OPINION | Looking at solutions to the homelessness crisis, which solutions go beyond spectacle and prove effective?
The humanitarian crisis of homelessness rightfully ignites a sense of urgency in many people.
Some rhetoric around urgency, though, is about other things: jockeying for political position, impatience with the fact that systemic poverty is so much more massive than the speed and scale of public actions, a desire for a spectacle of a solution, rather than a real solution.
I do find hope in the array of possibilities that people put forth. The village model, for example, has gained more acceptance, a hard-fought-for concept since people created Dignity Village two decades ago. I detect more widespread consternation around the fact that so many people live in their cars and are forced into illegal existences, so I’m hopeful that our city might yet create legal safe parking places for these people — often families. The bandwidth for solutions seems to have widened. A diversity of approaches matters for a diversity of people, as Leo Rhodes — my mentor, Street Roots vendor and board member — reminds me again and again.
But declarations about urgency should not be about jockeying for power, wasting energy and resources by canceling out good work. It should all be additive.
Our city and region passed two bonds and a tax measure in the last five years that deal with housing and services. I sometimes read declarations of failure because our region passed these and people are still on the streets. Many, many more people are struggling inside substandard housing, maybe tripled up with friends and at risk of being evicted because they’ve exceeded the number of people on the lease. Or maybe they are maintaining rent by forgoing medicine or food. It’s not only about homelessness, it’s about poverty.
I’m skeptical when these declarations of failure comes from private developers who aren’t creating housing that low-income people can afford (that’s simply not possible in the housing-for-profit model). Housing that people on low incomes can afford is buttressed by government housing vouchers, government rent assistance and other methods of government funding. It’s ridiculously complicated for cities, housing authorities and nonprofits to build affordable housing. Trell Anderson, the executive director of Northwest Housing Alternatives, once described it to me as layers of a cake — many, many layers of financing. That’s what is happening with this housing bond money.
These bonds are having to function within a housing system that, as former United Nations Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha put it, values housing “as a commodity rather than a human dwelling.”
If you have been thumbing through the Pandora Papers — the nearly 12 million financial records released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) revealing how wealthy people shelter their wealth, you probably noticed how frequently they shelter it in real estate.
The private equity real estate market — which is focused on squeezing profit out of those structures some of us regard as shelters — is massively powerful. Nothing about the housing market supports a right to housing. And thus, many people live without housing.
Together, the Portland and Metro housing bonds aim to create about 5,500 units of housing. That’s a challenging way to conceptualize it, of course, because multiple people live in one unit of housing, and the Metro bond, in particular, is designed to support projects with apartments big enough for families.
The Portland bond has two completed projects – the Ellington and the East Burnside Apartments – and has 10 more underway in a number of Portland neighborhoods: Cathedral Park, Creston-Kenilworth, Cully, Hazelwood, Glenfair, Kerns, Madison South, Northwest District, Old Town, Portland downtown, Kerns, Madison South and Powellhurst-Gilbert.
At this point, Metro bond housing projects are underwa y in Aloha, Beaverton, unincorporated Clackamas County, Cornelius, Gladstone, Gresham, Forest Grove, Happy Valley, Hillsboro, Portland, Tigard and Tualatin.
Last month, the most recent Portland Housing Bond project began construction with Home Forward — the construction of 206 housing units sited at the location of the former Safari Club near 30th Avenue and Southeast Powell Boulevard. It’s worth pointing out that this project matches the bond money with the homeless services money, which just began to come available in July. Thirty of the units will include additional services for families who are moving from homelessness into housing through El Programa Hispano Catolico.
And those Metro tax funds for supportive services? I recommend digging into the extensive detail of the implementation plan for Multnomah County through the Joint Office of Homeless Service : the services, the outreach workers, the funds to make housing possible through rent assistance, the additional shelters, the motels that can be transformed into long-term dwellings, the support to shore up services for communities of color who otherwise are underserved while overrepresented.
Another fatalistic declaration is that housing doesn’t matter — it’s about addiction and mental illness. There’s so much to unpack there, starting with the fact that housing itself can stabilize a person enough to begin to deal with their health (and that these Metro housing services funds can be used for this). But also, these health struggles have also been severely underfunded and, like housing for the poor, run discordantly with the profit-churning locomotive of this economy.
I’m proud that our community has stepped up multiple times to pitch in for housing and services over the last five years, and that so many people across the government and nonprofits are working to get the work done. The reality is that all of this goes agains t the systemic tide of wealth accumulation, and so if i t feels hard, w ell it is.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots . Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today .
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