Tag Archives: homeless

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Misguided Charity: Portland’s Proposed Pearl District Homeless Shelter

There’s a saying of uncertain providence, “Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day. Teach a Man to Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime”. 

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson wants to give the homeless in the Pearl District a fish. 

Wilson wants to turn an industrial building at NW 15th Avenue and NW Northrup Street into a so-called “low-barrier” overnight-only homeless shelter able to accommodate up to 200 people. An all-night warehouse for the homeless. According to the NW Examiner last month, the city and property owner Vanessa Sturgeon of Sturgeon
Development Partners signed a 12-year lease in May that Mayor Keith Wilson has described as a two-or-three-year
deal. The $18,000-a-month lease covers the main floor and part of a basement, a total of 16,000 square feet, to be used only for shelter for unhoused individuals.

Low-barrier means the people who stay there from 8pm to 6am wouldn’t have to show an ID, be sober (there’s be no sobriety checks) or drug-free, although alcohol and drugs would not be allowed. The 200- bed shelter at Northwest 15th will have only two showers and sex offenders will be allowed inside the low- barrier shelter because no one will be checking for IDs.

A critic posted on reddit: “It’s basically a night prison. 200 people, 6 toilets, low barrier, barely a snack, no meals, no counseling, no fresh clothing. And then they are going to “disperse” these people every morning near parks and schools.”

Potential overnighters could access a bed by standing in line before the shelter  opened. At a July 28, 2025, public forum at the Armory, Skyler Brocker-Knapp, who oversees the city’s shelter plan, said people will be handed a card with information about where to receive social services after leaving the shelter.

I still remember going to a free lunch for the homeless program in an underground Portland parking garage a number of years ago. Tables spread out across the center of the garage displayed a bounty of meal options put together by multiple well-meaning social justice volunteers, from sandwiches and lasagna to potato chips and hot ethic dishes. Homeless people streamed in, wearily assembled in slow-moving lines, grabbed hold of what they wanted and found a spot on the concrete floor to sit and eat.

It wasn’t uplifting. It was depressing.

Nobody was there to help the struggling people get their lives back on track, to inquire about the welfare of their children, or to make them aware of accessible pathways towards lasting change. The whole thing was a misguided feel-good effort at charity by naïve good Samaritans. 

More recently, I saw a group of fresh-faced, eager suburban teenage girls handing out sandwiches from the trunk of their car to homeless people at the Tom McCall Waterfront Park. That might have eased their consciences, but how, exactly, did that drive change?

As Kevin Dahlgren has noted in his Substack, @truthonthestreets, “We don’t have a homeless crisis; we have a mental health and addiction crisis. Unfortunately, many still treat the homeless crisis as if it’s a housing crisis and push for more and more shelter beds. The problem is these shelters are far too low a level of care for the majority of our mentally ill.”

“Many advocates for the homeless assume that homelessness is primarily due to the unaffordability of housing, rather than drug use, antisocial behavior, criminal activity or mental illness,” says Devon Kurtz, director of public safety policy at the conservative Cicero Institute. “From this assumption flows misguided confidence that living on the street is an unfortunate but preferable alternative to institutions that curb the civil liberties of individuals who are simply poor.  This assumption is wrong. In the largest survey of homeless Americans ever conducted, only 4% cited high housing costs as the primary reason they were homeless. Significant majorities said they had mental-health issues, had used illegal substances and had been to jail or prison for extended periods.”

A woman who directed a social service agency in the Portland area that served low-income families once told me the whole free food approach was “antiquated”, a long-ago discredited tactic , and that unrestricted aid was counterproductive.

So’s the proposed low-barrier Pearl District homeless shelter. 

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Confronting Chaos: Today’s New York Times

NY Times Book Review interview with Brontez Purnell, 02/25/2024:

NY Times – “What’s the last book that made you cry?”

Purnell – “The newspaper is the only thing I read that makes me cry.”

Excerpts from the Sunday New York Times, Feb. 25, 2024

Predators Leer as Moms Put Girls on Instagram, NY Times
  • Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram. The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more.  Interacting with the men opens the door to abuse. Some flatter, bully and blackmail girls and their parents to get racier and racier images. The Times monitored separate exchanges on Telegram, the messaging app, where men openly fantasize about sexually abusing the children they follow on Instagram and extol the platform for making the images so readily available.

          “It’s like a candy store 😍😍😍,” one of them wrote. 

  • A record number of people across the country are experiencing homelessness. The federal government’s annual tally last year revealed the highest numbers of unsheltered people since the count began in 2007.
  • …the principal challenge has come at home, where additional U.S. military assistance to Ukraine has been stymied by Donald Trump-aligned House Republicans who question the importance of Ukraine for American security and in some cases even the centrality of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance itself.
  • “You feel totally helpless, totally abandoned by authorities and society in general. You feel like nothing,” said Araceli Gatica, a 32-year-old who left San Luis Acatlán, a mountain village in Guerrero (Mexico). A local gang threatened to kill her after she refused to keep paying $200 a month in extortion. She arrived recently with her three children in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, hoping to seek asylum in the U.S.
  • Bombs that struck houses, markets and bus stations across Sudan, often killing dozens of civilians at once. Ethnic rampages, accompanied by rape and looting, that killed thousands in the western region of Darfur. And a video clip, verified by United Nations officials, that shows Sudanese soldiers parading through the streets of a major city, triumphantly brandishing the decapitated heads of students who were killed on the basis of their ethnicity.
  • Ms. Haley’s loss in South Carolina follows a string of early defeats. She argued in her speech that the nation needed new leadership in the midst of “a world on fire.” “It seems like our country is falling apart,” she said, adding that she was worried “to my core” for its future. “America will come apart if we make the wrong choices. “
  • Prominent epidemiologists have estimated that an escalation of the war in Gaza could cause up to 85,000 Palestinian deaths over the next six months from injuries, disease and lack of medical care, in addition to the nearly 30,000 that local authorities have already reported since early October.
  • And yet, even if parts of society came to terms with natural bodies, the same cannot be said for the natural process of women aging. Wrinkles are the new enemy, and it seems Gen Z — and their younger sisters — are terrified of them. Gen Z-ers are being introduced to the idea of starting treatments early as “preventative” treatment. They are growing up in a culture of social media that promotes the endless pursuit of maintaining youth — and at home, some of them are watching their mothers reject aging with every injectable and serum they can find. But considering the speed at which social media is pushing ever more unattainable beauty standards onto children, it’s time for us to consider our moral obligation to minimizing damage for the next generation.
  • … increasingly in recent months, scrolling the (Tik Tok) feed has come to resemble fumbling in the junk drawer: navigating a collection of abandoned desires, who-put-that-here fluff and things that take up awkward space…(T)he malaise that has begun to suffuse TikTok feels systemic, market-driven and also potentially existential, suggesting the end of a flourishing era and the precipice of a wasteland period.
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The Joint Office of Homeless Services: A Little Shop of Horrors

If you think Portland and Multnomah County’s homeless crisis is chewing through money, you probably ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Like the ravenous plant, Aubrey II, in the Little Shop of Horrors, its unbridled appetite for more money and more employees just keeps growing.

The Joint Office of Homeless Services, a collaboration between the city of Portland and Multnomah County, was created in 2016. In FY 2017 the Joint Office received a total allocation of $48.3 million from the city and county.

City funding for JOHS programs included $6.7 million for “Rapid Rehousing” that aims to make homelessness a short-lived experience for recently houseless individuals; $5.8 million on “Supportive Housing” to help individuals gain access to housing and preventative services; and $8.0 million on “Safety Off the Streets” to pay for shelters and services for victims of domestic violence, youth, women and families. The bureau also directed $736,825 to prevent seniors and people with disabilities from becoming homeless, divert at-risk individuals from coming into contact with the criminal justice system, and expand tenant protections. 

While the extent of homelessness was sobering, the mood was hopeful.

“A greater focus on management and results – in addition to sustained funding – will be needed to ensure that the region is making the most of its investment to help Portland’s most in need,” an early performance report said.

“…the department has a clear road map to expanding services that reduce chronic and episodic homelessness, with priority given to strategies that eliminate racial disparities, the Joint Office said in its FY2023 Adopted Budget.

Whatever that “clear roadmap” has been, it has cost a growing pile of money, up almost 550% since 2017, and a blistering July 2023 report from Multnomah County’s auditor alleges that the Joint Office is a mess.

As OPB has put it, “…a peek behind the scenes of the joint office reveals how clunky contract management, poor communication, insufficient data collection, and lack of vision have undermined the program’s effectiveness at solving one of the region’s most entrenched challenges.”

And now another scathing review from Health Management Associates of Oregon (HMA), requested by  Multnomah County Commission Chair Jessica Vega Pederson , noted:

  • a lack of alignment among elected leaders, county leaders, providers and service and housing providers regarding the appropriate components of the homelessness response system
  • a lack of a cohesive, effective governance of the Homelessness Response System
  • Uncoordinated systems provide fragmented care for shared clients, leading to returns to homelessness and poor outcomes
  • a lack of timely communication with stakeholders and sometimes finding out news through the media,
  • a lack of role clarity, decision-making and organizational structure within the JOHS

According to Multnomah County’s Press Office, ” The Joint Office contract with HMA is for two years, from May 2023 to June 2025. The total cost is $140,000. The contract involves the review today alongside work to accomplish the steps laid out in the review.” Why two simultaneous reviews are necessary, one of which cost the Joint Office money, is not clear.

Tracking the Joint Office’s budgets over the years is difficult because online reports from the office have numbers for given years that are all over the map, a sign, perhaps, of its dysfunction.

What is clear is the Joint Office’s FY 2023 Adopted Budget is $262.4 million. The budget increases over the years have been accompanied by a concomitant increase in staffing, from 13 full time equivalent positions in 2016 to 45 in FY 2021 and 96 in FY 2023.

Has the homeless count gone down with the commitment of all this money and personnel?

A 2015 Point-In-Time report said 3,800 individuals were homeless in Multnomah County on any given night.

After eight years of work and millions of dollars spent by the Joint Office of Homeless Services, the number of people considered homeless in the most recent Point-In-Time Count in Multnomah County, conducted Jan. 25-31, 2023?

6,297

A little shop of horrors, indeed.

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Want To Help Portland’s Homeless? Bring Back The WPA.

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. 

On September 28, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the First Lady, and an entourage of ninety arrived at Timberline Lodge for its dedication.

“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.

Ralph Ellison

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.

Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange

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.

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Nordstrom is Closing two San Francisco Stores. Could Portland be Next?

A long time ago, at a time of retail exuberance, Nordstrom announced it would be opening an avant-garde 300,000-square-foot Nordstrom store in downtown San Francisco’s Westfield Centre at the base of Powell St. in August 1988. 

Inside Nordstrom’s Westfield store in San Francisco

“We’ve been asked to make this a major flagship store for Nordstrom, so the quality level of the building and its merchandise is being escalated in a significant way,” Charles McKenzie, Nordstrom’s project manager, told me for a story I wrote about the company for The Oregonian that ran on June 14, 1987.

More than twice the size of Nordstrom’s downtown Portland, Oregon store, the high fashion emporium in San Francisco was expected to be a long-lasting shining beacon in the magical city by the bay.

So much for that. 

Earlier this week, Nordstrom announced the Nordstrom at Westfield will close at the end of August 2023 and a Nordstrom Rack store across the street will close in July. 

The news came on top of recent announcements that Anthropologie’s Market Street location in San Francisco will close on May 13 and Saks OFF 5TH will shutter no later than this fall.

The dynamics of downtown have changed dramatically over the past several years, and impacted customer foot traffic, Chief Stores Officer Jamie Nordstrom told The San Francisco Standard, with unacceptable levels of disturbance by organized criminals and destitute people.

Blame for the Nordstrom closures has been placed partly on the rise of e-commerce, but more on the deteriorating scene in San Francisco’s downtown core that has contributed to 20 retailers in or near San Francisco’s Union Square shuttering or announcing plans to close since 2020. 

A spokesperson with Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, which owns the Westfield mall, blamed the city for “unsafe conditions” and a “lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity.” 

Sound familiar?

In 1977, Nordstrom Inc. took the wraps off its spiffy brand new $8 million store in downtown Portland. More than 15,000 shoppers and gawkers squeezed into the city’s newest attraction on opening day, Oct. 31.

It may have been just another store to Nordstrom, but it represented a lot more to Portland. As the first new retail building to be built downtown in 15 years, the store served as a catalyst for a spirited revival of downtown as the place to be. 

Over the next ten years, the downtown Portland area bounded by NW Glisan St. on the north, I405 on the west, SW Arthur St. on the south and the Willamette River on the east witnessed at least $906 million in new and rehabilitated commercial and residential development, compared with just $89 million in investment during 1970-1976, according to the Portland Development Commission. 

In 1982, at an Association for Portland Progress luncheon, Bruce Nordstrom, co-chairman of the company, said his company had no intention of building until he received a call from Portland Mayor Neil Goldschmidt. 

Pioneer Courthouse Square, which opened in April 1984, solidified the emergence of a revitalized downtown retail core. 

Nordstrom’s downtown Portland store overlooking Pioneer Square

Now not a day goes by that television, radio and newspapers don’t bemoan the deterioration of Portland’s once lively downtown.

In mid-2021, people described Portland’s downtown to The Oregonian as “destroyed,” “trashed,” “riots” and “sad.”  “Persistent vandalism, accumulating trash and homelessness have soured attitudes about Portland’s economic, cultural and transportation hub,” the paper reported. 

In a poll of people in the Portland metro area commissioned by The Oregonian/OregonLive, residents across the metro area said downtown Portland had become dirty, unsafe and uninviting. Many reported the presence of so many homeless people and their outdoor camping as a particular concern. 

The city had moved far too slowly, for far too long, to address critical needs said poll respondent Myrna Brown, who lived in Southeast Portland, and she wasn’t optimistic the crisis would resolve itself anytime soon.

She was right to be pessimistic. 

Downtown Portland has continued to struggle. As News Nation put it in March, “Two years after riots plagued the city, two years after a pandemic and the push for social justice collided, the model liberal enclave has turned into a social mess.”

A homeless camp in downtown Portland

Chet Orloff, adjunct professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University, said Portland’s mess is partly “because we’ve been so lax in how we’ve unfortunately treated criminals, and we’ve been lax in our support of the police. That has simply allowed people to continue to damage the city.”

 In mid-April, outdoor retailer REI, citing frustrations with break-ins and theft, announced its 35,000-square-foot  Pearl District store, in place for nearly two decades,will close when its lease comes up at the end of February 2024

“You’re really betting on the future when you invest into a retail store,” PSU Professor Thomas Gillpatrick told KGW8-TV. “So what this is really sending a message to all of us in Portland, is Portland looks not as attractive as we have been in the past.”

KGW reported viewers reacting to the REI story said they were fed up with city leadership and the state of downtown.

“Yeah, this is a travesty.,” said one. “Our mayor has done nothing. All these businesses are folding up, leaving, moving on and just plain going out of business and he has done not one thing to help prevent this from happening.”

“What will it take for our elected officials to take concrete action to improve downtown and bring back the vital city I moved to in 1999?” said another viewer “I will not go into downtown Portland anymore, due to the open-air drug use, the ever-present graffiti and trash, the people passed (out) on the sidewalks, and the general sense of lawlessness that pervades downtown.”

“Whether you’re very conservative or very liberal, at some point everybody just gets fed up,” added Chris Ham, manager of Oregon’s Finest , a marijuana dispensary in the Pearl District.

How long will Nordstrom tolerate the situation in downtown Portland?

If it can abandon a flagship store in San Francisco, it can walk away from the once charming Rose City, too.

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What Media Coverage of Portland’s Walmart Closures Has Missed

In late February, Walmart announced it would be closing a batch of its US stores, including its two stores in Portland, OR at 4200 82nd Ave. SE and 1123 N Hayden Meadows on March 24, 2022. Dr. Multiple media have subsequently reported on the Portland closures, initially focusing on the loss of employee’s jobs and the company’s assertion that the closures were due to “several factors,” including profitability concerns.

The 82nd Ave. store will close to the public on 3/24/2023. All 379 employees at the facility will be terminated effective June 02, 2023. The Hayden Meadows store will close to the public on 3/24/2023. All 201 employees at the facility will be terminated effective June 02, 2023. 

On March 4, a Twitter contributor, Evan Watson, observed that the tone of media coverage began to shift when Fox Business put out a story headlined, Walmart to shutter Portland locations just months after CEO’s warnings on crime.

Fox said a Walmart spokesperson told Fox News Digital “…there is no single cause for why a store closes. We consider many factors, including current and projected financial performance, location, population, customer needs, and the proximity of other nearby stores when making these difficult decisions.”

But Fox chose to also highlight that the closure announcements for the Portland stores and multiple others across the country came “…just a few months after the Walmart CEO warned stores could close and prices could increase in light of sky-high retail crimes affecting stores across the country.”

“Theft is an issue. It’s higher than what it has historically been,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in December on CNBC, Fox reported. “He added that “prices will be higher and/or stores will close” if authorities don’t crack down on prosecuting shoplifting crimes.”

Fox went on to note that Walmart’s announcement came after other Portland stores had closed, citing crime as a reason, including a Nike store that shut down following rampant shoplifting incidents and a Cracker Barrel that shut down with employees citing security issues. Fox reported one store that shut down in November 2022, Rains PDX, had posted a note on the shop’s doors after a string of break-ins saying, “Our city is in peril. Small businesses (and large) cannot sustain doing business, in our city’s current state. We have no protection, or recourse, against the criminal behavior that goes unpunished.”

The crime connection to the Portland Walmart closure was then also picked up on The NY Post. Yahoo and local TV stations affiliated with KPTV.

Next up was Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, no doubt stimulated by the crime connection, who jumped into the fray with a tweet: “All Portland Walmart stores to close in late March. This is what happens when cities refuse to enforce the rule of law. It allows the mob to take over…”

This spurred Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler to put in his two cents, Tweeting, “Governor Abbott, are the dozens of Walmart stores that have closed in Texas in recent years all communities that “refuse to enforce the rule of law?” The retail industry is changing and retail theft is a national issue.”

And of course. dozens of people responded to Wheeler’s Tweet.

What no media mentioned, however, is the diversity of Walmart’s workforce affected by the closures or the impact of the closures on Walmart’s customers, most of whom are the lower-income Portlanders progressive political leaders always claim to be so concerned about.

I don’t have a breakdown of the workforce at the two Portland stores, but a recent analysis of Walmart’s total workforce showed that 56% were women, with 42% of those are part of management and 42% of the total workforce were people of color, with 31% of them part of management.

The only saving grace for these workers is that the hiring environment is strong. Weekly jobless claims have remained near or below the 2019 prepandemic average of about 220,000 for several months, even in the face of job cuts at larger employers in white-collar industries, particularly in technology, finance and real estate.  In other words, it is still a tight labor market, so laid-off Walmart workers may have less difficulty finding work. That could change, however, as the Federal Reserve continues its aggressive effort to fight inflation and there are signs that the job market’s extreme tightness might be easing.

As for shoppers’ income, analyses by Business Insider, Kantar Media; and Statista show that, although more higher income Americans have been gravitating to Walmart groceries and other items in the current inflationary environment, more than a quarter of Walmart shoppers have an annual income of $25,000 or less and the next quarter have an annual income of just $25,000 – $49,900. 

Walmart Shoppers by Income

$25,000 or less: 26.1%

$25,000 to 49,900:  26.8%

$50,000 to 74,900:  18.3%

$75,000 to 99,900:  11%

$100,000 or more: 17.4%

Why do lower income Americans shop at Walmart? Because generally they save more of their hard-earned dollars there, particularly on generics and Walmart’s store brands. 

 “…in general, most shoppers will find that groceries at Walmart can cost less overall, even for higher-end brands that will cost significantly more elsewhere, which means if you’re on a tighter budget, grocery shopping at Walmart can help you ensure your dollar goes further,” says Julie Ramhold, consumer analyst at DealNews.com.

And the savings can be significant. 

A November 2022 Consumers’ Checkbook review of spending at Washington area grocery chains and stores concluded that a family that spends $250 per week at the supermarket, could save $2,080 per year by shopping at Walmart versus an all-store average. 

In other words, the loss of these two Walmart stores is a bigger blow to Portland than the media has been saying. Politicians need to make note of that. 

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Is It Time To Bring Back “Bum”?

On June 17, Portland’s alternative weekly, Willamette Week, posted a story titled, “Tires Slashed, Mirrors Shattered Along Laurelhurst Street Where Tensions Between Neighbors and Houseless Residents Continue to Escalate.” 

“Houseless residents”? 

How did the media and much of liberal Portland get to the point where people who slash tires, shatter car mirrors, rip out landscape lights, overturn trash and recycling bins, destroy landscaping and damage parking strip trees are simply described as “houseless,” as though that’s their defining characteristic? 

How did we get to the point where people doing this:

or this:

or this:

are excused because they are “homeless” or “houseless” or some other insipid term? That’s just plain criminal.

Some would say calling some people bums is offensive, callous and unfeeling, that it’s not “fair” to lump people together for any reason.

Being homeless or houseless should not be a free pass to a different set of behavioral expectations. Being homeless doesn’t give somebody license to break into a small business, deface property with graffiti, shoot at each other and unsuspecting pedestrians, bury sidewalks and parkland under trash and garbage, pollute waterways , steal and chop up bicycles and cars, openly sell and buy drugs, assault  random passers-by and litter private properties with discarded syringes.

On June 20, KGW8 television reported on incidents at a tent site on the corner of Southeast 33rd Avenue and Powell Blvd. in Portland next to Grover Cleveland High School’s track and sports field. 

“We live in a war zone basically and there’s nothing I can do,” said Elias Giangos, who said he’s lived in the neighborhood for the past seven years. He and his wife plan to move out at the end of the month. Giangos said he was assaulted multiple times by those living at the campsite. Scars from the time he was stabbed by someone living at the campsite disfigure his left arm.

“Even when I was getting assaulted, we called the police, there’s no response,” he said.

Things recently got so bad with the so-called homeless around Multnomah County’s Gladys McCoy Building in Portland across from Union Station that the county hired a firm to assess the risks to county employees and recommend responses. 

According to the Physical Security Vulnerability Assessment of the area in and around Multnomah County’s Gladys McCoy Building prepared by Eric Tonsfeldt / Operations Manager – Foresight Security Consulting, “The density of unsanctioned homeless camping immediately around the McCoy Building represents the most immediate, consistent, and palpable threat to the safety and security of the employees and contractors in the McCoy Building.”

“The building is currently surrounded by ongoing, frequent drug abuse and distribution, violence, and aggression within dense areas of unsanctioned houseless camping.,” the report said. 

The report said the following crime occurred just within the 1/8-mile area centered on the McCoy Building between 7/19/2020 and 7/18/2021: 33 assaults, 79 instances of larceny, 7 instances of vandalism and 35 drug/narcotics offenses.

Those aren’t the to-be-ignored actions of “the homeless.” They’re the actions of vagrants, malcontents, addicts, crooks, criminals….bums.

.