Why is Portland so infested with homeless?

[texasdiver]

Originally Posted by Woof

Homelessness is not caused by "liberals". During the Reagan era, there were court decisions (I suppose Supreme Court) that determined that committed patients had to be kept in the least restrictive environment possible for their individual status. Due to the advent of astonishingly effective psychiatric meds, most patients no longer needed to be kept in the often abusive, filthy state hospitals - there was a vision that they would be moved to less restrictive "halfway houses" and get treated at community mental health centers.

At the same time, court judgments made it much harder to commit people - it used to be quite easy, and there were many tragedies of essentially normal or retarded people being held in hospitals for decades. So the pendulum swung from one extreme to the other.

Unfortunately the states were breathing a sigh of relief at the cost burden of state hospitals being mostly lifted, and were in no particular hurry to spend a lot of money on establishing community mh centers and funding supportive housing. So the patients were given some clothes and a bus ticket to another state, and dumped out into the streets.

Resources are generally better now, but street people still need to be committed to get into the system, as they will rarely choose to get into it and persevere.

I'd say that nowadays homelessness is more about young people not wanting to work at a steady job, or who don't want to pay high rents so they afford drugs ..... and not paying rent of course leads to eviction. Then they find the lifestyle isn't so bad with their new stoner buddies. There are still plenty of nutters, but a lower percentage than before.

There was also a HUGE element of NIMBYism involved. The old style state hospitals tended to be built way out in the middle of nowhere on large closed campuses. More modern halfway houses needed to be built nearby to transportation, jobs, and services which mainly means in urban areas. But that can be incredibly difficult to do, especially in gentrifying areas where the government planning process provides a bazillion veto points for affluent NIMBY local residents and businesses to use to block any sort of halfway houses and mental health clinics from being built near their homes and schools. So even if the money was there the political will to actually make it happen against widespread community opposition wasn't.

[PNW-type-gal]

I think one of the changes in perception of homeless has been caused by a huge increase in a subset of homeless, who aren't homeless quite so much as just traveling - one of the articles describes them as "voluntary seasonal homeless."

Why young homeless travelers aren't welcome in tourist cities - LA Times
http://www.psmag.com/books-and-cultu...homeless-89243

I know we see them seasonally in Southern Oregon, particularly downtown Ashland on the Plaza. There was an article in the Ashland paper this week about trying to handle the problems that groups cause.

[2bpurrfect]

Originally Posted by Minervah

Someone posted here who was living in New York and had never been to Portland that Portland advertised itself as being a mecca or haven or something like that for the homeless. I don't recall his exact words. That is unfortunate because if people spread falsehoods like that around other cities it brings those who come here to camp out or think it is fun to spend their summer vacation on the streets of Portland while availing themselves of limited services meant for the homeless people truly in need. Mayor Hales will have to make the delineation between them.

The mayor's challenge is to seek out the campers and the kids who think its all fun and games and those who choose to be homeless milking the system who can damn well take care of themselves. Then remove their services as fast as possible and watch them flee. In the past Portland tolerated them because there was enough for everyone to go around. But because of the ever increasing scum and lowlifes who have come to our city with nothing more in their minds but to bleed the system because they heard Portland was a nice place to live and they could live free, they have killed the goose that layed the golden egg and taken away the resources from the homelesspeople for whom the services were really meant.

Well i agree that these people who don't have to be homeless in Portland should leave or move back in with family. But just to inform them and everyone else. NO healthy non-elderly single adult ( without kids) can get welfare here, nor can they get foodstamps for more than 3 months. They would have to be disabled or elderly or have kids with them in order to get any more than that.