The most visible effort to deal with the homeless crisis in Portland is Safe Rest villages. “Safe Rest Villages are alternative shelters that serve as improved point of entry for Portlanders on the continuum from living on the streets to finding stability in permanent housing,” the city says. 

The seven Safe Rest Villages scattered around the city offer a host of services, including laundry, showers, flush toilets, and garbage recycling as well as case management, mental health supports, recovery support Services, community advocates, first aid and medical care. 

The problem is that while millions of dollars are being spent on these villages, residents can access all their services with no quid pro quo, in other words, without doing anything in return.  A resident can literally do nothing all day and night but stew in his or her despair. What the villages don’t offer or require is meaningful work. 

Let’s give them something to do.

Of all of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs during the depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) is often hailed as one of the most successful, employing more than 8.5 million people during a troubling time for America. 

WPA workers built bridges, roads, public buildings, public parks and airports. In Oregon, Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood owes its existence to the WPA as it was built by hundreds of people eager to work after suffering the effects of unemployment during the Great Depression. 

“Give a man a dole,” said Harry Hopkins, who directed the WPA, “and you save his body and destroy his spirit. Give him a job and you save both body and spirit”.

Why not try something like the WPA again in Portland?

Why not organize teams of Village Rest residents to get out and paint over the graffiti that’s defacing surfaces all over the city.? Or pick up the proliferating trash and needles?  Or clean up abandoned waterside campsites? 

Or try writing.

At its peak, the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project engaged about 6,500 men and women around the country. Among those Federal Writers who went on to gain national literary reputations were novelists Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow and John Cheever, poet May Swenson and African-American writers including Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright.

Or take pictures. 

During the depression, the Resettlement Administration, later replaced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), hired Columbia University professor Roy Stryker to lead the agency’s Photographic Unit. Stryker created a team of “documentary photographers” to capture the raw emotion behind the drudgery and bring empathy to the suffering of ordinary Americans.

New Jersey-born portrait photographer Dorothea Lange worked for the FSA. She took many photographs of poverty-stricken families in squatter camps but was best known for a series of photographs of Florence Owens Thompson, a 32-year-old mother living in a camp of stranded pea pickers. One photograph of Thompson, “Migrant Mother,” became a defining symbol of the Great Depression.

Surely we can do better than warehouse homeless people in Safe Rest Villages, Put them to work. Give them a job to do and save both body and spirit.