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Linda Witt's avatar

This is SO SPOT-ON, Alan Classen! Consolidating services in a single location would eliminate the damage to livability in the rest of Portland -- areas with working families, children, the elderly, schools and struggling businesses. Centralization of homeless resources would also be vastly more efficient in terms of resources and cost-effectiveness -- a wiser use of the increasingly limited taxpayer funds. Instead of spreading scores of outreach workers and specialized homeless services sparsely all over the city, they could be consolidated in one place, along with EVERY WRAP-AROUND SERVICE IMAGINABLE, for the convenience of doing real-time, effective and thoughtful triage that would help the homeless overcome their individual issues, whether it's a missing Social Security card, missing teeth, missing meds, missing a connection to low-cost housing, trauma/PTSD, or entrenched opioid or alcohol addiction.

Here's the catch: The mayor thinks that he MUST spread out the services so as to be convenient to the homeless, "meeting them where they are." However, other cities ditched that thinking and found much more success by purposefully consolidating services in outlying areas - Las Vegas, San Diego, Fresno, Amsterdam, Calgary, Alberta, and Vienna are a few examples. Public policy experts like Vadim Mozyrsky have said that placing shelters in areas with the least impact to the economy and residents "not only benefits those city residents who are working and raising families but also helps homeless individuals by placing them in environments conducive to recovery and away from negative influences such as drug dealing.”

Why does the mayor pursue this path that sacrifices the economy and livability of whole swathes of the city to the needs of a small number of persons, the majority of whom have entrenched opioid abuse and mental illness problems? (Portland's current homeless population is estimated to be made of 75% of mentally ill, opioid addition, or both.) Could the mayor be listening to failed policy advisors who have zero track record of actually making substantial inroads in the homelessness emergency, despite huge cash infusions over many years? Could the mayor be ignoring, perhaps, the wise counsel of public policy experts like Vadim Mozyrsky and Betsy Johnson? Could he be ignoring homeless sector experts like Alan Evans, who has an outstanding, data-backed, proven success rate in helping the homeless turn their lives around -- and who offered to the mayor to add adjunct low-barrier facilities on available land near Bybee Lakes)? Could the mayor be listening only to the entrenched homeless industrial complex, who are so heavily invested in their million-dollar properties in downtown, that they refuse to consider relocating to a centralized facility, but who prefer instead to simply churn ever bigger, year-after-year contracts with the city and county?

When will the insanity end? When can Portland neighborhoods reclaim their prosperity, their livability, their FUTURE? When will this mayor abandon his failed and very costly harm reduction policies, and instead embrace the law-and-order "tough love" approaches that have successfully reduced camping in San Francisco by 85%? Centralized homeless services, combined with enforcement of camping bans, would dramatically improve the homeless emergency practically overnight. It would save lives that would be lost to opioid overdose and it would pull Portland out of its disastrous death spiral.

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David Mitchell's avatar

Despite the widespread praise for Mayor Wilson’s supposedly genuine and well-meaning intentions, it is the height of political arrogance for him to have persisted in his incredibly amateurish and tone-deaf proposal for the new sparsely equipped homeless shelter in the Pearl District. The hopes and dreams of thousands of residents and hundreds of business owners who have made substantial personal investments in their residences and establishments, on top of the municipal governments and developers who have invested billions in planning and constructing the neighborhood since the 1990s, are being ignored by a single headstrong politician with no experience whatsoever in much the same way that our nation’s President gives the middle finger to millions of Americans who know better than their designated leader. So who will compensate Pearl residents and others with a stakehold in that area when their livelihood and safety will be further eroded by this feckless Mayor? We already know the answer.

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