I've worked as primary care clinician in a "homeless clinic" in San Francisco for close to 30 years; a friend has worked in a similar clinic in Boston for the same length of time. Our jobs are not so different. I find it puzzling that people write essays & books trying to understand American homelessness without simultaneously analyzing American "billionaire-ness." It's all part of the same problem. Talking about the poor without simultaneously touching on the mega-rich & the hollowing of the middle class is like the blind man talking about the elephant's tail while ignoring its ears & tusks. Nick, you have lots of experience with side-by-side extreme wealth & extreme poverty in developing countries. I'd be more interested in your reflections on what you've seen there compared to what you're noticing here in the US, than in your commentary on the superficial differences in homelessness on east & west coasts.
It isn’t so difficult as it has been made out to be. When the cities on the West Coast decided to offer ever more services and to stop policing petty crime and drug crimes, the homeless population ballooned overwhelming those efforts. Yes, the climate is more moderate, but that isn’t the reason. The reason is well intentioned but ineffective solutions have backfired at the same time that cities like Seattle and Portland have seen their longtime leaders bow out and replaced by ideologues with few, if any practical solutions. Allowing park camping, wanton vandalism, petty theft and the drug trade to go on unabated is killing these cities.
It’s tragic because Portland and Seattle’s once had livability that was envied by tourists and cherished by locals. No more. Still possessed of much natural beauty, the once vibrant downtown in each place is very different today. Failure to favor the interests and concerns of the majority in misplaced notions of so called “compassion” only increased the numbers of, and misery and suffering of, the homeless, mentally ill, and addicted. Businesses have been done in by the burden of protecting themselves from crime, and cleaning up after the street denizens, and have thrown in the towel.
Effective leaders are scarce, and those who try are quickly labeled by every distasteful name in the extreme lexicon, jeered at, and pretty much run out of office. No wonder few put themselves forward.
Without better, more effective leaders, and more civic engagement by the citizens, nothing will change. It’s easier to blame “the rich”, or “the system” or “end stage capitalism” than it is to get involved in solutions and leadership.
That’s heartbreaking, because without the involvement of the people who complain about the conditions in the parks, or the petty crime in the neighborhoods, or the drug use and vandalism but do nothing else, nothing will change. But those people need a defined call to action, and something to coalesce around to be effective….and that takes leaders. Leaders with guts, determination, and the ability to communicate a clear set of desired actions.
My opinion on this is that our cities have let things simply get out of hand. All homeless people should be rounded up and triaged according to what their problems are. All able bodied people without mental problems should be sorted out, housed, and given jobs. All people with mental problems should be put in institutions (yes, we will have to open them up again) and given treatment. All drug addicts should also be put into rehab situations and helped. NO ONE should be allowed to sleep on the streets. I know this sounds like someone who is not a liberal made this up, but I AM a liberal and I have mentioned this idea to other liberals who all agreed with me that this is the only way to handle this problem. The criminals must be arrested and put in jail - not let out over and over again. Sorry, but this is what needs to be done.
there are multiple factors contributing to West Coast homelessness but don’t underestimate the temperate weather, if the politicians are not worried they could freeze to death in winter, their sense of urgency to solve the problem is lower since it is a ‘hard’ problem to solve, especially with the subset that have legitimate mental health issues
I write as a Democrat, a liberal, and a donor to you, Tina Kotek, and Tobias Read. I was searching for someone who would shake up the excessive moral signaling going on in Portland. Anarchists were allowed to co-mingle with BLM protesters. City, county, and state police officers could have gone in and arrested lawbreakers, separating the vandals from the peaceful. They held back. "Violence is the language of the oppressed." At each level of government there was failure to recognize that the violence was destroying the BLM effort. Officeholders needed to say that they were not being cruel or over-policing; they were protecting Portland and the right to protest by employing tough love.
No one wants to be cruel. No one want to site homeless near anyone. The result is the endless cruelty of people on median strips and parks, destroying the city. If police unions won't arrest people, fire the police chief and get one who will command enough respect that police do their jobs. We Democrats are supposed to be the party of good government. We should provide good government. It is OK to fire people who don't do a good job. The public expects it. They would appreciate seeing Democrats demanding it.
Democrats are too indulgent, too afraid of looking mean, too afraid of being criticized for being mean, or racist, or racist-adjacent, or not sufficiently anti-racist. So they tolerated lawbreaking, and therefore gave the city over to lawbreakers.
I think the West Coast is where the hippie movement flowered, and we've ended up with idealist folks who can be a little disconnected from practical reality, and I think this creates a feedback loop of politicians who are afraid to upset the voters. Progressivism is more like a religion on the West Coast, where it might be a little different in other places. Just an thought!
I have worked with homeless on the East Coast, and in California. I think weather is an incentive to solve the problems, and might be an element of your thesis. However, I think we have to go back to the Regan years, and the disinvestment in housing and mental health services. Deinstitutionalizing those with mental health, and not providing community based services was a huge creator of poverty and more. The expectation that 'charity' would replace federal investment in housing and services was really a failure, and the fact that folks have forgotten these policy creations of homelessness is huge. One of my favorite books is 'Sweet Charity and the End of Entitlement' by Papendock lays this out well. I suggest too that in the period since Regan we have resorted to the criminalization of homelessness, and incarcerated many. The health care system leaves those who are poor without care, only ER services, where they are promptly discharged to the street, where they get sicker and die. Just some thoughts. Edie Jessup
In the most simplistic of terms, the differences in east coast culture and west coast culture can be understood in the different ways they were settled, evolved, and reinforced by waves of immigrants that came and stayed there. Thse who went west brought a different mythos, one that assumed qualities and standards that resonate today. Manifest Destiny, gold rushes, free or cheap land bring elements of people seeking wealth, unbridled opportunity, and a freedom connected to land like few other places in the USA. I grew up in Texas, which has a unique blend of east and west, then spent a few decades in Michigan, where labor and natural resources forged deep bonds, now somewhat broken in a post-industrial world. Now my home is in Oregon, where I'm learning to discern the differences between east and west and coastal cultures... there's a lot of the old west here, and it's not Portland, which I have always loved for its blue collar days (like Michigan). I can't be sure, but the space between progressive and conservative is wider here that any place I've ever seen.
I'm a firm believer in education and have to think it's key to the problem...not just K-12, but adult and public education.
Here in Santa Cruz CA we have an overwhelming homeless population camped out right under our County Administration Bldg. Courts won't let the County remove them without an alternative space to go to. No one wants them in their neighborhood. Yet, we spend a huge portion of our taxes on dealing with homeless needs at the expense of anything else it seems, including public parks taken over by homeless campers.
When a hotel project is proposed it gets shot down by our "progressives" who scream we should be building housing for low income folks....completely ignoring it takes business and revenue to generate the funds for our country to function. No good idea or solution escapes 'the progressives' who seem opposed to all construction that isn't for homeless.
Around here its " BANANAs" :
Build
Absolutely
Nothing
Anywhere
Near
Anyone
And another year rolls by and we have even more homeless....everywhere under bridges, offramps, along our creeks and rivers.....making for an ecological nightmare, along with the countless needles discarded without regard for anyone else....
I'm torn daily between compassion and disgust....along with so many others wanting to see positive change and solutions~
Yes I agree that too often 'progressive' policies lead to unintended consequences and often don't tangibly help people. Portland in particular has a number of people in leadership (city and county) that are distracted by ideas of 'diversity' and equity, and when we have a number of emergencies happening these things feel excessive at best. None of this was apparent to me until the pandemic and subsequent homeless camp sprawl, which forced me to pay attention to local politics. Before this happened, I was only focused on national issues and always happily voted for all progressive measures and candidates.
I’m a teacher in Oregon. The education system in Oregon is very weak in my view, though I cannot compare this to the East , as I’ve only been a teacher since moving out here in 2018. I did live for 20 years in New York City, and definitely feel shocked by Portland’s downfall as I find it to currently be scarier and dirtier than I expected it to be in comparison. New York City has large global investment behind it, so it seems unfair to compare the standard of living in PDX to NYC. Apples to oranges, really.
My concern about Portland is that it lacks a wide range of people living there and keeping a sense of balance and stability. In other words, the political demographic of the city is very narrow and everyone tends to think the same and have the same ethos about society. In NYC you’ve got a range of views, a range of political persuasions. Your Wall Street banker is going to call himself fiscally conservative, but socially liberal, your working folks might be more likely to be Democrats and proud union members in NYC.
Portland seems to lack balance in government precisely because everyone thinks similarly and perhaps bad policies go unchallenged. This references the “purity versus pragmatism” you spoke of in your piece.
But education is definitely broken in Oregon. I entered a Masters for Teaching at an Oregon university in 2018, and the ideas in that program were half baked and lacked research and evidence. It was extremely ethos driven, and actually teaching students seemed secondary to “building relationships.”
If I had to summarize the program’s goal I would say to make sure that I, as the teacher, did not come away thinking I should be leading the class. I was instructed over and over to be the “guide on the side” to “not worry if I don’t teach them anything,” to make sure I “built that relationship” in order to be that “stable adult” in that student’s life.
Except the stability seemed to be based on how well they liked me, and not on whether they learned from me. Some of this is reasonable, but as the main focus and base of all of teaching it’s a disaster.
Just look at the approach to reading. At least teachers are demanding approaches with more evidence now, but there are a robust number of people in education who arrogantly balk at evidence-based approaches to reading. There is a commitment in education to ethos, belief, and ideology. There is an eschewing of structure, academics, and rigor. (The fear being we will traumatize the kids with expectations, so we have none that are solid.)
I talked with a man living on the street in my Portland neighborhood. He says that he can’t get a job because he was a felon, he can’t leave his RV, parked on the street, because it may be towed or other street people will steal his stuff. Does he like living on the street, I asked. “No. I hate it”.
On the homelessness front, two major factors: Cost of housing, and winter. There's a lot of left-leaning NIMBYism that drives housing costs up in LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle. And if you don't have a home, it's a lot better to hang out in LA or San Francisco (or even Seattle) than in the Midwest or East Coast. But whatever flaws of governance, none of the major west coast cities is remotely troubled as, say, Baltimore.
I don't fault schools so much for closing during COVID; schools are huge COVID spreaders. Maybe they closed for too long but it seems like this is one of many situations where Democrats are suffering from "no good deed goes unpunished."
The San Francisco school board's focus on renaming schools is, admittedly, an absurdity.
Could it be that the climate allowing homelessness year round (compared with the East Coast) along with cities giving benefits to unsheltered people are factors that draw people without housing to West Coast cities?
In the state of WA we have no income tax so services folks rely on are funded on regressive taxes that affect low income and the poor the most. There is not enough housing, there aren’t enough access to shelters, transitioning housing, drug addiction programs, services for families with kids, etc. The history of redlining and zoning that doesn’t allow for multi-family everywhere plus the arrival of the tech boom have made homelessness and poverty more visible and growing. Finally, Seattle isn’t terrifying. South Seattle and certain areas of downtown have been dealing with issues of petty violence, drug use and folks living in the streets for decades. The thing now is that is affecting the richer white neighborhoods in the North. So the response sadly isn’t more equitable taxes or social services, is being the police in so my neighborhood isn’t affected. We need real solutions that serve the poor so they can be housed no matter what.
I've worked as primary care clinician in a "homeless clinic" in San Francisco for close to 30 years; a friend has worked in a similar clinic in Boston for the same length of time. Our jobs are not so different. I find it puzzling that people write essays & books trying to understand American homelessness without simultaneously analyzing American "billionaire-ness." It's all part of the same problem. Talking about the poor without simultaneously touching on the mega-rich & the hollowing of the middle class is like the blind man talking about the elephant's tail while ignoring its ears & tusks. Nick, you have lots of experience with side-by-side extreme wealth & extreme poverty in developing countries. I'd be more interested in your reflections on what you've seen there compared to what you're noticing here in the US, than in your commentary on the superficial differences in homelessness on east & west coasts.
It isn’t so difficult as it has been made out to be. When the cities on the West Coast decided to offer ever more services and to stop policing petty crime and drug crimes, the homeless population ballooned overwhelming those efforts. Yes, the climate is more moderate, but that isn’t the reason. The reason is well intentioned but ineffective solutions have backfired at the same time that cities like Seattle and Portland have seen their longtime leaders bow out and replaced by ideologues with few, if any practical solutions. Allowing park camping, wanton vandalism, petty theft and the drug trade to go on unabated is killing these cities.
It’s tragic because Portland and Seattle’s once had livability that was envied by tourists and cherished by locals. No more. Still possessed of much natural beauty, the once vibrant downtown in each place is very different today. Failure to favor the interests and concerns of the majority in misplaced notions of so called “compassion” only increased the numbers of, and misery and suffering of, the homeless, mentally ill, and addicted. Businesses have been done in by the burden of protecting themselves from crime, and cleaning up after the street denizens, and have thrown in the towel.
Effective leaders are scarce, and those who try are quickly labeled by every distasteful name in the extreme lexicon, jeered at, and pretty much run out of office. No wonder few put themselves forward.
Without better, more effective leaders, and more civic engagement by the citizens, nothing will change. It’s easier to blame “the rich”, or “the system” or “end stage capitalism” than it is to get involved in solutions and leadership.
That’s heartbreaking, because without the involvement of the people who complain about the conditions in the parks, or the petty crime in the neighborhoods, or the drug use and vandalism but do nothing else, nothing will change. But those people need a defined call to action, and something to coalesce around to be effective….and that takes leaders. Leaders with guts, determination, and the ability to communicate a clear set of desired actions.
My opinion on this is that our cities have let things simply get out of hand. All homeless people should be rounded up and triaged according to what their problems are. All able bodied people without mental problems should be sorted out, housed, and given jobs. All people with mental problems should be put in institutions (yes, we will have to open them up again) and given treatment. All drug addicts should also be put into rehab situations and helped. NO ONE should be allowed to sleep on the streets. I know this sounds like someone who is not a liberal made this up, but I AM a liberal and I have mentioned this idea to other liberals who all agreed with me that this is the only way to handle this problem. The criminals must be arrested and put in jail - not let out over and over again. Sorry, but this is what needs to be done.
there are multiple factors contributing to West Coast homelessness but don’t underestimate the temperate weather, if the politicians are not worried they could freeze to death in winter, their sense of urgency to solve the problem is lower since it is a ‘hard’ problem to solve, especially with the subset that have legitimate mental health issues
I write as a Democrat, a liberal, and a donor to you, Tina Kotek, and Tobias Read. I was searching for someone who would shake up the excessive moral signaling going on in Portland. Anarchists were allowed to co-mingle with BLM protesters. City, county, and state police officers could have gone in and arrested lawbreakers, separating the vandals from the peaceful. They held back. "Violence is the language of the oppressed." At each level of government there was failure to recognize that the violence was destroying the BLM effort. Officeholders needed to say that they were not being cruel or over-policing; they were protecting Portland and the right to protest by employing tough love.
No one wants to be cruel. No one want to site homeless near anyone. The result is the endless cruelty of people on median strips and parks, destroying the city. If police unions won't arrest people, fire the police chief and get one who will command enough respect that police do their jobs. We Democrats are supposed to be the party of good government. We should provide good government. It is OK to fire people who don't do a good job. The public expects it. They would appreciate seeing Democrats demanding it.
Democrats are too indulgent, too afraid of looking mean, too afraid of being criticized for being mean, or racist, or racist-adjacent, or not sufficiently anti-racist. So they tolerated lawbreaking, and therefore gave the city over to lawbreakers.
Peter Sage
Medford, Oregon
https://peterwsage.blogspot.com
I think the West Coast is where the hippie movement flowered, and we've ended up with idealist folks who can be a little disconnected from practical reality, and I think this creates a feedback loop of politicians who are afraid to upset the voters. Progressivism is more like a religion on the West Coast, where it might be a little different in other places. Just an thought!
I have worked with homeless on the East Coast, and in California. I think weather is an incentive to solve the problems, and might be an element of your thesis. However, I think we have to go back to the Regan years, and the disinvestment in housing and mental health services. Deinstitutionalizing those with mental health, and not providing community based services was a huge creator of poverty and more. The expectation that 'charity' would replace federal investment in housing and services was really a failure, and the fact that folks have forgotten these policy creations of homelessness is huge. One of my favorite books is 'Sweet Charity and the End of Entitlement' by Papendock lays this out well. I suggest too that in the period since Regan we have resorted to the criminalization of homelessness, and incarcerated many. The health care system leaves those who are poor without care, only ER services, where they are promptly discharged to the street, where they get sicker and die. Just some thoughts. Edie Jessup
In the most simplistic of terms, the differences in east coast culture and west coast culture can be understood in the different ways they were settled, evolved, and reinforced by waves of immigrants that came and stayed there. Thse who went west brought a different mythos, one that assumed qualities and standards that resonate today. Manifest Destiny, gold rushes, free or cheap land bring elements of people seeking wealth, unbridled opportunity, and a freedom connected to land like few other places in the USA. I grew up in Texas, which has a unique blend of east and west, then spent a few decades in Michigan, where labor and natural resources forged deep bonds, now somewhat broken in a post-industrial world. Now my home is in Oregon, where I'm learning to discern the differences between east and west and coastal cultures... there's a lot of the old west here, and it's not Portland, which I have always loved for its blue collar days (like Michigan). I can't be sure, but the space between progressive and conservative is wider here that any place I've ever seen.
I'm a firm believer in education and have to think it's key to the problem...not just K-12, but adult and public education.
Here in Santa Cruz CA we have an overwhelming homeless population camped out right under our County Administration Bldg. Courts won't let the County remove them without an alternative space to go to. No one wants them in their neighborhood. Yet, we spend a huge portion of our taxes on dealing with homeless needs at the expense of anything else it seems, including public parks taken over by homeless campers.
When a hotel project is proposed it gets shot down by our "progressives" who scream we should be building housing for low income folks....completely ignoring it takes business and revenue to generate the funds for our country to function. No good idea or solution escapes 'the progressives' who seem opposed to all construction that isn't for homeless.
Around here its " BANANAs" :
Build
Absolutely
Nothing
Anywhere
Near
Anyone
And another year rolls by and we have even more homeless....everywhere under bridges, offramps, along our creeks and rivers.....making for an ecological nightmare, along with the countless needles discarded without regard for anyone else....
I'm torn daily between compassion and disgust....along with so many others wanting to see positive change and solutions~
Yes I agree that too often 'progressive' policies lead to unintended consequences and often don't tangibly help people. Portland in particular has a number of people in leadership (city and county) that are distracted by ideas of 'diversity' and equity, and when we have a number of emergencies happening these things feel excessive at best. None of this was apparent to me until the pandemic and subsequent homeless camp sprawl, which forced me to pay attention to local politics. Before this happened, I was only focused on national issues and always happily voted for all progressive measures and candidates.
I think there's more data points I'd need in order to draw up theories:
What do the drug routes coming from Mexico look like? Are they more concentrated in the west?
What are the weather extremes in the various Dem-led cities?
What are the housing costs in those cities?
What do homeless resources look like in each city?
I’m a teacher in Oregon. The education system in Oregon is very weak in my view, though I cannot compare this to the East , as I’ve only been a teacher since moving out here in 2018. I did live for 20 years in New York City, and definitely feel shocked by Portland’s downfall as I find it to currently be scarier and dirtier than I expected it to be in comparison. New York City has large global investment behind it, so it seems unfair to compare the standard of living in PDX to NYC. Apples to oranges, really.
My concern about Portland is that it lacks a wide range of people living there and keeping a sense of balance and stability. In other words, the political demographic of the city is very narrow and everyone tends to think the same and have the same ethos about society. In NYC you’ve got a range of views, a range of political persuasions. Your Wall Street banker is going to call himself fiscally conservative, but socially liberal, your working folks might be more likely to be Democrats and proud union members in NYC.
Portland seems to lack balance in government precisely because everyone thinks similarly and perhaps bad policies go unchallenged. This references the “purity versus pragmatism” you spoke of in your piece.
But education is definitely broken in Oregon. I entered a Masters for Teaching at an Oregon university in 2018, and the ideas in that program were half baked and lacked research and evidence. It was extremely ethos driven, and actually teaching students seemed secondary to “building relationships.”
If I had to summarize the program’s goal I would say to make sure that I, as the teacher, did not come away thinking I should be leading the class. I was instructed over and over to be the “guide on the side” to “not worry if I don’t teach them anything,” to make sure I “built that relationship” in order to be that “stable adult” in that student’s life.
Except the stability seemed to be based on how well they liked me, and not on whether they learned from me. Some of this is reasonable, but as the main focus and base of all of teaching it’s a disaster.
Just look at the approach to reading. At least teachers are demanding approaches with more evidence now, but there are a robust number of people in education who arrogantly balk at evidence-based approaches to reading. There is a commitment in education to ethos, belief, and ideology. There is an eschewing of structure, academics, and rigor. (The fear being we will traumatize the kids with expectations, so we have none that are solid.)
I talked with a man living on the street in my Portland neighborhood. He says that he can’t get a job because he was a felon, he can’t leave his RV, parked on the street, because it may be towed or other street people will steal his stuff. Does he like living on the street, I asked. “No. I hate it”.
On the homelessness front, two major factors: Cost of housing, and winter. There's a lot of left-leaning NIMBYism that drives housing costs up in LA, SF, Portland, and Seattle. And if you don't have a home, it's a lot better to hang out in LA or San Francisco (or even Seattle) than in the Midwest or East Coast. But whatever flaws of governance, none of the major west coast cities is remotely troubled as, say, Baltimore.
I don't fault schools so much for closing during COVID; schools are huge COVID spreaders. Maybe they closed for too long but it seems like this is one of many situations where Democrats are suffering from "no good deed goes unpunished."
The San Francisco school board's focus on renaming schools is, admittedly, an absurdity.
Could it be that the climate allowing homelessness year round (compared with the East Coast) along with cities giving benefits to unsheltered people are factors that draw people without housing to West Coast cities?
In the state of WA we have no income tax so services folks rely on are funded on regressive taxes that affect low income and the poor the most. There is not enough housing, there aren’t enough access to shelters, transitioning housing, drug addiction programs, services for families with kids, etc. The history of redlining and zoning that doesn’t allow for multi-family everywhere plus the arrival of the tech boom have made homelessness and poverty more visible and growing. Finally, Seattle isn’t terrifying. South Seattle and certain areas of downtown have been dealing with issues of petty violence, drug use and folks living in the streets for decades. The thing now is that is affecting the richer white neighborhoods in the North. So the response sadly isn’t more equitable taxes or social services, is being the police in so my neighborhood isn’t affected. We need real solutions that serve the poor so they can be housed no matter what.