Homeless in Portland

Portland, Oregon has a problem. People live on the streets. 

It isn't just Portland.

I wrote about the tents on Portland sidewalks because I visited there and expected to report on lingering evidence of the street violence this summer. It turned out that the real problem with livability in Portland wasn't the broken windows and boarded up storefronts from the 2020 summer of discontent. It was the shocking number of people living on the streets.  They are "the un-housed," as I have been instructed to describe them.

Their misery creates a problem for the comfortable, because they live among us, in parks, along roadways, on sidewalks, and huddled in doorways. They diminish the urban experience, but I cannot be angry with them. ""Few people live on the streets because they refuse to live in nice homes," I wrote two days ago in this blog. They are evidence of an abundance of failures, some perhaps their own, but certainly including some failures of America's systems and institutions, that we would have so many living this way in a country so wealthy as ours. I consider them victims. 

Herb Rothschild has an informed perspective on the origins of their victimhood. He was educated at Yale, then Harvard, was an English professor, and during his working years and in now in retirement, he has been an advocate on behalf of civil rights, civil liberties, racial justice, the environment, and peace.  For many years he wrote a column in the Ashland Daily Tidings. He lives in Talent, Oregon 

A Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

 

I’d like to contribute to the discussion about homelessness that your August 12th column spurred. My remarks have two foci—the presence of large numbers of mentally ill on the streets and whether public housing programs make a difference.

“Dave” asserted that Reagan “opened up the hospitals saying community mental health would provide the needed services, but then later cut the funding for community mental health.” What actually happened was different and much more complex. I know the history well, because beginning in the late 1960s, as a volunteer leader of the ACLU in Louisiana, I was deeply involved in the national movement to bring due process to the commitment and treatment of the mentally ill.

Care of the mentally ill, except in Washington, D.C., is almost entirely a state, not a federal responsibility. And in large part state laws provided little to no due process protection for those whom others wanted to commit to mental institutions against their will. Accused murderers had more rights. Unsurprisingly, most commitments were involuntary, and voluntary commitments were frequently changed to involuntary by fiat.

Abuse was rife. One story must serve. In 1970, I was waiting outside a committee room at the Louisiana capitol until a bill addressing the abuse was called for a hearing. The superintendent of East Louisiana State Hospital—the state’s largest—was also waiting. He told me that twenty percent of the population at East weren’t ill at all. Rather, they were elderly folks whom their relatives had had committed to a mental institution rather than to a nursing home because that way they got the social security checks, whereas the checks would have been sent to the nursing home.

Until a federal court ruling named Wyatt v. Stickney (1971), the institutions weren’t required to try to heal their residents, although by then the standards of care were much better than in the old “snake pit” days. Wyatt required a personalized treatment plan, reviewed annually, or the institution had to release the person. Still, people who posed no danger to others were being held for years against their wills. Finally, in 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in O'Connor v. Donaldson that persons can be committed involuntarily only if they are a demonstrable danger to themselves or others. And “demonstrable” means convincing to a judge in an evidentiary procedure during which persons are entitled to counsel.

It was in the wake of Donaldson that the big holding pens, usually in rural areas, emptied out. I considered this a just outcome; the people who were released didn’t deserve incarceration. Most of them, however, needed care, and the states weren’t willing to put into place community-based infrastructures. No small group homes, no clinics to make sure they stayed on their meds, etc. The new address for all too many of those released from the institutions was the streets. The appropriately self-named commentator Low Dudgeon may, in his arrogant ignorance, call these people “compunctionless career takers,” but the truth is very different. And the fact that many of them were psychologically damaged by their service in our nation’s wars of choice should give him pause.

The mentally ill make up one sizable component of the heterogenous homeless population. Another is the economically displaced. In Jimmy Carter’s last budget, there was more than $30 billion for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Reagan reduced it to $7 billion. Unsurprisingly, the 1980s saw a surge of homelessness. Currently, the HUD budget is about $30 billion, which means that in constant dollars it is half of what it was in FY1980.

Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage stands at $7.25, which comes out to $15,000 a year. If one uses the old rule of thumb that a family should spend no more than a quarter of its income on housing, then a minimum wage worker would need to find housing for $313 a month. There is no place in this nation with such housing prices. Even in cities and states that have enacted minimum wages higher than $7.25, a family of four can’t find housing below $1,000 a month. Actually, in most large urban areas, the average cost is likely to be three times that.

The market cannot supply adequate housing. Nations in Europe know this; they build low-density public housing. None of them have the problem of homelessness that we do. I doubt if that’s because there are far fewer “compunctionless career takers” there. More likely it’s because they don’t think a proper society should allow the top 1/10 of 1% of its population to own five palatial homes and pay low taxes while families must sleep in their cars.