You can’t bring a large population of people addicted to drugs or battling severe mental illness into a neighborhood and expect things to remain the same…. That fact is becoming more and more obvious to those who didn’t realize it from the beginning. These people need help not a place to crash. Millions have been spent on a deflection center that by all accounts is a complete failure. People with debilitating mental illnesses can’t help themselves and expecting someone suffering from drug addiction to suddenly start making good decisions is never going to be successful. Megan Moyer and Multnomah County have taken us down this path and as everyone can see….”all is not ok”
Agreed, Rich. Note that the city does offer some (minimal) outreach to these folks to help them get the services they need (over and above the bed for the night), and we are fortunate to have 2 highly passionate independent volunteers in the Pearl who devote hours per day to helping the shelter participants. But the county has to date been a no-show. JVP just recently commented that the shelters conveniently provide an 'opportunity' to connect the homeless with services to get them out of whatever situation they are personally churning in. The Moore overnight shelter opened in January -- why has it taken the county 12 months to all of a sudden realize that they should be part of this effort?
Could it be that for ideological reasons the decision makers don’t want to make the homeless and addicted and mentally ill do anything they don’t want to do?
I think our leaders are simply ignoring the facts on the ground, that people who are acutely mentally ill or acutely substance addicted are not in a position to make good decisions for themselves, and that we (government, society) need to factor that in to the strategies for helping them.
Jessica Vega Pederson is the most disingenuous, clueless and self-absorbed politician I have ever seen in Portlandia during my 50+ years of voting here. Breathtakingly ineffective.
Wilson just wants to tout that he’s now reached this completely arbitrary number of shelter beds but has really zero overall plan. This entire time he (and the rest of our government, at all levels) have ongoing opened totally useless, expensive, shelters/centers, provided zero “incentives” to force people into them and off the streets, and the large problems they’ve foisted on the neighborhoods they place these resources in have just been left to fend for themselves. It’s criminally negligent behavior frankly to knowingly bring hundreds of drug addicts/mentally unstable individuals into the middle of residential neighborhoods and I’m really tired of seeing him pat himself on the back about it.
I’ll an accept his self-congratulations when I start seeing the RVs, tents and trash off our streets. Let’s see if the City is really going to do what they promised when they sold taxpaying paying voters on all their homelessness bond measures.
Based on history, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath! Almost half the city council just tried to take what little funding/resources are now being used to clean the streets away from us. I’m sure future attempts will be made.
Deflection/diversion was a failure, and it is time to forget about them. Jail, followed by civil commitment for those who break public laws and have severe mental disorders. People are still underestimating the public consequences of the severely mentally ill homeless. Start with jail and civil commitment and give them a few weeks in the hospital.
You can’t bring a large population of people addicted to drugs or battling severe mental illness into a neighborhood and expect things to remain the same…. That fact is becoming more and more obvious to those who didn’t realize it from the beginning. These people need help not a place to crash. Millions have been spent on a deflection center that by all accounts is a complete failure. People with debilitating mental illnesses can’t help themselves and expecting someone suffering from drug addiction to suddenly start making good decisions is never going to be successful. Megan Moyer and Multnomah County have taken us down this path and as everyone can see….”all is not ok”
Agreed, Rich. Note that the city does offer some (minimal) outreach to these folks to help them get the services they need (over and above the bed for the night), and we are fortunate to have 2 highly passionate independent volunteers in the Pearl who devote hours per day to helping the shelter participants. But the county has to date been a no-show. JVP just recently commented that the shelters conveniently provide an 'opportunity' to connect the homeless with services to get them out of whatever situation they are personally churning in. The Moore overnight shelter opened in January -- why has it taken the county 12 months to all of a sudden realize that they should be part of this effort?
Could it be that for ideological reasons the decision makers don’t want to make the homeless and addicted and mentally ill do anything they don’t want to do?
I think our leaders are simply ignoring the facts on the ground, that people who are acutely mentally ill or acutely substance addicted are not in a position to make good decisions for themselves, and that we (government, society) need to factor that in to the strategies for helping them.
Jessica Vega Pederson is the most disingenuous, clueless and self-absorbed politician I have ever seen in Portlandia during my 50+ years of voting here. Breathtakingly ineffective.
Wilson just wants to tout that he’s now reached this completely arbitrary number of shelter beds but has really zero overall plan. This entire time he (and the rest of our government, at all levels) have ongoing opened totally useless, expensive, shelters/centers, provided zero “incentives” to force people into them and off the streets, and the large problems they’ve foisted on the neighborhoods they place these resources in have just been left to fend for themselves. It’s criminally negligent behavior frankly to knowingly bring hundreds of drug addicts/mentally unstable individuals into the middle of residential neighborhoods and I’m really tired of seeing him pat himself on the back about it.
I’ll an accept his self-congratulations when I start seeing the RVs, tents and trash off our streets. Let’s see if the City is really going to do what they promised when they sold taxpaying paying voters on all their homelessness bond measures.
Based on history, we probably shouldn’t hold our breath! Almost half the city council just tried to take what little funding/resources are now being used to clean the streets away from us. I’m sure future attempts will be made.
Deflection/diversion was a failure, and it is time to forget about them. Jail, followed by civil commitment for those who break public laws and have severe mental disorders. People are still underestimating the public consequences of the severely mentally ill homeless. Start with jail and civil commitment and give them a few weeks in the hospital.