Welcome to the lemmy.world community for Portland, Oregon!
This community has kind of been empty since it was created, I'm hoping to change that!
Unlike "other" Portland communities you may have seen "elsewhere", I believe in a "warts and all" approach. You are free to take off your Rose tinted glasses and talk about topics that are dragging our city down.
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2024 is going to be an interesting year politically with all the changes to city government, I will attempt to tag political threads with a [Politics] tag and encourage users to do so as well.
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Links to know!
Portland Trailblazers Schedule!
https://www.nba.com/blazers/schedule
Portland Winterhawks Home Game Schedule!
https://www.rosequarter.com/events/winterhawks
Portland Timbers Pre-Season Starts in February!
https://www.timbers.com/schedule/matches#competition=all&%3Bdate=2024-02-10
Although understandable from an economicals standpoint, substantial evidence points to housing first as a solution to homelessness.
Yes, some people stay indefinitely, that's the point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
Edit: herea is a great documentation including explanations why it works
I bet it's cheaper to house these people indefinitely than it is to imprison or institutionalize them indefinitely.
Yeah but the latter makes shareholders happy.
I think that's true, but we continually try housing them in residential neighborhoods, and that does not go down well.
If ya ship them all to a facility outside town where they won't bother anyone, well that looks like some sort of concentration camp, and its probly gonna turn into one for real.
Housing them is an interesting series of challenges that we have not really faced yet.
One of the benefits of a housing first model is giving the homeless person security and safety. When that need is met they can focus on things like recovery. This "Alternative shelter" model is a joke. Sleeping pods? Basically glamping at this point and never viewed as a permanent home by the residents which means they never feel that security that comes from a permanent home.
I've never been homeless but I've spent a night or two on a park bench. The anxiety and fear of constantly being worried someone could assault you is real. The only way I could sleep is by getting black out drunk.
America needs to step up its housing first model and offer permanent living quarters with basically no strings attached, anything less will end up a failed experiment.
Maybe there's subtext I'm missing, but this doesn't seem that unreasonable.
Some points I gathered:
Seems reasonable to me because:
I understand there are a lot of external factors causing homelessness, and we do need more shelter capacity but this seems like it would help more people in the interim.
The whole thing sure sounds reasonable to me.
"Unwilling to engage" is a really nice way to describe these folks. Society has given up on them and they hate it in return. Ask them. They are happy to explain it. They hate the fukin world, and have plentiful reasons for doing so. Really. Spend some time talking to these folks instead of theorizing. They are perfectly clear about the situation and how they feel.
Many (all) of these camps are in the middle of neighborhoods that would rather not host a colony of social dropouts that hate them. You know, the residents are concerned about their kids, etc. So it would be nice if they had some way of dialing down the amount of hate that concentrates at the shelter. Is this the correct way? Beats me, but it looks like they had to do something ...
Can only try to help unwilling people for so long that you have to consider that this kind of assistance is not limitless and has to be prioritized for people who are interested and willing to at least try to support themselves. Fill up shelters to use them, but when you're at capacity based on what the local government and its policies by extension of the voterbase's willingness to contribute financially can support, you have to make hard decisions.
Will these people end up on the street? Probably. If this feels unreasonable, support candidates pushing to increase/reallocate funding for the program, or volunteer your own time and money to contribute.
I mean, we could also adopt humane policies, my dude.
Humane policies only work with those willing to accept them.
For example:
Is it humane to leave a woman with an amputated foot and infected leg sitting in the dirt on the side of a freeway in 100 degree heat when she's had not one but two wheelchairs stolen? Absolutely not.
"Vicky is known to our outreach workers, as well as teams who work with the city, all of whom have been attempting to provide services or engage for several weeks. At times, she has informed those teams that she has not been interested in care. But they continue to check in and try to work with her."
The humane thing would be to tell her "We won't let you die, come with us." and get her hospitalized even if she doesn't want it. If she were capable of taking care of herself, she wouldn't be in this situation.
Oh, cool. Edge-case hypotheticals in place of an actual response.
Not an edge case, they're all over Portland:
"Why would I want to become part of normal society, so I can complete counseling and treatment just to, f---ing, you know, be in a cell of life," she said.
No, it is an edge case. There will always be edge cases. And when it comes to things like medical ethics there's a reason why there are entire degree programs and jobs in that particular area. You only need experts in situations that require expertise.
Because when you get to the edge cases shit gets weird. I'm completely comfortable not having answers to deep ethical and moral questions, especially when they have to do with medicine or society. The vast majority of people just do not fall under that umbrella.