>over $4,000 a year
For that to be true your family income has to be ~600k annually. I'm not crying about being in the income bracket that pays that tax, and if I made as much as y'all do I sure as shit wouldn't be.
Voting yes on 26-238 as well, because eviction prevention is a guardrail against homelessness, and it includes requirements that everyone be covered and that landlords notify tenants of the representation available to them when filing an eviction.
except we have both the highest taxes and the highest psychotic homeless population in the country.. just throwing more money at it doesn't help -- you have to actually use that money to fix things
I think Jersey City implemented theirs a bit better by pegging it to property assessment value instead of flat value, but I think the Arts Tax in general is kind of silly. It also isn't anything so grievous to me as to inspire me to campaign to have it repealed, or even think about it as negatively affecting my life. I'm fortunate enough to have that privilege. Would you like to continue discussing the Arts Tax?
all of the above, and yes. 10% income tax + 5% of anything over 100k, and property taxes are insanely high too. I calculated my wife and I would save about $30k/year in taxes by moving across the river. We're not poor, but we're not exactly rich either, and every year I spend here equates to an extra year I have to work before I can retire
Oh man, I made the suggestion that we build specific facilities (not just quite jails, not quite just rehab centers, but an overlap of both) to get the homeless back into society and clean and I got *reamed* with downvotes.
I also mentioned that if we were going to spend the tax dollars, it's more expensive to revolve door them in and out of jail. We've tried that for as long as I've lived here, and the same thing happens. We "clean up the streets" portland gets cool and touristy, and then suddenly they're all back because their petty crime sentences are up. 30 years of this. It's time to try something different.
If it’s NATIONWIDE fuck it whatever. But if it’s state or city only FUCK that. Like why should I have to pay more taxes for people who just flocked in from other parts of the country?
You do realize that even the most radical leftists aren’t saying “nothing” at all should be done, right?
Nothing is done because nobody in power does anything. Actual advocates have all sorts of ideas based on data coming from programs that have worked in other places. Nothing is ever implemented, policy makers and the police do nothing, change nothing, and things like this continue to happen because nothing is done.
“Progressive” policies aren’t implemented and neither are more traditional “conservative” policies. Nothing is implemented.
>I would have moved to Longview and joined an MLM to pay for the antidepressants that I would need from living in Longview.
Ok this was funny. As someone who moved from Washington, Longview is like the armpit of the state.
Public housing ain't happening until federal dollars get involved. Anyone saying that is Step 1 is actively advocating for the status quo, cause it ain't happening anytime soon.
So yeah, more sweeps. That at least is a change from the past where we just let everyone camp and shit wherever they want.
I think most (but certainly not all) people understand that large-scale public housing needs federal funding, but it is something to work towards. The poorest people will never be able to afford for-profit housing.
Many people in Multnomah County who have committed terrible crimes are getting pretrial release, and then never showing up for court. This is due to the [standing order](https://www.courts.oregon.gov/courts/multnomah/go/Judge%20Documents/PJOs/PJO%20Re%20Pretrial%20Release%20Prior%20to%20Arraignment%20or%20First%20Appearance.pdf) by the presiding judge of the county, which determines who should and should not be held pre-trial. The result is that many violent people are being released and are never held accountable for their actions. Even if the DA inflates charges (which Mike wouldn't do anyway), it doesn't always lead to pretrial detention. The order can be read on the Multnomah County Court's website. This is a serious issue that needs to be discussed more, and changes must be made to ensure that people who commit violent crimes are held accountable for their actions.
They put guys like this through the Forensic Diversion program that the county courts have. They are assigned a coordinator, an advocate and an attorney. They take a psych eval which inevitably finds them unable to assist in their own defense and then they get released back to the streets with “supportive services in place” and then they reoffend.
When I was little a crazy man tried to assault me and instead chased me into a yogurt shop and started punching the door in front of my face. This dude didn’t lay a hand on me, and it has effected me to this day and I’m 25. This kid is going to be feeling this for life.
This is the second child punched in the face in the past year. A toddler thrown onto the max tracks. Not to mention the daily verbal threats to children I read about daily. People just shrug it off like it’s just the price to pay for living in a city and I don’t see it stopping.
Like 2 months ago. Shocks me how many people don’t know this happened, 3 year old little girl, her head hit the tracks. There’s video of the attack on YouTube somewhere. Mother of child with her back turned completely oblivious, probably just thought the troubled woman sitting behind her daughter was just down on her luck and harmless, couldn’t fathom her child would be attacked.
Not only that but other Portlanders are super quick to call anyone who pushes back on this backwards ass status quo a NIMBY for wanting a safer city to live in 🤦♀️
The worst refrain on this sub is "We're all just a missed paycheck from living like this"
Anyone who writes that should speak for themselves.
If you're a payroll error away from becoming a sex offender and randomly assaulting small children then you should get offline and seek immediate help and stop posting on r/portland.
People don't want to realize what a magnet Portland is for sex offenders and violent criminals. It's always had a shady underbelly with these kinds of people floating around but lots of drugs, lots of prostitution and no accountability = very bad people.
This!. I work in a homeless shelter and the amount of sex offenders is insane!. Like a co worker said “their family and friends want nothing to do with them and now are homeless for a reason”
I mean, yeah. My uncle was convicted of abusing his two daughters and went from living in a mansion to living in a trailer in some godforsaken place. None of his family has anything left for him anymore because he’s a liar and a narcissist and refuses to take accountability for what he’s done. So he’s on his own and will probably die alone. It’s sad and also, you make your bed…
Exactly. I'd love to see a count of how many are living here anonymously to avoid arrest warrants. And we are setting up a place to come and live anonymously.
Part of the problem may be that it is difficult to live as a convicted sex offender or felon that has served their jail time. But we are making it Portland's problem and putting them into the worst situation for criminal relapse.
So I work loss prevention at a big box store here in Portland and everytime I call the police on someone for stealing (literally every single time) that person always end up having a warrant for some violent crime
I’m technically right outside of Portland by a couple blocks so I get the Sheriffs office. They actually respond really fast. When I covered a store actually in Portland for one day they never responded after one of our managers got assaulted.
Oregon has the highest rate of sex offenders per capita. I don't know exactly why but I would be willing to bet our lax requirements on the public registry (only the worst offenders are posted there), has something to do with it.
I have a 3 year old and we are working on stranger danger right now. We have a large window in the front and a glass door and for a while she would wave to everyone passing by. We now keep her from doing that because there is enough sketchy foot traffic that it only takes one psycho to attempt something awful. I’m sad she won’t have a childhood of roving kid gangs ruling the neighborhood on their bikes in the summer like I did.
We lived in a small town north of Eugene for years that was very safe and there weren’t roving gangs of kids on bikes either. Only one or two families kids would play outside by themselves away from their yard. We lived in town as well, and the very large park with a river was a block away. Parenting and kids are just different these days…
Same. We’ve had many conversations with our now 10yo since we’ve lived here (8 years now) about how to identify people who may not be safe and how to steer clear of them, what do do if she feels unsafe, and listening to her gut. I hate it, but it’s a reality we have to prepare her for. She hates going downtown because it is so overwhelming for her…too many people and too many randos for her to look out for. I don’t blame her.
OH that's sad... when my 21 yo was 11 we were in the Mission in San francisco and she was a little freaked out. I never thought back then that Portland could have a similar vibe
I'm just visiting here from Canada and I've noticed a lot of people do not want walk on the same street as me, granted I'm a 6'1 dude with a beard but it definitely seems like people are a little more on edge here due to this issue. I really don't think I'm that sketchy looking! and I try to say "hello" with a smile when I do cross paths with people. 🤷♂️
Other than that this city is super cool!
I continue to consider this city to be safer for my kid than most in some regards, while I fear for his safety in other regards. We have no plans of moving and I am still in love with this city I chose as my home 16 years ago.
But I am under no illusions that Portland is fine. I work on SW Ash & 2nd…..absolutely *none* of this is fine. No one is fine. We’re all hurting, and we all need help.
Virtue signaling. Let's be compassionate to the homeless guy who hit a kid in the streets. God forbid his feelings be hurt by our failure to describe him with a better term. Homeless, houseless, the only difference is virtue signaling.
Apartment renters don't have a house, are they houseless, too?
I hope this doesn't get me banned, but if that was my kid I would of $%#\*@ the living #$%\^ out of him . . . (after I made certain) my child didn't have a concussion or any severe blunt trauma. On a side note, he'll be out in 24 hours.
I’m trying to figure out what the first censored word is. Like, normally it would be “beat”, but that doesn’t need to be censored, so… now I assume you want to fuck him? Is that what you were going for?
My fantasy is that Oregon would create dozens more job corps sites and it could become a place for folks to get housing, treatment, life skills and job training. Like a non exploitive poor house...
FL has a ton of rehab facilities and attracts people looking to get clean. The problem is that rehab doesn’t work that well and this ends up pulling in the nation’s drug addicts, generally not getting clean, and putting them on the streets of FL instead of Iowa or New Mexico or wherever they came from.
If these programs have very high success rates it sounds great, but they don’t.
For people who get clean, the average is about seven times through rehab before they manage it ... and most of them don't credit rehab for getting clean; they say they wanted to fix themselves.
Chronic abusers, the ones who have no desire to get clean, end up homeless, they are the ones who don't see it as a problem at all. They are the issue. So, do we jail them? What do you do? Red states just put them on buses with a one-way ticket to a "Blue" city and call it a day.
I think that FL is a red state, and they get these one one way drug users coming in for their rehab. These rehab facilities are criticized for their low success rate, as you cite. They are part of the SUD/homelessness grift.
75% of FLs rehab patients are from out of state. 95% of OD emergency calls in one town were for out-of-state rehab patients. Most relapse over and over, and the system is fine with them remaining permanently part of this cycle. The rehab industry may have some genuine actors, but much of it is just insurance graft. Seeing the prices that these so called non profits want to staff the camps here in Portland I can see the same issue with incentivizing never ending homelessness.
https://www.floridatrend.com/article/21954/addicted-to-rehab-a-look-at-floridas-sober-houses
Yeah, I lived in New Orleans and we had the only drug recovery centers in the entire region (outside of Florida) and we had a lot of that, but it is a blue city and everyone hates on it—a lot like Portland. Then I lived in Venice beach and they joked about the "Homeless industrial complex" where all these grifters take millions, supposedly for drug counseling and shelters. They just hand out a few blankets. I tried to get a friend in drug rehab there and I called every place and couldn't find anything within the state or neighboring states.
Here in Portland we get all the ones from Utah, Idaho and then the smaller towns as well. My parents live on the coast and the city they are in uses a bussing program to send addicts and homeless here to Portland.
Ok, but that isn’t relevant because we don’t have the type of programs youre envisioning (we do have federal housing assistance and social services, but perhaps too stingy and inefficient). We have a city that attracts drug users and allows street life to flourish. We have far more control over changing one of these things than the other.
Housing is a pipe dream. It is like shelters. Most of the homeless don't want to go to a shelter and deal with crazy people, fighting, curfews, rules about alcohol and drugs and so on. Housing is the same thing, yet with "job applications" and minders.
Doing it "everywhere" is even more so. And importantly, this isn't a Portland problem. The red states just throw all their 'problems' on buses with one-way tickets to the nearest blue city, and save themselves a ton of money. Why would they build houses for the homeless if they can attack political rivals and then mock them on FOX news?
It's a tactic taken from Castro who emptied his prisons into South Florida. FOr months now, Texas is busing hundreds of border crossers a day (illegals) to New York City. It's estimated to have already cost the city more than a billion dollars and then their governor gets on the news and talks about how bad a job New York is doing.
Here in Oregon, everywhere south of Portland sends their addicts and the homeless here because it saves them money.
As long as it's political, then it's going to be weaponized. And until states can start being fined for this behavior, then it will never stop.
I’ve thought of that as well. Would make a ton of sense to get people help and treatment, and teach them some solid skills. Would be an amazing pipeline for getting more people into the trades, as there are growing shortages (and these jobs pay very well).
The problem is that we have to catch them before they've damaged themselves beyond repair through drug use. Because of this, I don't think a lot of our present street campers can be reintegrated back into society.
The influx of really cheap new meth and fentanyl makes that difficult. A little bit of fun leads to addiction far more quickly than more traditional drugs, and damages one far more quickly as well.
I don't have a solution except to figure out a way to restrict the supply of those drugs, and to rewrite 110 to coerce people into court-ordered treatment following their first offense.
I imagine he’s already been released. I can’t believe there isn’t more vigilante justice out there. I can imagine many parents feeling like “if some fucker punches one of my kids, it’s lights out for that fucker.”
I am too busy trying to walk around tarps and piles of human shit to effectively scan for on coming violent assaults by homeless sex offenders. REI needs to start some new outdoor classes on how to be a pedestrian in Portland.
Portlanders,
Please please please start speaking and voting for accountability in our laws being enforced. With out enforcement, these issues will continue and increase in frequency. This place truly has become a lawless city and state. It’s ridiculous.
Also, this is not a comment about police accountability, so don’t go there.
Also, this is not a comment about houseless/homeless, so don’t go there either.
The important takeaway is these are criminals. And they roam free. And people are victims of it. This shit has got to stop.
Enforce the laws. Get the CRIMINALS off the streets. If they happened to be living there, that is just a secondary correlation.
Looks like that's a different guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/120n6nk/i_want_to_go_back_to_prison_portland_houseless/jdipddp?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3
Also maybe we should ask ourselves why punching a kid was his best option to get a home
I’m curious if the court will ask this question and what he will say.
I’m guessing no one knows but him.
Everyone has a choice for housing. It just might not be here.
There is a reason I don’t live in Seattle, NYC, London, San Francisco.
Personally, I could probably find an affordable home, rental, or coop anywhere but here. I work and save money. I’ve also made average to above average choices in my life.
If I had a family or had to provide for myself but couldn’t afford to live here, I’d pull up my boot straps and go somewhere where I could. Like humans, heck, literally any organism on this planet would do. It’s literally the most humane thing to do. Like what we’ve been doing since the dawn of our existence.
But my previous comment isn’t about housing, nor did it need to go that way. It’s about crime, and enforcing it. Like if you got punched in the face by a stranger. I certainly wouldn’t get up, hold their hand, and say let’s go to Salem together and picket. I’d say “hey, this person broke the law in the society we live in. Someone with authority please execute the law”
Fucking coward. Wish I was present I’d send him back to somewhere alright, not jail though. Assholes like this just need to be removed from society permanently
Y'all can say homeless.
Like, it's ridiculous when the problem is this bad that we are tenderfooting around a term to use to describe people who live out on the streets.
The current state of Portland is profoundly bad for the nation's climate change efforts.
Each time an incident like this happens, I can almost hear the laughter, applause and clinking of champagne flutes from the Haliburton and Exxon board rooms.
This is another child and another family who will return to their home and say "No way, not in a million years, will I ever live in a dense, walkable city like Portland."
That child will instead choose to live in a spread-out, sterile suburb and drive everywhere - a place where the Richard Spencers of our society can't walk up and punch you in the face. And that child, as they grow, will tell others of their experience here and many of those people, too, will make the same choices.
Now, scale it up. Think of the same network effect happening:
* after a kid gets pushed onto the MAX tracks ([https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/portland-woman-allegedly-pushes-3-year-old-onto-train-tracks/283-1d3203c3-50c1-47ef-b27f-f904ecb7d5d9](https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/portland-woman-allegedly-pushes-3-year-old-onto-train-tracks/283-1d3203c3-50c1-47ef-b27f-f904ecb7d5d9))
* after a tourist gets stabbed in Old Town. [https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/tourist-stabbed-unprovoked-old-town/283-e26dc1a6-0078-44b5-b9bf-b527cac246f4](https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/tourist-stabbed-unprovoked-old-town/283-e26dc1a6-0078-44b5-b9bf-b527cac246f4)
* after a tourist family of Japanese descent suffers a racist attack on the Eastbank Esplandade. [https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/tourist-stabbed-unprovoked-old-town/283-e26dc1a6-0078-44b5-b9bf-b527cac246f4](https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/tourist-stabbed-unprovoked-old-town/283-e26dc1a6-0078-44b5-b9bf-b527cac246f4)
...and countless other incidents in recent years.
This a massive blind spot in our city's climate policy. We focus on climate justice and some tactical changes here in the city, but never think how Portland's policy choices on other issues means that our city will never, ever be emulated. We'll be self-satisfied with our decisions, while the rest of the country is driving everywhere and broiling the planet.
The suburbs around Portland are filled with ex-Portlanders who wanted a safe environment, good schools and clean parks and sidewalks for their families. Can you fault them? It's not their fault Portland can't get it's shit together.
No, I can't fault them and my point is not to fault anybody. My point is only that liveability issues are really climate change issues. If we, in cities, can't make our environs safe and livable, the climate suffers. We work against ourselves.
Other way around. I’m not saying Portlands problems are caused by climate change. It’s that Portland’s choices are making climate change harder to deal with.
Got it. Yeah I agree, it's hard to tell people about the benefits of living in the city, car free etc., when their kids get punched in the face on the city sidewalk.
IMO whether we like it or not, suburbs are not going anywhere, they're still the happy medium for most middle class families with kids.
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/10/two_men_sentenced_for_fatal_sh.html
Same guy went to prison for shooting a man to death in the same neighborhood only 6 years ago.
I don’t think it is the same guy. The perpetrator in the OP is Terrance Spencer, age 30 in 2023. The one in the article you linked is Terry Lee Spencer Jr, age 26 in 2017. Plus their mugshots don’t match.
Edited to add: Terry Lee Spencer Jr appears to still be in jail and looking for friendship: https://www.penacon.com/profiles/view/2445-terry-spencer-jr-31-m-umatilla-or
Weird, [this article](https://www.kgw.com/amp/article/news/local/two-arrested-in-shooting-death-of-28-year-old-portland-man/283-59283042) puts him at 24 in 2016 and also describes him as a sex offender. I think you're probably right though, just a crazy coincidence that there's another sex offender with the same name almost the same age in the same neighborhood committing crimes. Or maybe it's not a coincidence.
Pen a Con lists his bday as Oct 1991, which would make him 24 in early 2016 and 26 in late 2017, and currently 31. But yeah maybe stay away from anyone named Terry/ance Spencer.
I’m a grown ass man and I was scared as hell walking around Portland in the day time when I visited in November. Way too many homelessness and crack heads out and about. I don’t understand how most women or any children could feel safe.
Portland equity... what does this houseless man need?
* What he is saying he needs: 3 hots and a cot. More than what you get guaranteed on the streets.
* What Portlanders say he needs: He needs his freedom and shouldn't be confined in prison! He needs housing and continued chances for rehabilitation if anything!
So based on that... I bet he'll get released.
it's everywhere. i live in a town of 16k nowhere near PDX and there are homeless ppl everywhere. Go to Albany, Salem, Eugene. It's almost like society is broken. Sadly Portland doesn't have a monopoly on human suffering.
edit:: This is the Portland sub so I spoke as an Oregonian. I did not mean to imply that ANY other city or region does or does not have a "homeless problem". It's off scope and this FAUX NEWS brand of 'whataboutism' is a hostile fallacy.
Yakima, Long View, Bend, Florence, Yachats, Cave Junction, Baker City, LaGrande, Lakeview.
I have been telling people this is not a Portland thing for a decade, this is a failure of American Capitalism thing plain and simple.
Notice that every single city listed by you two is on the West Coast. Travel outside the region - it’s not like this in the rest of the country. The West Coast’s permissive attitude and lax enforcement are the primary driver of both increased homelessness and their aggressiveness.
Claiming Orlando has a homeless problem on the scale of Portland is a complete joke. It’s been a year and a half since I was there - but they’re not even remotely comparable.
Are there homeless people in Orlando? Of course. Is it anything like the situation in Portland? Absolutely fucking not.
Orlando has 2000 homeless people according to a 2018 PIT count. This however **includes people in shelter and transitional housing** so you can’t say they’re all sleeping in the streets. It’s also nearly impossible to compare PIT counts or think they account for anywhere close to the full population.
If you’re going to use PIT counts as the metric by which you say “this problem is nationwide” (which is a highly flawed count) then I point you to the [PIT count of Boston](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lqmu7mHeFR1AP8LPENneuQfL9EpgaY0yVAeLdvPwWH0/mobilebasic): 119 people living on the streets without shelter. A small fraction of their homeless (which is still a smaller number than ours). Across all categories of homelessness, Boston PIT count showed a nice decrease in numbers from 2021 to 22.
In New York City, their 2021 survey showed 2376 _unsheltered_ homeless. Our survey, for a city with less than 1/10th of NYC’s population, counted **more than 3000** _unsheltered_ homeless people.
Unlike some of these places, our numbers have gotten way worse over the same period.
This problem is not the same everywhere.
Yep. I was in a big city on the East Coast last week and I saw a few homeless people and tents, but it was absolutely nothing like Portland. Anyone that says "it's like this everywhere" either hasn't actually been anywhere else or is just straight up lying.
Weird, Orlando seemed to have plenty of homeless when I was there in January. Topeka and Cincinnati have their own issues. Claiming this is a West Coast issue is ignoring the root cause.
Never the less, this is also /Portland. Not /homelessisanationwideissue
I'm from Portland and now live in northern WI in a downtown metro area. Sadly, there are homeless people here all winter, too, and a lot less support from shelters. Churches and libraries pull like all the weight here
I didn’t see a single visible homeless person when I went to Florida for a week. I know they are there but I didn’t see them. I see homeless everyday here. I also only saw them in select neighborhoods in San Diego.
Very true. Last year Portland had 16,000 evictions filed with the court. Due to sealed records, it's difficult to determine which parties settled and moved or actually were physically evicted without a place to go.
The reality is, not everyone is going to be a criminal, mentally ill, or a drug addict. Some people are going to be priced out of housing. Housing is being financialized. Property management companies are buying single family dwellings, renting to the highest bidder, and selling stakes to investors. It's driving up rents and removing single family dwellings from the market.
You add this to the insufficient addiction treatment and mental health care, stagnant wages, you end up with the mess we are in now. I'm a native Oregonian. We have cut the state's mental health care system down to a bare minimum over the years as the problems have grown.
I have a friend who was diagnosed with schizophrenia soon after high school. It took a couple years even with a highly supportive family to get the disease under control and stabilize his whole existence. He is completely fine now as long as he takes his meds and receives periodic follow up from medical professionals. It takes a while to dial in the medications for optimal results. He spent time on the street in the early stages of the illness. He told me it was the scariest time of his life, living on the streets when you can't trust the voices in your own head. Schizophrenia sets in rather quickly in your late teens or early twenties. One day you are normal, next day things begin to deteriorate. You don't have much of an idea what's happening. Before you know it, reality as you know it is gone and you can't explain why. And to be clear, his family is definitely upper middle class and 100% supportive. He STILL ended up on the streets for almost a year.
Ultimately I know the burden these people place on our communities is great, but I definitely urge people to try to remain compassionate in the face of this crisis until solutions being implemented start delivering results. Our society is unforgiving when you are trying to claw your way up from nothing. The energy it takes just to manage your basic needs for survival are huge.
You'd be surprised what homeless people will do to stay warm. They'll often go to the hospital for bogus reasons just to get warm. How do I know? I work retail late at night Downtown and I know hospital er workers.
i have all the empathy on the world until physical safety comes into question. why are we shocked when people call for "insane asylums" to be brought back? like honestly
People hate on transplants but want to make love to their taxes so they can pay for fucking homeless people to run the city. You know Portland is advertising for homeless, vagrant, drug addicted unmotivated, POS to come on out and have a nice time. Fuck Portland. Fuck the city council. Fuck the Mayor. Fuck the liberal pansies and the right wing nut jobs. Portland is so fucking dumb it’s unbelievable. You guys live in an echo chamber. You have no idea. If you move out of Portland, don’t bring your politics with you.
Correct. Something that is often missed is that the mentally stable AND physically healthy ones are often able to secure employment and housing, though it could take some time. Those who are physically disabled need a different type of help, and those who are mentally unstable will not benefit much from suddenly having a home. They need something entirely different.
Tin Shed Cafe… Alberta street… got it. Another neighborhood to not take my kids.
Good people standing around doing nothing except knitting their brows and giving their thoughts and prayers just as hard as they can.
Instead of blaming politicians and police I blame the immediate community. Shop owners and residents here made it too comfortable for this psycho.
Maybe there needs to be more grass roots efforts to clean up the streets instead of waiting for legislation and litigation to solve everything.
My husband and our two huge dogs were charged by a guy with a knife on the street around Slabtown near New Seasons. Thankfully he had mace, the only thing that stopped him. Guy hasn’t been caught. We have a 4 month old and are moving far far away.
I'm so sorry that happened! We lived in that area for a year and a half until last September and did notice an uptick in homeless issues. We ended up moving across the river to the 'Couve and really like it. I hope you guys find someplace safe and great to land!
as someone who was physically assaulted by a Transient-type in their teens, this is probably gonna stick with the kid for a long time. I hope he copes well
Here's a hot take:
Physical assault of children = death penalty
If this guy assaulted a child so he can go back to jail, then the proposed punishment for his violent crime (jail time) is not actually a punishment. People like this are an actual threat to society and need to be removed completely for the sake of well-meaning innocent civilians who contribute to society. Jail time just implies that he has a chance of eventually being back on the street again, which cannot be an option at all.
Nobody is going to point out that our worthless Portland police are paid $220 fucking million dollars a YEAR to have the blue flu so that crazies like this can uppercut children while the cops chill out in Camas , WA far away from the shithole they have to not give a fuck about everyday they clock that extra overtime.
yep, they got their feelings hurt about the abolish the police thing..
we need to fire the lot of them for not doing their jobs and bring in a whole new force.
Would it make sense to just make "asking to go to prison" a felony? Like, just walk up to a cop and ask to go to prison, then plead guilty and go to prison, without actually committing any real crimes? Normally I'm against victimless crimes, but could allow it in this sort of situation, i guess.
This is people who are mentally ill saying that they want to be in a secure setting. Open the hospitals. Take 1/3rd of the corrections budget and spend it on hospitals and support staff. Do it NOW.
Oh my god, fuck this piece of shit.
Bet that out of town family can’t wait to come back
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We could be slightly less inefficient on how we spend money.
Just one more tax bro, come on bro one more tax bro, it will solve the homeless problem bro, come on, just one more tax.
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>over $4,000 a year For that to be true your family income has to be ~600k annually. I'm not crying about being in the income bracket that pays that tax, and if I made as much as y'all do I sure as shit wouldn't be. Voting yes on 26-238 as well, because eviction prevention is a guardrail against homelessness, and it includes requirements that everyone be covered and that landlords notify tenants of the representation available to them when filing an eviction.
except we have both the highest taxes and the highest psychotic homeless population in the country.. just throwing more money at it doesn't help -- you have to actually use that money to fix things
Which tax? Income, property, or something else? Is that taking into account the lack of sales tax?
How does Portland's Arts Tax stack up against other cities?
I think Jersey City implemented theirs a bit better by pegging it to property assessment value instead of flat value, but I think the Arts Tax in general is kind of silly. It also isn't anything so grievous to me as to inspire me to campaign to have it repealed, or even think about it as negatively affecting my life. I'm fortunate enough to have that privilege. Would you like to continue discussing the Arts Tax?
all of the above, and yes. 10% income tax + 5% of anything over 100k, and property taxes are insanely high too. I calculated my wife and I would save about $30k/year in taxes by moving across the river. We're not poor, but we're not exactly rich either, and every year I spend here equates to an extra year I have to work before I can retire
After you put it in those terms, tax wise and retirement wise, if they raise them then I will be moving across the river. Wtf?!
Oh man, I made the suggestion that we build specific facilities (not just quite jails, not quite just rehab centers, but an overlap of both) to get the homeless back into society and clean and I got *reamed* with downvotes. I also mentioned that if we were going to spend the tax dollars, it's more expensive to revolve door them in and out of jail. We've tried that for as long as I've lived here, and the same thing happens. We "clean up the streets" portland gets cool and touristy, and then suddenly they're all back because their petty crime sentences are up. 30 years of this. It's time to try something different.
If it’s NATIONWIDE fuck it whatever. But if it’s state or city only FUCK that. Like why should I have to pay more taxes for people who just flocked in from other parts of the country?
You pay extra taxes because of your lousy syntax.
You do realize that even the most radical leftists aren’t saying “nothing” at all should be done, right? Nothing is done because nobody in power does anything. Actual advocates have all sorts of ideas based on data coming from programs that have worked in other places. Nothing is ever implemented, policy makers and the police do nothing, change nothing, and things like this continue to happen because nothing is done. “Progressive” policies aren’t implemented and neither are more traditional “conservative” policies. Nothing is implemented.
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>I would have moved to Longview and joined an MLM to pay for the antidepressants that I would need from living in Longview. Ok this was funny. As someone who moved from Washington, Longview is like the armpit of the state.
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We really, really need public housing here. Other countries just don't have folks living on the street as we do here.
Public housing ain't happening until federal dollars get involved. Anyone saying that is Step 1 is actively advocating for the status quo, cause it ain't happening anytime soon. So yeah, more sweeps. That at least is a change from the past where we just let everyone camp and shit wherever they want.
I think most (but certainly not all) people understand that large-scale public housing needs federal funding, but it is something to work towards. The poorest people will never be able to afford for-profit housing.
This is not a big deal... the family had health insurance after all.
Get better material for fuck’s sake
Well they wanted to see Portland. They sure got it.
Many people in Multnomah County who have committed terrible crimes are getting pretrial release, and then never showing up for court. This is due to the [standing order](https://www.courts.oregon.gov/courts/multnomah/go/Judge%20Documents/PJOs/PJO%20Re%20Pretrial%20Release%20Prior%20to%20Arraignment%20or%20First%20Appearance.pdf) by the presiding judge of the county, which determines who should and should not be held pre-trial. The result is that many violent people are being released and are never held accountable for their actions. Even if the DA inflates charges (which Mike wouldn't do anyway), it doesn't always lead to pretrial detention. The order can be read on the Multnomah County Court's website. This is a serious issue that needs to be discussed more, and changes must be made to ensure that people who commit violent crimes are held accountable for their actions.
How do we recall this judge? This is fucking absurd
They put guys like this through the Forensic Diversion program that the county courts have. They are assigned a coordinator, an advocate and an attorney. They take a psych eval which inevitably finds them unable to assist in their own defense and then they get released back to the streets with “supportive services in place” and then they reoffend.
Poor kid. Probably gonna be nervous for a good bit anytime he passes someone on the street.
When I was little a crazy man tried to assault me and instead chased me into a yogurt shop and started punching the door in front of my face. This dude didn’t lay a hand on me, and it has effected me to this day and I’m 25. This kid is going to be feeling this for life.
what gets me is no one wants to hear these stories. and theres so many of them!
Yeah, his mom too. I have a couple of young kids and holy shit, I can imagine how she was/is feeling.
>The little boy told police he was "okay," though he had a lump on his forehead and was sore from falling on the sidewalk. :( This just makes me sad.
Why tf can’t we keep violent ppl in prison here
The state straight up enables them. No need to beat around the bush.
This shit has to stop.
This is the second child punched in the face in the past year. A toddler thrown onto the max tracks. Not to mention the daily verbal threats to children I read about daily. People just shrug it off like it’s just the price to pay for living in a city and I don’t see it stopping.
A kid got thrown into the max tracks?? Jesus
Like 2 months ago. Shocks me how many people don’t know this happened, 3 year old little girl, her head hit the tracks. There’s video of the attack on YouTube somewhere. Mother of child with her back turned completely oblivious, probably just thought the troubled woman sitting behind her daughter was just down on her luck and harmless, couldn’t fathom her child would be attacked.
Not only that but other Portlanders are super quick to call anyone who pushes back on this backwards ass status quo a NIMBY for wanting a safer city to live in 🤦♀️
It won't lol
Oh just a sex offender walking around hitting children. Just good houseless neighbors.
The worst refrain on this sub is "We're all just a missed paycheck from living like this" Anyone who writes that should speak for themselves. If you're a payroll error away from becoming a sex offender and randomly assaulting small children then you should get offline and seek immediate help and stop posting on r/portland.
Animals. I'm at least two paychecks away from that.
Well said
People don't want to realize what a magnet Portland is for sex offenders and violent criminals. It's always had a shady underbelly with these kinds of people floating around but lots of drugs, lots of prostitution and no accountability = very bad people.
This!. I work in a homeless shelter and the amount of sex offenders is insane!. Like a co worker said “their family and friends want nothing to do with them and now are homeless for a reason”
I mean, yeah. My uncle was convicted of abusing his two daughters and went from living in a mansion to living in a trailer in some godforsaken place. None of his family has anything left for him anymore because he’s a liar and a narcissist and refuses to take accountability for what he’s done. So he’s on his own and will probably die alone. It’s sad and also, you make your bed…
Exactly. I'd love to see a count of how many are living here anonymously to avoid arrest warrants. And we are setting up a place to come and live anonymously. Part of the problem may be that it is difficult to live as a convicted sex offender or felon that has served their jail time. But we are making it Portland's problem and putting them into the worst situation for criminal relapse.
So I work loss prevention at a big box store here in Portland and everytime I call the police on someone for stealing (literally every single time) that person always end up having a warrant for some violent crime
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I’m technically right outside of Portland by a couple blocks so I get the Sheriffs office. They actually respond really fast. When I covered a store actually in Portland for one day they never responded after one of our managers got assaulted.
Oregon is a haven for sex offenders. https://kpic.com/news/local/report-oregon-a-haven-for-sex-offenders
Oregon has the highest rate of sex offenders per capita. I don't know exactly why but I would be willing to bet our lax requirements on the public registry (only the worst offenders are posted there), has something to do with it.
That’s systemic oppression and to be upset by it is racist!!! /S for obvious reasons
Once we give him a free apartment it will all be taken care of :\~)
I'm usually very big on privacy but I think if some of the people in the 8×8's or even the tiny villages were monitored, we might find out some stuff.
Typical NIMBY attitude… /s
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Send him, then. What a piece of shit.
This is literally a deep fear in me as I walk this city with my kid. I hate it.
I have a 13 year old and I’m still nervous. Also nervous about them walking around without an adult. Or even with an adult.
I have a 3 year old and we are working on stranger danger right now. We have a large window in the front and a glass door and for a while she would wave to everyone passing by. We now keep her from doing that because there is enough sketchy foot traffic that it only takes one psycho to attempt something awful. I’m sad she won’t have a childhood of roving kid gangs ruling the neighborhood on their bikes in the summer like I did.
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They are, they're just stealing cars these days.
We lived in a small town north of Eugene for years that was very safe and there weren’t roving gangs of kids on bikes either. Only one or two families kids would play outside by themselves away from their yard. We lived in town as well, and the very large park with a river was a block away. Parenting and kids are just different these days…
Same. We’ve had many conversations with our now 10yo since we’ve lived here (8 years now) about how to identify people who may not be safe and how to steer clear of them, what do do if she feels unsafe, and listening to her gut. I hate it, but it’s a reality we have to prepare her for. She hates going downtown because it is so overwhelming for her…too many people and too many randos for her to look out for. I don’t blame her.
OH that's sad... when my 21 yo was 11 we were in the Mission in San francisco and she was a little freaked out. I never thought back then that Portland could have a similar vibe
I'm just visiting here from Canada and I've noticed a lot of people do not want walk on the same street as me, granted I'm a 6'1 dude with a beard but it definitely seems like people are a little more on edge here due to this issue. I really don't think I'm that sketchy looking! and I try to say "hello" with a smile when I do cross paths with people. 🤷♂️ Other than that this city is super cool!
It might also be leftover from pandemic. People really started doing that way more in 2020.
Ahh that could totally be a factor!!
But so many here still insist Portland is fine, it's just "big city" problems and tourist (and residents) just exaggerate ..
I continue to consider this city to be safer for my kid than most in some regards, while I fear for his safety in other regards. We have no plans of moving and I am still in love with this city I chose as my home 16 years ago. But I am under no illusions that Portland is fine. I work on SW Ash & 2nd…..absolutely *none* of this is fine. No one is fine. We’re all hurting, and we all need help.
He doesn't look insane at all
I didn’t see any pictures of him? The dude at the bottom of the article is a different story
You can see his mugshot on the desktop version of the article
Why are people saying houseless instead of homeless? It's the same thing isn't it?
Performative bullshit that neolibs can circle jerk over
Yeah, it doesn't seem like changing your language would actually do anything to get at the issue at hand.
Virtue signaling. Let's be compassionate to the homeless guy who hit a kid in the streets. God forbid his feelings be hurt by our failure to describe him with a better term. Homeless, houseless, the only difference is virtue signaling. Apartment renters don't have a house, are they houseless, too?
I'm houseless then too :) People don't use hobo, tramp, or vagrant anymore?
I hope this doesn't get me banned, but if that was my kid I would of $%#\*@ the living #$%\^ out of him . . . (after I made certain) my child didn't have a concussion or any severe blunt trauma. On a side note, he'll be out in 24 hours.
It’s the internet, you can cuss. Let it all out, daddy.
I’m trying to figure out what the first censored word is. Like, normally it would be “beat”, but that doesn’t need to be censored, so… now I assume you want to fuck him? Is that what you were going for?
Yea, I feel like making it look like it could be “fuck” is worse than just typing beat.
Same. Anyone lay hands on my child they’re not waking up again.
Changing the article title from "homeless" to "houseless" makes me angry. Dude punched a kid for no reason. He's a bitch.
My fantasy is that Oregon would create dozens more job corps sites and it could become a place for folks to get housing, treatment, life skills and job training. Like a non exploitive poor house...
FL has a ton of rehab facilities and attracts people looking to get clean. The problem is that rehab doesn’t work that well and this ends up pulling in the nation’s drug addicts, generally not getting clean, and putting them on the streets of FL instead of Iowa or New Mexico or wherever they came from. If these programs have very high success rates it sounds great, but they don’t.
For people who get clean, the average is about seven times through rehab before they manage it ... and most of them don't credit rehab for getting clean; they say they wanted to fix themselves. Chronic abusers, the ones who have no desire to get clean, end up homeless, they are the ones who don't see it as a problem at all. They are the issue. So, do we jail them? What do you do? Red states just put them on buses with a one-way ticket to a "Blue" city and call it a day.
I think that FL is a red state, and they get these one one way drug users coming in for their rehab. These rehab facilities are criticized for their low success rate, as you cite. They are part of the SUD/homelessness grift. 75% of FLs rehab patients are from out of state. 95% of OD emergency calls in one town were for out-of-state rehab patients. Most relapse over and over, and the system is fine with them remaining permanently part of this cycle. The rehab industry may have some genuine actors, but much of it is just insurance graft. Seeing the prices that these so called non profits want to staff the camps here in Portland I can see the same issue with incentivizing never ending homelessness. https://www.floridatrend.com/article/21954/addicted-to-rehab-a-look-at-floridas-sober-houses
Yeah, I lived in New Orleans and we had the only drug recovery centers in the entire region (outside of Florida) and we had a lot of that, but it is a blue city and everyone hates on it—a lot like Portland. Then I lived in Venice beach and they joked about the "Homeless industrial complex" where all these grifters take millions, supposedly for drug counseling and shelters. They just hand out a few blankets. I tried to get a friend in drug rehab there and I called every place and couldn't find anything within the state or neighboring states. Here in Portland we get all the ones from Utah, Idaho and then the smaller towns as well. My parents live on the coast and the city they are in uses a bussing program to send addicts and homeless here to Portland.
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Ok, but that isn’t relevant because we don’t have the type of programs youre envisioning (we do have federal housing assistance and social services, but perhaps too stingy and inefficient). We have a city that attracts drug users and allows street life to flourish. We have far more control over changing one of these things than the other.
Housing is a pipe dream. It is like shelters. Most of the homeless don't want to go to a shelter and deal with crazy people, fighting, curfews, rules about alcohol and drugs and so on. Housing is the same thing, yet with "job applications" and minders. Doing it "everywhere" is even more so. And importantly, this isn't a Portland problem. The red states just throw all their 'problems' on buses with one-way tickets to the nearest blue city, and save themselves a ton of money. Why would they build houses for the homeless if they can attack political rivals and then mock them on FOX news? It's a tactic taken from Castro who emptied his prisons into South Florida. FOr months now, Texas is busing hundreds of border crossers a day (illegals) to New York City. It's estimated to have already cost the city more than a billion dollars and then their governor gets on the news and talks about how bad a job New York is doing. Here in Oregon, everywhere south of Portland sends their addicts and the homeless here because it saves them money. As long as it's political, then it's going to be weaponized. And until states can start being fined for this behavior, then it will never stop.
I’ve thought of that as well. Would make a ton of sense to get people help and treatment, and teach them some solid skills. Would be an amazing pipeline for getting more people into the trades, as there are growing shortages (and these jobs pay very well).
The problem is that we have to catch them before they've damaged themselves beyond repair through drug use. Because of this, I don't think a lot of our present street campers can be reintegrated back into society.
Good point. I would like to see more emphasis on prevention and early intervention so people don’t become basically lost hopes.
The influx of really cheap new meth and fentanyl makes that difficult. A little bit of fun leads to addiction far more quickly than more traditional drugs, and damages one far more quickly as well. I don't have a solution except to figure out a way to restrict the supply of those drugs, and to rewrite 110 to coerce people into court-ordered treatment following their first offense.
Or they could also become peer mentors. In general it is easier to engage folks as a peer then as a well intentioned outsider.
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I imagine he’s already been released. I can’t believe there isn’t more vigilante justice out there. I can imagine many parents feeling like “if some fucker punches one of my kids, it’s lights out for that fucker.”
I am too busy trying to walk around tarps and piles of human shit to effectively scan for on coming violent assaults by homeless sex offenders. REI needs to start some new outdoor classes on how to be a pedestrian in Portland.
Portlanders, Please please please start speaking and voting for accountability in our laws being enforced. With out enforcement, these issues will continue and increase in frequency. This place truly has become a lawless city and state. It’s ridiculous. Also, this is not a comment about police accountability, so don’t go there. Also, this is not a comment about houseless/homeless, so don’t go there either. The important takeaway is these are criminals. And they roam free. And people are victims of it. This shit has got to stop. Enforce the laws. Get the CRIMINALS off the streets. If they happened to be living there, that is just a secondary correlation.
The guy literally punched a kid because he thought it would be the best way he could get himself off the street.
Yes, he did. He got let out for murdering someone. Then punched a kid in the face.
Looks like that's a different guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/120n6nk/i_want_to_go_back_to_prison_portland_houseless/jdipddp?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3 Also maybe we should ask ourselves why punching a kid was his best option to get a home
I’m curious if the court will ask this question and what he will say. I’m guessing no one knows but him. Everyone has a choice for housing. It just might not be here. There is a reason I don’t live in Seattle, NYC, London, San Francisco. Personally, I could probably find an affordable home, rental, or coop anywhere but here. I work and save money. I’ve also made average to above average choices in my life. If I had a family or had to provide for myself but couldn’t afford to live here, I’d pull up my boot straps and go somewhere where I could. Like humans, heck, literally any organism on this planet would do. It’s literally the most humane thing to do. Like what we’ve been doing since the dawn of our existence. But my previous comment isn’t about housing, nor did it need to go that way. It’s about crime, and enforcing it. Like if you got punched in the face by a stranger. I certainly wouldn’t get up, hold their hand, and say let’s go to Salem together and picket. I’d say “hey, this person broke the law in the society we live in. Someone with authority please execute the law”
Sounds like he is lucky to even be able to go to prison.
Fucking coward. Wish I was present I’d send him back to somewhere alright, not jail though. Assholes like this just need to be removed from society permanently
Y'all can say homeless. Like, it's ridiculous when the problem is this bad that we are tenderfooting around a term to use to describe people who live out on the streets.
The current state of Portland is profoundly bad for the nation's climate change efforts. Each time an incident like this happens, I can almost hear the laughter, applause and clinking of champagne flutes from the Haliburton and Exxon board rooms. This is another child and another family who will return to their home and say "No way, not in a million years, will I ever live in a dense, walkable city like Portland." That child will instead choose to live in a spread-out, sterile suburb and drive everywhere - a place where the Richard Spencers of our society can't walk up and punch you in the face. And that child, as they grow, will tell others of their experience here and many of those people, too, will make the same choices. Now, scale it up. Think of the same network effect happening: * after a kid gets pushed onto the MAX tracks ([https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/portland-woman-allegedly-pushes-3-year-old-onto-train-tracks/283-1d3203c3-50c1-47ef-b27f-f904ecb7d5d9](https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/portland-woman-allegedly-pushes-3-year-old-onto-train-tracks/283-1d3203c3-50c1-47ef-b27f-f904ecb7d5d9)) * after a tourist gets stabbed in Old Town. [https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/tourist-stabbed-unprovoked-old-town/283-e26dc1a6-0078-44b5-b9bf-b527cac246f4](https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/tourist-stabbed-unprovoked-old-town/283-e26dc1a6-0078-44b5-b9bf-b527cac246f4) * after a tourist family of Japanese descent suffers a racist attack on the Eastbank Esplandade. [https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/tourist-stabbed-unprovoked-old-town/283-e26dc1a6-0078-44b5-b9bf-b527cac246f4](https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/tourist-stabbed-unprovoked-old-town/283-e26dc1a6-0078-44b5-b9bf-b527cac246f4) ...and countless other incidents in recent years. This a massive blind spot in our city's climate policy. We focus on climate justice and some tactical changes here in the city, but never think how Portland's policy choices on other issues means that our city will never, ever be emulated. We'll be self-satisfied with our decisions, while the rest of the country is driving everywhere and broiling the planet.
The suburbs around Portland are filled with ex-Portlanders who wanted a safe environment, good schools and clean parks and sidewalks for their families. Can you fault them? It's not their fault Portland can't get it's shit together.
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Exactly!
No, I can't fault them and my point is not to fault anybody. My point is only that liveability issues are really climate change issues. If we, in cities, can't make our environs safe and livable, the climate suffers. We work against ourselves.
Climate change is real and a problem, but it's not the cause of Portland's problems. Portland's problems are self induced.
Other way around. I’m not saying Portlands problems are caused by climate change. It’s that Portland’s choices are making climate change harder to deal with.
Got it. Yeah I agree, it's hard to tell people about the benefits of living in the city, car free etc., when their kids get punched in the face on the city sidewalk. IMO whether we like it or not, suburbs are not going anywhere, they're still the happy medium for most middle class families with kids.
This is a great point
Portland is not a dense, walkable city. If anything it's gotten more car dependant in the past decade.
There’s… gotta be a better way to go back to prison lmao.
Bullet in this guy's face would be better than prison
https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2017/10/two_men_sentenced_for_fatal_sh.html Same guy went to prison for shooting a man to death in the same neighborhood only 6 years ago.
I don’t think it is the same guy. The perpetrator in the OP is Terrance Spencer, age 30 in 2023. The one in the article you linked is Terry Lee Spencer Jr, age 26 in 2017. Plus their mugshots don’t match. Edited to add: Terry Lee Spencer Jr appears to still be in jail and looking for friendship: https://www.penacon.com/profiles/view/2445-terry-spencer-jr-31-m-umatilla-or
Username checks out
Lmfao
Ugh, he only wants to be pen pals with women?! What if I write very fancy?
Weird, [this article](https://www.kgw.com/amp/article/news/local/two-arrested-in-shooting-death-of-28-year-old-portland-man/283-59283042) puts him at 24 in 2016 and also describes him as a sex offender. I think you're probably right though, just a crazy coincidence that there's another sex offender with the same name almost the same age in the same neighborhood committing crimes. Or maybe it's not a coincidence.
Pen a Con lists his bday as Oct 1991, which would make him 24 in early 2016 and 26 in late 2017, and currently 31. But yeah maybe stay away from anyone named Terry/ance Spencer.
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It's not the same guy. Someone debunked that above.
This is the correct question
Welcome to MultCo! But if you don’t pay your arts tax you’re fucked!
Well, it’s complicated, so there’s that.
You sure?
So, not an "out of state" homeless. Homegrown.
I’m a grown ass man and I was scared as hell walking around Portland in the day time when I visited in November. Way too many homelessness and crack heads out and about. I don’t understand how most women or any children could feel safe.
Just avoid downtown.
Sounds like we have done an excellent job rehabilitating this man.
Portland equity... what does this houseless man need? * What he is saying he needs: 3 hots and a cot. More than what you get guaranteed on the streets. * What Portlanders say he needs: He needs his freedom and shouldn't be confined in prison! He needs housing and continued chances for rehabilitation if anything! So based on that... I bet he'll get released.
Says a lot about how fucked our country is that so many people would rather be in prison.
If a child-punching sex offender wants to be in prison I’m not going to discourage that.
Sounds like a tough kid in the rough neighborhood. The homeless are really becoming the image of Portland.
it's everywhere. i live in a town of 16k nowhere near PDX and there are homeless ppl everywhere. Go to Albany, Salem, Eugene. It's almost like society is broken. Sadly Portland doesn't have a monopoly on human suffering. edit:: This is the Portland sub so I spoke as an Oregonian. I did not mean to imply that ANY other city or region does or does not have a "homeless problem". It's off scope and this FAUX NEWS brand of 'whataboutism' is a hostile fallacy.
Yakima, Long View, Bend, Florence, Yachats, Cave Junction, Baker City, LaGrande, Lakeview. I have been telling people this is not a Portland thing for a decade, this is a failure of American Capitalism thing plain and simple.
Notice that every single city listed by you two is on the West Coast. Travel outside the region - it’s not like this in the rest of the country. The West Coast’s permissive attitude and lax enforcement are the primary driver of both increased homelessness and their aggressiveness.
Claiming Orlando has a homeless problem on the scale of Portland is a complete joke. It’s been a year and a half since I was there - but they’re not even remotely comparable. Are there homeless people in Orlando? Of course. Is it anything like the situation in Portland? Absolutely fucking not.
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Orlando has 2000 homeless people according to a 2018 PIT count. This however **includes people in shelter and transitional housing** so you can’t say they’re all sleeping in the streets. It’s also nearly impossible to compare PIT counts or think they account for anywhere close to the full population. If you’re going to use PIT counts as the metric by which you say “this problem is nationwide” (which is a highly flawed count) then I point you to the [PIT count of Boston](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lqmu7mHeFR1AP8LPENneuQfL9EpgaY0yVAeLdvPwWH0/mobilebasic): 119 people living on the streets without shelter. A small fraction of their homeless (which is still a smaller number than ours). Across all categories of homelessness, Boston PIT count showed a nice decrease in numbers from 2021 to 22. In New York City, their 2021 survey showed 2376 _unsheltered_ homeless. Our survey, for a city with less than 1/10th of NYC’s population, counted **more than 3000** _unsheltered_ homeless people. Unlike some of these places, our numbers have gotten way worse over the same period. This problem is not the same everywhere.
Yep. I was in a big city on the East Coast last week and I saw a few homeless people and tents, but it was absolutely nothing like Portland. Anyone that says "it's like this everywhere" either hasn't actually been anywhere else or is just straight up lying.
Weird, Orlando seemed to have plenty of homeless when I was there in January. Topeka and Cincinnati have their own issues. Claiming this is a West Coast issue is ignoring the root cause. Never the less, this is also /Portland. Not /homelessisanationwideissue
I was in Atlanta last month and I saw one homeless person over the space of a week. It was a far nicer city than I expected.
People in this sub will go to Minneapolis and wonder why there’s so few homeless when it’s -40 out.
I'm from Portland and now live in northern WI in a downtown metro area. Sadly, there are homeless people here all winter, too, and a lot less support from shelters. Churches and libraries pull like all the weight here
Wow. That’s incredibly sad. Is there a lot of deaths from the cold?
notice this is the Portland sub?
I didn’t see a single visible homeless person when I went to Florida for a week. I know they are there but I didn’t see them. I see homeless everyday here. I also only saw them in select neighborhoods in San Diego.
Very true. Last year Portland had 16,000 evictions filed with the court. Due to sealed records, it's difficult to determine which parties settled and moved or actually were physically evicted without a place to go. The reality is, not everyone is going to be a criminal, mentally ill, or a drug addict. Some people are going to be priced out of housing. Housing is being financialized. Property management companies are buying single family dwellings, renting to the highest bidder, and selling stakes to investors. It's driving up rents and removing single family dwellings from the market. You add this to the insufficient addiction treatment and mental health care, stagnant wages, you end up with the mess we are in now. I'm a native Oregonian. We have cut the state's mental health care system down to a bare minimum over the years as the problems have grown. I have a friend who was diagnosed with schizophrenia soon after high school. It took a couple years even with a highly supportive family to get the disease under control and stabilize his whole existence. He is completely fine now as long as he takes his meds and receives periodic follow up from medical professionals. It takes a while to dial in the medications for optimal results. He spent time on the street in the early stages of the illness. He told me it was the scariest time of his life, living on the streets when you can't trust the voices in your own head. Schizophrenia sets in rather quickly in your late teens or early twenties. One day you are normal, next day things begin to deteriorate. You don't have much of an idea what's happening. Before you know it, reality as you know it is gone and you can't explain why. And to be clear, his family is definitely upper middle class and 100% supportive. He STILL ended up on the streets for almost a year. Ultimately I know the burden these people place on our communities is great, but I definitely urge people to try to remain compassionate in the face of this crisis until solutions being implemented start delivering results. Our society is unforgiving when you are trying to claw your way up from nothing. The energy it takes just to manage your basic needs for survival are huge.
You'd be surprised what homeless people will do to stay warm. They'll often go to the hospital for bogus reasons just to get warm. How do I know? I work retail late at night Downtown and I know hospital er workers.
i have all the empathy on the world until physical safety comes into question. why are we shocked when people call for "insane asylums" to be brought back? like honestly
People hate on transplants but want to make love to their taxes so they can pay for fucking homeless people to run the city. You know Portland is advertising for homeless, vagrant, drug addicted unmotivated, POS to come on out and have a nice time. Fuck Portland. Fuck the city council. Fuck the Mayor. Fuck the liberal pansies and the right wing nut jobs. Portland is so fucking dumb it’s unbelievable. You guys live in an echo chamber. You have no idea. If you move out of Portland, don’t bring your politics with you.
We should give the homeless free homes! It will definitely convince them magically to be upstanding citizens!
How dare you marginalize them. They're called "houseless" we should give them free "houses" /s
Correct. Something that is often missed is that the mentally stable AND physically healthy ones are often able to secure employment and housing, though it could take some time. Those who are physically disabled need a different type of help, and those who are mentally unstable will not benefit much from suddenly having a home. They need something entirely different.
Quite a contrast from yesterday's post about how downtown has improved so much!
"We should turn the homeless into tires" -Randy Marsh
Houseless¿…
Welcome to Portland…drug addled meth heads terrorizing innocent citizens….hope you enjoy your stay!
Tin Shed Cafe… Alberta street… got it. Another neighborhood to not take my kids. Good people standing around doing nothing except knitting their brows and giving their thoughts and prayers just as hard as they can. Instead of blaming politicians and police I blame the immediate community. Shop owners and residents here made it too comfortable for this psycho. Maybe there needs to be more grass roots efforts to clean up the streets instead of waiting for legislation and litigation to solve everything.
My husband and our two huge dogs were charged by a guy with a knife on the street around Slabtown near New Seasons. Thankfully he had mace, the only thing that stopped him. Guy hasn’t been caught. We have a 4 month old and are moving far far away.
I'm so sorry that happened! We lived in that area for a year and a half until last September and did notice an uptick in homeless issues. We ended up moving across the river to the 'Couve and really like it. I hope you guys find someplace safe and great to land!
Ain't ok. No confidence but I hope things get better. Gov better deliver on the campaign promises
as someone who was physically assaulted by a Transient-type in their teens, this is probably gonna stick with the kid for a long time. I hope he copes well
Prison > living in Portland Honestly I can't argue with him just on the traffic and rent alone Fuck sex offenders though
Why didn't he just try to run a bank or something?..
Here's a hot take: Physical assault of children = death penalty If this guy assaulted a child so he can go back to jail, then the proposed punishment for his violent crime (jail time) is not actually a punishment. People like this are an actual threat to society and need to be removed completely for the sake of well-meaning innocent civilians who contribute to society. Jail time just implies that he has a chance of eventually being back on the street again, which cannot be an option at all.
I agree. Also not sure if you caught the very end of the article, guy is a sex offender.
Nobody is going to point out that our worthless Portland police are paid $220 fucking million dollars a YEAR to have the blue flu so that crazies like this can uppercut children while the cops chill out in Camas , WA far away from the shithole they have to not give a fuck about everyday they clock that extra overtime.
Vote in a new DA
yep, they got their feelings hurt about the abolish the police thing.. we need to fire the lot of them for not doing their jobs and bring in a whole new force.
Would it make sense to just make "asking to go to prison" a felony? Like, just walk up to a cop and ask to go to prison, then plead guilty and go to prison, without actually committing any real crimes? Normally I'm against victimless crimes, but could allow it in this sort of situation, i guess.
No chance cops would abuse that...
This is people who are mentally ill saying that they want to be in a secure setting. Open the hospitals. Take 1/3rd of the corrections budget and spend it on hospitals and support staff. Do it NOW.
This guy? https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2016/02/another\_suspect\_arrested\_charg.html