seen in Portland, Vancouver, Sf ... were the intention.
In my experience, they're inexperienced with the world and of a background where problems like these are only hypothetical, and therefore very black and white. It's easy to get behind the feel-good answer if you know nothing about the problem other than a Vox explainer you read 5 minutes ago. They don't know what real harm reduction actually looks like, because that would take more than hitting Like and Share.
"Wow! Homeless people still exist! In my city?! That's not very nice! And the police threw away the cover photo lady's tent and pepper-sprayed her friends sleeping bag? That's really not very nice! All to clean up the area for the visit of some official?"
The violence with which many camps are removed is abhorrent to many, as is the idea of shuffling them around for mere cosmetic purposes (not to actually get them into a better place), so there's a naive "everybody be nice! leave those poor people alone!" attitude that doesn't actually care about pesky details.
Since their experience is hypothetical and they're idealizing and romanticizing The Homeless, discussion on practical realities like the number of violent felons and sex offenders in camps is shut down with a classic "that never happens". They'll pretend it's some kind of made-up minority and not the bulk of people who can't/won't go to a shelter (i.e, because they have warrants or have been banned for bad behavior).
Sure, they got what they asked for, but I don't believe they ever really considered what they were asking for, beyond "stop being mean".
I think you accurately characterized a sizable portion of the electorate, not just in the US but in many Western countries. That still leaves me wondering what the social workers, homeless advocates, Mission workers etc were doing.
Either they have been screaming that this is a disaster and nobody wanted to hear (or amplify) them, or they thought it could work on a fully voluntary basis. The latter despite them being in contact with homeless and/or drug addicts regularly. Neither explanation bodes well for civil society.
I think people in western countries have been a victim of our own successes, where we enjoy such a prosperous (relative to most of history) life that we now unwittingly afford the luxury of forgetting how raw human behavior actually works.
People don't start out being nice, altruistic and self sacrificing. That is socially conditioned and a learned behavior. However, we have conflated those positive traits as the base class of humanity, when it's really not.
I worry that we will need to return to widespread suffering just to relearn the same things we knew only a free short generations ago.
The state is accommodating us by dealing with such people, and we keep the state under control (lol) by not letting them get sloppy with even the worst among us.
That is, the state does in fact have certain obligations, regardless of any personal feelings one may have.
WFH means biz isn’t coming back there any time soon even with the homeless gone.
It’s why homeless are downtown now rather on the fringe; fringe used to be emptier more frequently as downtown filled. Now folks are home on the fringe all the time.
I was just downtown for lunch on weekday and it was a ghost town. I worked for PSU for years, am aware of what it should look like and it’s just dead. That’s been the case since 2020.
If you want services, good luck. Feds extracted that money and feed it to cloud app companies to keep you all happy and you still aren’t.
Let’s keep giving Elon forever to fail to reach Mars and complain government experiments are failures right away.
Americans have a credibility problem. Work less and less but expect more and more because we have a lot of hallucinated wealth. Where do the real workers come from if everyone is doing office work? Now that other nations have matured after WW2 rebuild, how do we justify taking more for less output?
1945-2000s was a statistical anomaly. America needs to sober up.
I don't buy this "WFH makes downtowns drug-ridden war zones" dichotomy. I've been to downtown Portland before Covid, and it was pretty repulsive, just like SF. Sure, it has deteriorated in both places since, but that was not pre-determined. WFH != war zone in downtown.
These problems are so American. Downtown in European cities (that I know) are as vibrant as ever. Europe has done just as many social programs as Portland or probably more. Why do people no live in these areas?
It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement.
PS: US Government haven't given Musk a single $ to go to Mars, what are you even talking about.
All the food carts across from the building where I used to work left, the Indian buffet restaurant closed, walking up around 10th near the Target to check out other restaurants I loved many I saw many barricaded former businesses.
The city used to be beautiful. It used to be vibrant and bustling with people and tourists and working professionals but when I was there last retracing my steps as if I was working and living there again it was not the Portland I remember. It’s disheartening.
That’s not to say I’m blaming the homeless or those addicted to substances or dealing with mental Health problems. I’m not. I believe in helping people when they can’t help themselves. But allowing open drug use, camping in front of businesses, etc., doesn’t do much for said businesses and people to invest in your city leaving you with less tax revenue to help these very same folks with.