Thread: Mayor @tedwheeler threatening to pull the city out of the Joint Office of Homelessness is more than irresponsible. https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/09/portland-mayor-threatens-to-pull-city-from-county-partnered-homeless-efforts-county-chair-calls-it-outrageous.html

I’m guessing it’s also part of larger agenda to create mass shelters for people on the streets in PDX, not unlike the 1980/90s when America’s mass emergency shelter network was born in response to modern day homelessness.

The housing vs shelter conversation has been an argument that’s permeated in communities for 40 + years. It was born out of the federal gov disinvesting tens of billions of dollars in housing & creating now decades of makeshift triage responses to ending homelessness in America.

Due to these realities local communities have never had the resources to scale up to actually solve homelessness locally due to the lack of state & federal resources for housing specifically.

More or less, the housing vs shelter convo/debate happens because we don’t have the resources to do both given the lack of housing, forcing the two separate approaches to homelessness to often times get exploited & pitted against one another for political gain. Both are needed.

The reality is Portland doesn’t exist in a bubble. Homelessness is overwhelming hundreds of communities across America right now. Portland is no different.

We’ve used terms like street homelessness/housing crisis so much that’s it’s become a rhetorical slogan used by everyone, including politicians. Today, because the terms have become diluted it’s become hard to even convey the gravity of the situation/circumstances we are facing.

The housing crisis & mass homelessness existed prior to the pandemic & was driven by skyrocketing rents, the lack of regulations in housing, the lack of living wage jobs/income & the lack of affordable housing stock.

All of these drivers of homelessness still exist. Only now the pandemic has created a crisis within a crisis on the housing front on a scale we’ve yet to comprehend. Millions of jobs lost, shrinking revenues, evictions & many communities facing economic collapse/hardships.

It becomes easy to scapegoat ppl experiencing homelessness for these realities, when it fact, human being sleeping on the streets are our neighbors & the products of a broken system & corporate welfare. The same system that wants to hide the homeless from the public at-large.

More so, we have a White House & R led Congress that refuses to support local communities & states w any support, much less the needed support, to both prevent an oncoming eviction crisis that will overshadow anything we may have experienced before.

The reality is we have to concentrate on moving forward, together, the best we can knowing until there is relief from the feds we can’t climb this mountain alone. It’s simply not possible.

In the Portland region, we have it better than most. We’ve raised more than a billion dollars at the ballot to create housing, rent assistance programs & other services to work towards combating the housing crisis.

We can’t forget we are housing thousands of people w a safe place to call home annually & building thousands more affordable housing units for generations to come.

Many communities throughout the United States right now have nothing. Zero. Nada. It’s not a debate about shelters or housing or any other housing strategy. It’s raw survival & an absolute nightmare.

Instead of division, we need unity. We need leaders. That means all of us moving in the same direction. Since 2016, we have passed three local ballot measures, historic renters rights measures, zoning reform, & multiple other revenue mechanisms for housing. We need more.

That means prioritizing sanctioned camps, decriminalizing homelessness, more policies that support the poor, supporting our mental health systems & overhauling the criminal justice systems, all things that relate directly to homelessness. There’s so much work to do.

What we don’t need is the business elite & those blaming the homeless for the repercussions of capitalism or any one politician driving public policy on homelessness & housing. We don’t have to always like each other to work together given the circumstances.

The work put into creating the joint offices spans over decades of research, experience & realities on the streets. Is it perfect? No! But it’s effective given the resources we have & the circumstances we are in.

We must continue our collective work for housing/racial justice in both Portland & throughout the United States. To not do so & bow to any one interest or ideology or strategy would be a disservice to our neighbors on the streets & our community as a whole. We must fight on...