Homelessness. Housing. Crisis.
Those three words have become commonplace in our city over the past three years.
It’s for good reason too. The skyrocketing rents are leaving many Portlanders at risk of losing their housing. Thousands of people continue to suffer on our streets. There is no end in sight. It is a crisis. No question.
Saying that, it doesn’t mean housing is the only social justice issue that should be deserving of our attention or the media’s watchful eye.
A colleague of mine recently communicated that with the amount of attention being focused on housing in our community, we are losing an opportunity to connect the issue itself to the larger social justice movement. Other issues that are equally important and ultimately connect with the issue of housing are being drowned out. It’s true.
For example, why are we more focused on the issue of a homeless shelter than the fact that mentally ill people are being warehoused in our county jail? Why are we talking about homelessness without talking about the fact that the lack of criminal justice reform in our community continues to create more homelessness?
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It’s one thing for government to highlight these issues in a report or offer a recommendation. It’s another thing altogether to actually do something about it.
It’s easy for government, nonprofits, the business community and neighborhoods to call for more revenue and policies to support housing and homeless services. The house is on fire.
It’s a lot harder to call for radical reform at the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, to end racial profiling or to hold the Portland Police Bureau accountable to its residents.
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What about focusing on the fact that TriMet should be offering low-income bus fare region-wide, or asking that hospitals offer more than window dressing through their philanthropy programs while maintaining record profits in the tens of millions? The list is long.
The reality, my friends, is the game is rigged. Anyone who’s got any skin in the game knows this. If you’re a person of color, you’ve known it from the day you were born.
We like to think of ourselves as a sophisticated city, but the reality is we live in an environment where everyone knows everyone and there’s limited resources, capacity and political capital to go around.
In short, it’s hard to create social change on multiple fronts at any one time. Step out of line or upset the wrong person or group, and there goes your ability to raise money and to have the political capital to influence good policy. It’s these very dynamics that stunt social change or reform in our city and our state.
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During the recession, it was most apparent when you would see large corporations, like banks, force local housing and homeless agencies to provide photo ops for $5,000 donations, when in fact it was those very national banks that helped create the housing crisis. It’s humiliating.
Our system is riddled with these kinds of realities.
None of this is to say that great work isn’t being done in our community. It’s to say that to be able to get ahead of many of the problems that face our community, especially in the context of poverty, we’ve got work to do.
In a time when there is a growing divide between government and the realities playing on the streets, it’s important for all of us, including myself and Street Roots, to connect the many social justice issues. We can all do a better job. We will.
There’s no shortage of work to be done from the environment to early childhood education, from tax reform to police accountability, from transportation issues to criminal justice reform. We’re all on this planet together, and we all have a responsibility to make our community the best it can be. We have to support one another.
Israel Bayer is the executive director of Street Roots. You can reach him at israel@streetroots.org or follow him on Twitter @israelbayer.