Mayor Charlie Hales does not give spare change to panhandlers. He's done debating the merits of a sit-lie law. He wants inclusionary zoning, although he says it's not going to end homelessness in Portland.
And though he agrees that Multnomah County needs a new local revenue stream devoted to building and preserving affordable housing, he says that effort should wait until city leaders figure out how to pay for street repairs.
On the heels of our Oregonian/Oregonlive series on homelessness in the Portland region, I sat down with Hales this week for a 40-minute conversation on homelessness, the pricing out of Portland and what comes next. Hales had just finished a meeting of the executive committee of A Home for Everyone, the effort by elected officials from throughout Multnomah County to come up with a new plan for homelessness. Multnomah County Chairwoman Deborah Kafoury had planned to join us, but postponed an interview as she mourns the death of her mother, former City Commissioner and longtime affordable housing advocate Gretchen Kafoury.
Note: The mayor's answers, plus a few of my questions, have been edited for clarity and length.
Describe the problem A Home For Everyone is trying to confront. How do you define it?
To address a seemingly intractable permanent problem with heart and head at the same time. Let's be collaborative partners, let's work together, let's not worry about turf or bureaucracy, let's get the federal government, the county and the city and the housing authority and the nonprofit sector together.... Let's carefully examine what we're doing, find things that work, do more of the ones that do work and then also be conscious about chipping away or taking down a piece of this problem.
... Homelessness is not a fixed group of people who've been homeless for 20 years. We have people coming into homelessness and people coming out of homelessness, or being helped out of homelessness in many cases. There are new homeless people pouring into that situation at all times. Why are they pouring in? It's a combination of all kinds of factors, income inequality, the erosion of the middle class, the fact that people don't have a couple months' rent in savings for when things go badly, mental health problems, substance abuse problems, the fact that if you come out of the criminal justice system, you have a really, really hard time getting a job. All of those things conspire to create more new homeless people.
On Saturday night, I was out on a police ride along with Officer Schmautz in East Precinct. He's worked that patrol area for a long time. He knows which houses are vacant, he knows which stores are having a hard time with shoplifting, and he knew these two guys we encouraged at the bottle return at Albertsons ... He got out of his car to talk with them without a tremor of concern, because he knew they weren't dangerous. But he also knew they were both addicted to heroin and were going to be there again tomorrow. Those two guys are just one little microcosm of those problems. They're living in a tent or under a tarp out along the Springwater Corridor somewhere along the border of Portland and Gresham. They're exercising some pretty limited choice about their lives. Their first choice is not living under a tarp on the Springwater Corridor, but that's the best choice they can see in the life they have now.
Mayors have been working on this for a generation now, since at least Bud Clark. Why haven't we solved it? What haven't we done? What mistakes have been made?
No doubt there are all of the above. There are mistakes, there are things we should have done that we didn't or things we did do that weren't all that effective. It's easy for any of us to look critically at this issue and say, "My God, they spent $47 million on Bud Clark Commons and we still have exactly the same number of people on the streets tonight? Did it do any good?" The answer is yes, there are a whole lot of people who got off the street, got cleaned up, got started toward treatment and recovery because they got under that roof. Does that mean the total number has dropped? No. There are a whole lot of people who have gotten out of addiction and into their first housing thanks to Transition Projects and Central City Concern. A lot of them are now working. There's a lot of individual success being created by good people, whether it's volunteers at the Salvation Army or Blanchet House or professionals at Central City Concern and other nonprofits. There's lot of good work being done. Remember this is a tank in which people are pouring in through several faucets and being syphoned out through several outlets.
This may seem like a personal question, but it's one I'm asking everybody I interview on this topic: Do you give to panhandlers?
No, unless it's a food coupon. I maniacally patronize Street Roots vendors. There's an example of people who are earning money on a legitimate venture, where people who are homeless or just leaving homelessness have a real opportunity. We have a lot of copies of Street Roots around this office.
Why not give cash?
Because most panhandlers are going to use that money for drugs. There's a lot of food available in the central city from a whole variety of wonderful organizations. There's not enough housing available, we all know that. But the highest likelihood of a transaction with a street panhandler is that the money will be used for drugs or alcohol. Giving people access to services, make sure they know how to get to Blanchet House for a meal or to a shelter when it's cold, I do that and I think most people do or would. But it's not helpful to give cash to panhandlers. That's a hard truth.
One of the things we hear a lot is that because food is so available here, because we have so many services, because we are so generous, we attract homeless people. Do you think Portland is a magnet for homeless people?
I think that's a smaller problem. Most of the people who are homeless in Oregon are from Oregon. ...No one is sleeping under the Ross Island Bridge under a tarp tonight in the dirt or in the mud because Portland is just a really fun and easy place to be homeless. No place is a fun and easy place to be homeless. This is a national problem. You've quoted the numbers; every big city has a homeless problem. It's a national problem that stems from societal factors like the availability of drugs and the ineffectiveness of the mental health system and the decline of wages for non-college-educated workers. All of those are big national factors. This is a big, terrible national problem, and we actually can make a difference at the local level.
What does it look like when it works? Five years from now, when we come back to write the series examining whether this effort worked, how should we gauge success?
It will be the norm that veterans will not be homeless. We won't see that veterans homelessness we've seen since the Vietnam War. Second, we will have more shelter capacity. For those who are ready to get off the street tonight, it's unconscionable that we don't have a place to send them. Third, you'll see the city and the county and the housing authority and these other partners working smart with perhaps more money than today, but certainly working smart with the money we have.
Last question: Through this process of A Home for Everyone's work, what have you learned that has surprised you or changed how you view this issue?
Not necessarily just through this process, homelessness is not a single strand. There are these other strands of mental health and addiction and dysfunction in the lives of kids that are intertwined with the fact that there's a dirty, unkempt guy under a tarp under that bridge. There's a story for each of those people, and an awful lot of those stories involve abuse, sexual predators, drugs, alcohol, an inability to get a job after getting that criminal record. My understanding of homelessness has become more nuanced the more I've learned.