Can Portland be saved?

The NY Times published a lengthy and interesting story today about the homeless problem in Portland. The story is titled “Fighting for Anthony: The Struggle to Save Portland, Oregon.” Anthony Saldana is the central character in this tale. He moved to Portland from Las Vegas back in 2018 on the advice of his sister.

Anthony got a job at Home Depot and for a while lived alone. Later he moved in with his sister and her partner. At some point he began using drugs and though we’re not told exactly why, he eventually moved into a tent.

As the pandemic wore into 2021, Mr. Saldana left his sister’s house and started sleeping outside.

He returned regularly for “Anthony Day” — Ms. Richardson’s day off from her job at a local grocery store. She served him meat lover’s pizza, while he did his laundry and took a shower.

In the morning, Mr. Saldana headed back to his tent.

He would say goodbye and leave. No hugs or even a fist bump. His sister said Mr. Saldana didn’t like to be touched.

Mr. Saldana was 4 years old when he went to live with a relative in California, who abused him until he was a teenager, his sister said.

That last sentence above is the most important one in the story. It explains why Anthony wound up on the street. A young progressive named Jakob Hollenbeck befriended Anthony and one night Anthony opened up to him about his past.

Mr. Saldana told Mr. Hollenbeck about the abuse that he had suffered as a child and how it had shaped his life.

“He wanted me to know that’s why he lived on the street,” Mr. Hollenbeck recalled. “But he said he couldn’t do it much longer.”

And that line above is the saddest one in the whole story. Anthony knew this couldn’t last.

In March, Hollenbeck stopped by Anthony’s tent and called out, asking if he needed anything. No one answered and Hollenbeck assumed he was sleeping. Nearly three weeks later police found Anthony’s body while preparing to move his tent. He had overdosed on fentanyl. His body had been lying there for several weeks.

This is obviously sad but as a reader it’s also clear that nothing done by Anthony’s sister or his friend Jakob ultimately was enough to keep him alive. There’s a sort of false assumption that if only they’d been able to get him off the street and back into an apartment somehow, he’d have been okay. But would he? Sadly, I don’t think so.

Anthony was a broken person. His experience of abuse as a child had left him with a lot of pain he didn’t know how to deal with other than drugs. He was self-medicating to the point that he couldn’t live anywhere but on the street. The person who abused him, whoever that was, really killed him. It just took a long time.

There is one voice of reason in this story, a hotel owner named Jessie Burke:

Ms. Burke, who with her husband opened the boutique hotel in the Old Town neighborhood in 2015, believes that Portland can recover but that it needs to adjust its attitudes toward homelessness.

In recent years, she said, the city has been too permissive about camping and people using hard drugs in public places.

“Some people respond to carrots, and some respond to sticks,” Ms. Burke said. “But we have used carrots here.”

There are also some really good comments. Here’s the top comment from a reader in Boston:

Saying this is an affordable housing crisis is an inaccurate trope. What price for a home would make it “affordable” and “fix” this situation? Ten dollars a month? Five? Rent could be five dollars a month, and most street homeless people would put the five dollars up their arm and not to their affordable housing landlord. It’s like blaming obesity on too many tasty snacks; people would just overheat calories on other food. We cannot fix what we are identifing incorrectly. We blame it on lack of affordable housing because saying we need personal accountability and tough personal choices to be made, isn’t “nice” or “sensitive”.

That’s absolutely correct. Anthony had a free place to live with his sister. He couldn’t make it work because of the drugs. He couldn’t kick the drugs because of his childhood trauma. Cheaper rent was never going to be enough to save him. Another person gets it:

Sometimes, you really can’t help people. You certainly can’t “fix” them. A person must want to change: their circumstances, their habits, their lives.

Many, if not most, of the chronically homeless persons are struggling with addiction and/or mental health disorders. I think most of them would refuse free housing, IF they had to follow rules and regulations about that housing. It’s about their “freedom”, “ “independence “ and let’s face it, being able to buy and use their preferred drugs.

In other words, they want to live their own life. And have the rest of us pay dearly for that choice, in a myriad of ways. When does it stop? When they go to Jail, a treatment center, or die. Choose.

One more:

The most visible example of liberal failure. There is no nice, feel-good way to get people off the streets. Enforcing the law is an unpleasant but necessary aspect to maintaining a civil society. Deny that, and you get chaos.

The homeless are clearly victims of something, abused by their own families or suffering a mental illness. But it certainly isn’t high rents. When rents are high, people double up or move further from downtown. They don’t decide to live under a bridge.

But whatever the issue, sympathy and understanding cannot translate into allowing them to take over. Maybe the answer is more shelters, mental facilities, or those homeless villages. But buying them camping equipment surely does nothing to solve the problem.

Anthony needed mental heath treatment he didn’t get. Giving him a tent wasn’t help it was enabling his downward spiral. So long as residents of Portland are willing to watch tortured souls try to end their pain with drugs on the street, the city can’t and won’t be saved. It will take the strength to tell people like Anthony no more and the resources to give them a viable alternative.