More luxury apartments

Sorry for the boring photo, but this is my neighborhood. This was once a fairly quiet area on the edge of a posh zone: a place for plumbing offices, lumber lots, and parking lots dotted with maple trees. Now it’s all a building zone for luxury apartments. Most of these will rent for $2500-$5000 a month. The sidewalks are lined with people living in tents (to protect their privacy, I left them out of the shot). As I walked to the post office to send my daughter in Houston a small package, I passed, in 8 blocks, 18 tents, one of which was being “swept” by city workers who take everything and put it in the garbage. A worker smiled pleasantly over his rake, just doing his job, as I passed by. 

Another massive survey of over 1000 unhoused people in Denver (very nearly the same size as Portland) shows that the reason people are houseless is that there is no affordable housing. It’s not all mental illness and drug use, as some privileged people like to say. Not eccentric folk who prefer living outside. Some 78% of respondents said they did not need mental health support to stay in housing, 90% said they did not need substance abuse support. What is needed? Affordable rent. Many houseless people are among the “working poor,” and 88% are searching for housing under $1000 a month; many say under $600 would be more sustainable, but there’s no hope of that, and only 17% are disabled and need free or nearly-free housing.

As I’ve noted often, hundreds, maybe hundreds of thousands of middle-class people have been paid to do surveys over the past 30 years, and those surveys tell a bleaker story every time they’re computed. In Portland, 59% of unhoused families are living with children, the highest percentage in the nation; many live in their cars.

The millionaire who beat Jo Ann Hardesty in her run for re-election to City Council has declared that providing tents and blankets to houseless people is “enabling” them and should stop. I am left speechless.