On this Monday, the city sent its contractors a list of 14 sites:
A middle school with two tents and three broken-down RVs blocking access to the student drop-off zone.
A vacant lot near Costco, where some homeless residents had been living for long enough to lay concrete foundations and start building rustic homes.
A highway underpass with at least 20 residents, where the nearby building was charred by fire damage.
A cul-de-sac littered with stolen and disassembled vehicles located next to the DMV.
During the past several years, Portland had systemically eliminated some of its tools for policing life in homeless encampments. Oregon had decriminalized the possession of small amounts of heroin and methamphetamine, which were common in camps. Portland had cut its police budget by $15 million and gutted its neighborhood response team. Increasingly, the city’s homelessness enforcement was left up to teams of contractors armed with nothing but de-escalation training, heavy-duty gloves, Naloxone to treat opioid overdoses, garbage bags and orange buckets to carry away human waste.
How long can stuff like this go on before you scare off the taxpayers who can actually afford the cost of living there?
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