The Homeless Problem in Portland, Oregon May NEVER End

This is unbelievable! How can we have this happen in a major US city?

I know you’ve heard about the homeless problem in Portland, Oregon. It’s a situation that’s just getting worse. We’re going to begin our look at how bad it is here in downtown, and then hop around to different areas of this city.

In downtown proper, there’s tents all over the place, but on the week I was in town, most of the tents were set up in one area - off of Burnside near Chinatown. But check back a different week and who knows where they’ll be. They move around a lot, since the city does periodic sweeps to clear tent camps from the downtown area. For all the reasons you think they would.

In 2015, the city estimated there were around 4,000 people who were homeless in Portland. At the time, it was announced that number was a 17% decrease from the last time they counted. We don’t have an updated number of homeless in Portland, but it’s clear there has been a huge spike here. It’s so bad, the city declared a homeless emergency. This place has gone from having an average of about six large encampments before the pandemic to more than 100 encampments scattered throughout the city. Here’s the latest map of where they are but this changes daily.

Portland spends a ton of money on the problem, but it’s getting worse. The city’s budget to tackle the homeless problem has increased by a lot. Four years ago, Portland spent $47 million on the problem. The following year Portland spent $57 million dollars. Then $71 million the next year. And this year, Portland spent a whopping $121 million dollars on its homeless problem. In one year. In the last six years alone, this city has spent $286 million on homelessness. That’s like $71,000 per person. Many people wonder where all that money is going, since the homeless numbers here are only going up, not down. And Multnomah County has just announced it plans to spend $1 BILLION on this problem over the next ten years. Part of that plan is buying up land all over the place to set up semi permanent camping locations for large groups of people. But there’s a new plan all the time.

And don’t forget about all the money Portland spends to clean up after the homeless. It can cost the city $20,000 to clean up just one small camp when they sweep them out of the area.

There’s been about 7,000 permanent housing units built in Multnomah County. They’ve been increasing the number of shelter beds and have tried to increase the amount of mental health and drug addiction treatment programs. But again, the problem is only getting worse here.

Here’s one such maybe solution. This little tiny village is in the heart of downtown. It’s made up of pallet houses, which cost about $7,000 each and can supposedly be assembled in an hour. There’s a handful of other little homeless villages like this throughout the city and plans to build more.

So Portland’s new new plan is to push people out of downtown and into self sustained little villages like this. The city goes through periods when it actively sweeps homeless camps from the downtown area, though all that does is push people out away from downtown and just scatters them into other parts of town. Or they just come right back a week later. Apparently weeks before I arrived, the city had done another big sweep, so what we’re seeing right now is just a part of what was here for much of the year prior.

But a question arises - does building everyone a home just incentivize people to not try to earn a living. I mean why work when you can live for free? Some of these people DO have jobs. Perhaps anywhere between 15 and 25% of homeless in Oregon are working homeless, who just can’t afford rent. The cost of living here has increased by more than 50% in the last decade.

People say rent control is the answer but sometimes it slows down affordable housing growth. Think about it - if they tell you how much profit you can make you might not even build an apartment complex. It happened in Minneapolis when they added rent control - whole much needed cheap housing projects stopped. And Portland’s rent control is three times higher than in Minneapolis.

There's an ongoing debate as to if cities like portland are spending too much on trying to find a housing solution instead of working to get people stabilized with medical care and drug treatment. But drugs have been a fixture in portland for decades now.

Portland’s homeless problem goes way beyond just costing taxpayers tons of money.

#oregon #moving

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