Kontextmaschine

27th April 2022

Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 94 notes

morlock-holmes:
There’s a PAC in Portland which wants to deal with the Homeless crisis by introducing a ballot measure requiring the city to use 75% of funds dedicated to combatting homelessness for flash building a huge number of shelters, and then giving people the ability to sue the police if they don’t break up homeless encampments.
Which to me seems to be an implicit admission that the shelters you are building are worse to live in then a tent under the freeway overpass.
I mean like, normally a temperature controlled area with a place to put your stuff and not get rained on would be superior to, you know, a doorway, so if you still need police to force people to get out of doorways and underpasses and into your shelter, it feels like that’s a sign to step back and reasses.
Yeah, a few elections ago there was an initiative for some tax on high earners to fund housing but the people pushing it were more pushing a “housing for locals who would be gentrified out”/housing with wrap-around services/get-back-in-the-public-housing-game tip that’s got fairly high cost and lead time per unit created in a way that does not seem poised to really change the “woah there are suddenly a lot of people living in cars or tents on the sidewalk or elsewhere in numbers that can form sizeable Hoovervilles”
Also Portland’s in a federal judicial district whose precedent is it can’t criminalize public camping unless it can promise somewhere to sleep and as it stands it doesn’t have the capacity and until it does can at best sweep rough sleepers out of individual sites (with like a week forewarning)
So the local powers that be, which have really come together since the 2020 election, have decided that as long as there’s gonna be a surtax on the rich they may as well redirect it away from the housing dreamers (in 2020 they also knocked off unreliable councilor Chloe Eudaly, who was kind of owning that not-as-bad-as-SF-but-at-least-not-YIMBY-*blessed* incumbent resident housing angle) to Dealing With The Homeless Crisis as in getting all these encampments gone

Oh also the initiative would require cities in Metro (the metropolitan-area government that consolidates a lot of county functions) to keep camping bans once they get enough shelter slots, on pain of losing all funds, as enforced through a private cause of action for lawsuits

Tagged: portlandportlandportland