As a homeless-outreach pastor who has been working with the unhoused community for the last eight years, I was dismayed by a recent Press Herald op-ed (“City needs to answer questions about homeless encampments,” Aug. 2).
One trope – that unhoused people are coming to Portland from all over the United States to bask in the welcoming atmosphere of our wall-to-wall services – is easy to debunk. I have as yet to meet anyone who has fled the heat of Phoenix to set up their tent on a soggy, rat-infested bit of lawn next to a busy highway in our seaside community.
The idea that there are statistically large numbers of beds available at the Homeless Services Center that are not being taken advantage of by the folks in the Fore River Encampment, looks, superficially, to support the idea that these folks don’t want the help that is being offered – that they simply want to loaf their lives away in the aforementioned rat-infested encampment.
This reasoning, of course, fails to consider the numerous reasons someone might refuse a bed at the Homeless Services Center: couples not wanting to be separated; people with mental health issues for whom the cacophony of a congregate setting is unworkable; people with unresolved substance use issues that could be thrown into withdrawals due to the early curfew; people who believe that the community of the encampment is much more supportive than what they’ll find at the center.
Portland’s DHHS Director Kristen Dow has done an amazing job of bringing together all the various social service and city agencies in an attempt to find a solution to the encampments. The fact remains: There simply isn’t enough capacity to house all of the people that are outside.
In addition, beds at the Homeless Services Center are only one possibility for housing. Many of the chronically unhoused would do best in Housing First facilities with wraparound services, such as Huston Commons, Logan Place and Florence House. Others, particularly couples, would do best in their own apartments. But the fact is, there are vastly fewer opportunities for folks to be housed in those facilities. I haven’t seen statistics, but I have no doubt there are no residents of the Fore River encampment who have refused Housing First or independent apartments. These simply aren’t available.
I would love for the removal of encampments from public land by the fall to be a real possibility, but it’s not.
This expectation is indicative of a belief that if you continue to traumatize the unhoused by chasing them from place to place, they will eventually simply disappear or maybe, as Ebeneezer Scrooge put it in “A Christmas Carol,” that they will die and “decrease the surplus population.”
Even though death is a common and unwelcome visitor in this world, the bulk of these folks will continue to be with us no matter what lengths we go to to take the upsetting reminder of pervasive poverty out of the sight of those who paid a premium for a view of planes coming and going from the jetport, rather than a bunch of tents lined up along a parkway across from the cemetery.
At the end of the day, the problem of encampments doesn’t simply come down to charity or the lack thereof. As Martin Luther King. Jr. is quoted as saying: “True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.”
If we really want the poor to disappear, this is the work that we must do: not to hide the poor, but to consign to the dustbin of history the circumstances that make their presence inevitable.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
