The Mental Health Association of Portland opposes the city of Portland’s camps for people who are homeless, as described in five resolutions passed by four of five City Council members on Nov. 3.
It would be easy to say nothing about the city’s new plan to force people in crisis and who are homeless into three large outdoor camps. Most commenters and experts agree — without intergovernmental agreements in hand, without designated locations supported by neighbors, without the capability to recruit, hire and manage a sizable workforce, and mostly without substantive and effective incentives to attract people who are homeless rather than threaten or coerce them — this plan is going nowhere.
We write because we think the plan will be ineffective. To us, the plan shows a lack of research, stakeholder engagement, poor planning and fiscal irresponsibility on the part of city leaders.
Further, the city’s plan is proposed as a solution — which is a lie to taxpayers. For example, the city will spend millions to fund “navigators” to steward people to “available services,” except those services are almost nonexistent. Without new funding for services, such as long-term psychiatric hospitalization and acute drug detoxification, any plan will fail. This absence of crucial services — absolutely necessary to gain and sustain housing — is why many Portlanders are chronically homeless. Those who devised this plan know better but didn’t do the essential prep work.
Instead of concocting a plan which primarily serves the interests of property and business owners and not the identified people crisis, the city should have listened to people who are homeless and those who are direct service workers. They often know what to do, and they haven’t been asked with any sincerity, uniformity or skill. Those voices and lived experiences are missing from the city’s plan. The plan’s authors should have listened inclusively for solutions that make sense to those who are directly affected to learn to use attraction and not coercion or punishment to gain compliance.
The plan adds to a legacy of thoughtlessness. Throughout most of its history, the city of Portland disregarded people who are poor and people who do not have homes.
The plan is not just $27 million for one year. It’s also the lost opportunity of success in cooperation with others based on qualitative data. The cost is incalculable to business and property owners, taxpayers and people in crisis.
The plan adds to a legacy of thoughtlessness. Throughout most of its history, the city of Portland disregarded people who are poor and people who do not have homes. Only with urban renewal in the 1970s did the city begin to understand homelessness as a blight that requires its response. Then for decades, instead of robustly funding effective solutions, city leaders and administrators maligned people who were homeless, sought funding and resources from the county, state and federal governments, directed police to corral them in the skid road area, over-arrested and over-prosecuted them, delayed public education and conversation about effective solutions, and used homelessness as an economic bulldozer to affect real estate prices. Not until the cocaine plague joined cheap heroin on the streets in the late 1990s did the city commit its own money to reduce homelessness.
And when the city did spend, the spending benefitted property and business owners and never the individual in crisis as an end in itself.
No one — no animal — should be forced to live in an outdoor camp with 250 other people. That’s an inhumane and unmanageable experience that will cause trauma and service mistrust. The city’s plan proposes using both police and private security to monitor the camps 24/7, which invariably results in more arrests, more jailings, more conflict, more trauma — and less reason to cooperate or comply.
From the perspective of people who care about the welfare of people with mental illness, it’s hard to imagine a more thoughtless response to homelessness. Just roll out the process. It’s utterly predictable that people who are sick with mental illness, and with a public health system both unable and unwilling to take on more responsibilities, will be exited from these camps for “behavioral issues.” What’s next for them? Jail? Exile? These are 19th-century ideas.
The solution to this problem is fairly simple but requires a complete change in the moral nature of the city. The city and its proxies should never engage with people who are homeless merely as a means to an end but only as an end in itself.
What most people who are homeless want is help to end their homelessness, help which recognizes and respects them as individual autonomous humans. They want effective medical assistance and active social supports. They want housing — just like anyone else — which is clean, safe and with a lock on the door and the key in their pocket. They want work to become self-sufficient, or if unable to work, something meaningful to do with their time.
Changing the moral nature of an individual — what the philosopher Kant called the categorical imperative — is hard work for a priest, rabbi or an abbot. Changing the moral nature of a city is straightforward public administration. Assign people who put the interests of those in crisis first to facilitate the solution in charge AND remove people who fail the categorical imperative from the discussion.
Authored and signed by Mental Health Association of Portland board members and advisors Irene Kalonji, Mary Margaret Wheeler Weber, Sandra Chisholm MPA, Jason Renaud, Michael Hopcroft, Tara Candela JD, MSN, PMHNP-BC and Patrick Nolen.
Editor’s note: This letter has been edited to adhere to Street Roots’ style.
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