Opinion | The collective strength of Old Town is a force to be reckoned with. How do we continue a campaign of hope for our neighborhood?
Hope is on the rise in Old Town.
Within blocks, Sisters of the Road is transforming the House of Louie into its cafe; Ground Score is dispatching clean-up crews from a warehouse where more crews repurpose discarded items, some of which show up in the adjoining reuse store; AfroVillage PDX is setting up internet so all houseless neighbors have access; Street Books sets up outdoor libraries and Portland Street Medicine hosts weekly medical clinics. It is this neighborhood where Street Roots is renovating its permanent home with so much care that Portland’s Historic Landmarks Commission named it a Project of the Year. We are feeling our collective strength.
All of this is alongside new businesses extending kindness to neighbors on the streets, from Barnes and Morgan tea shop to Goodies Snack Shop to Cycle Portland, as well as the longtimers, like Subway sandwich shop, which serves a bit like a de facto neighborhood message center. It is here that Old Town Pizza and Brewing launched a campaign to “Believe in Portland,” in the spirit of the Portland Mercury’s “Say Nice Things about Portland” guide.
This is all against the backdrop of a very different campaign, one that’s grenade-launching and angry, with billboards around describing conditions as a “Schmidt Show,” deriding the city and casting blame on Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt. It’s a fear-mongering approach about the central city for people who don’t regularly visit it and won’t, with that kind of messaging.
Theirs is a strategy of name-calling. Any organization providing services is “grifting.” Everyone who works with people on the streets is an “enabler.” These words are affixed to constructive efforts, such as Portland Street Response — which, without a community fight, is at risk of being dismantled — because the program is designed to meet people where they are at, defusing crises rather than meeting them with arrests and guns. This caustic, cynical rhetoric also underlines a camp ban that nominally began last week and pins jail time to public laying and sleeping during daytime hours, among other infractions.
Of course, this punitive approach is costly. Locking a person up in jail is about $400 a night, more expensive than a night in just about any hotel in town except the Ritz Carlton, which booking.com prices at $575 for the first available dates in October. “Ritz Carlton, more expensive than a night in jail” — a potential marketing campaign? We must not cave to a reality of a city with a deepening divide between the powerful rich and the incarcerated poor.
It’s a kind of magical thinking that rageful policy could undo what’s deep and structural. It feels a bit as though people are stuck in a snow globe, trapped in a flurry of fury, oblivious that what is local is also widespread: people are suffering in expensive cities across the nation.
Los Angeles County has seen homelessness rise 10% in the past year, counting 75,518 people as homeless — either on the streets or in shelters. New York City just surpassed 100,000 people living in shelters, which is about 1 in every 80 people. New York City has a right to shelter law, spending over $2 billion a year on it. It’s a different approach than many cities; a decision the legal aid attorney who sued the city for the law and then became the “housing czar” under then-Mayor Bill DeBlasio began to see as an unrelenting limbo without a right to housing.
Likewise, fentanyl overdoses are a national tragedy, not an isolated local failure. Fentanyl death rates are high across the nation. Unfortunately, there’s a great deal of venom toward people battling for their lives in public rather than behind walls, with the intensity of addiction in a time of cheap, potent and highly variable drugs.
It’s a strange strategy, scapegoating the ones who are suffering. The sociologist Matthew Desmond writes that poverty is about how “some lives are made small so others may grow.”
In other words, if the poor are the targeted, beware that it’s about protecting a “barricaded, stingy, frightened kind of affluence,” as Desmond writes, and not abolishing poverty. Ask why people might stir the pot of fear, anger and hate.
The late poet Lucille Clifton writes:
“so many ones to hate and i
cursed with long memory
cursed with the desire to understand
have never been good at hating”
She wrote these lines in the days after 9/11 from a desk about 90 miles from the Pentagon, where we both taught at St. Mary's College. Her granddaughter had just been born. Her love was for her granddaughter, yes, but it was also about the messy world:
“And I am consumed with love
for all of it
the everydayness of bravery
of hate and fear of tragedy
of death and birth and hope
true as this river”
That’s the kind of love that’s called for, one that loves the world as it is and as it can be. All of it.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. 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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