They have the money. There is nothing mean about getting them in homes. Druggies aren't the problem unless they are doing it out in the open or committing theft or violence. Get them homes, treatment, and get the police to do their jobs and this problem would be solved. Police just needed to arrest thw people who were actually doing damage rather than harassing everyone. Get the police to actually do their job. Fix public transit and this won't be a problem. It's doable. Yep, need to go all in on public transit to make it faster than driving.
So move to Portland, become a homeless junkie and get a free house. Man am i on the wrong path….. anyone have a needle i can borrow?
And lose the ability to take vacations (that requires income which would exclude you from free housing) or to pick your neighbors, or to afford a decent vehicle, or a nice phone, or a decent computer, TV, decent clothes... Pretty much anything of value or any life most healthy people want. Being a junkie would only mean you have a lower quality of life and more rehab and counseling to attend... Not sure why you'd want that. It should be irrelevant to housing. And it should certainly not be limited to Portland. In fact, it shouldn't be available to anybody who has to move there. This should be available to all local people, in their home towns, or even better funded at the federal level to allow for maximum flexibility. These points have been discussed many times and every problem has a logical solution which has been most effectively solved or at least improved in the real world via the housing first method.
meh. Life will be one big vacation with all this money the gov has to support my habits. Who needs work when i can get free housing? How do you come to your conclusions? Homeless jobless people have phones. got a needle? These incentives are too good to pass up.
What @Phatguysrule is referring to is the policy called housing first, it’s objectively proven to work. It worked in Finland, and has worked in Utah. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392 If you really want to go live on the streets to get in a queue to be provided a free spartan place to live with no other luxuries, no one is stopping you, go for it. The rest of us just want to see something done to get these folks off the streets and the city cleaned up, and we’re following the science to make that happen. If you have a better idea on how to do that then let’s hear it, if not then you’re tilting at windmills because the science is there.
Most jobless and homeless don't have nice phones. Or anything nice. And all people want and appreciate nice things. That's human nature. Housing first takes advantage of that nature to encourage people to keep improving their situation. The court has been clear, as recently as this week. It's not constitutional to punish people for being homeless. You can't exclude them from sleeping in public spaces unless they have a safe and secure place to rest. In other words, a home. You can be upset about that all you want, but we have constitutional rights to protect individuals from the tyranny of the majority, and I am opposed to restrictions on individual constitutional rights in every case I can think of. It is cheaper and more effective to get these people in homes, as I have shown many many times. It also makes every problem they have easier and cheaper to treat and/or solve more effectively. Refusing to do so is simply chopping our noses off to spite our faces.
Someone should make a needle app for smartphones. Just put the drugs in your phone and then rub it over your arm. #ProblemSolved
like an all purpose phone with a bottle opener on one side and a replaceable needle injector on the other. Brilliant!!! Where do i preorder?
Score! Only six left though. You want in? I only need five, one for each weekday. i dont partake on the weekends, just during work hours.
So it would appear the goal is to limit the spread of communicable disease (spread by saliva, mucous, etc) while offering incentive for addicts to continue visiting clinics where they are more likely to seek treatment and begin the path to recovery. What's the down side?
A) That I don't know that that model has shown to work with Fentanyl addicts, b) I didn't see anything about setting up more clinics, more doctors, more rehab facilities, more enforcement of drug sales, etc., c) I'm happy to be shown I'm wrong on this, but I'd hypothesize that the increase in addiction, addiction-related crime and disease and death rates stems largely from the city's lax attitude over the last 2+ decades towards drug use and vagrancy. In Tampa and the immediate are, for instance, there was a massive shift in 2012 (when it had the nation's highest homeless rate) to "cleaning up the streets" and especially reduction in encampments (bastions of that disease and crime) and homelessness along beaches and right-of-ways. https://www.tampabay.com/news/local...crackdown-on-the-homeless-is-working/1250370/ There were a ton of opinion pieces in local media, 'thinkprogress.com' and other sites, opining that this would lead to massive increases in jail population, more violence and crime and children starving in the streets. As it turns out, police and social services have a collective heart and the vast majority of those who were ever incarcerated were violent. Since FL removed COVID restrictions in late 2020 there's been an influx of many more homeless than the County had resourced for, leading to another wave of "outsiders" who aren't used to FL laws, resources or policies, but I have multiple friends who are first responders that are saying the Fentanyl problem is starting to get worse, and previously-successful methods of intervention and support are now just "can we get a narcan into someone before they're dead." Cleaner pipes isn't going to help with that.
The courts have already ruled that we cannot punish people for being homeless. Our inability to house these people is our biggest problem. It wouldn't matter how many treatment centers you have, if they go back out on the street when they are released. We already know that arresting people doesn't help reduce drug use. We have already funded more treatment centers for the addicted and homeless. I agree, that we need more. But providing straws and foil rather than syringes isn't going to have any impact on any of that. With the prevalence of drugs (which do not require syringes) clinics are saying they are having less ability to connect with as many people, as not as many are coming in to exchange needles anymore. But the problem with drugs is still getting worse. They are hoping to do this in an effort to get back to making those connections again. I'm wondering what thw potential down side is? Surely you don't think more contact with clinics andtreatment centers will increase the use of drugs?
Which courts? OR ones? 9th Circuit? Federal? Because in at least 3 FL cities they have laws against public sleeping and storage (Ocala, Tampa, Miami). And maybe that means that the problems go elsewhere, but breaking up vagrant camps and reducing ability to "aggressively panhandle" have removed a lot of the criminal behavior. I don't know that (not saying it isn't true) but it's much tougher to get drugs when not on the streets (whether in a supervised shelter, or a hospital, or rehab center, or jail). Again, I'm asking, not judging--are the rates in Portland for treatment decent? Here in FL they're miserable--I don't know what the term is ("relapse", maybe?) but there are very few (tracked) people who exit a treatment center that don't end up relapsing or back in emergency services. As I said, the overdose rates on Fentanyl alone are skyrocketing, and that's with more draconian measure here than were described in the article. No, my hypothesis is that there is very little ROI on the resources spent to enable and condone illegal and unsocietal behavior. I don't see (though I'm happy to be proven wrong) how connecting with a mentor or provider at a clinic, getting help getting clean, and then rolling right back into a vagrant camp where people have city-supplied drug resources and no tangible detriment to continuing the addictive behavior can be a positive for the community at-large (which is the province of the government) or the recovering addict. Not saying it's easy or I have the answers, but it's worth the question of "is this what's going to solve the problem?"
Does the First Amendment protect panhandling? Yes. As the Willis Court explains, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment covers “charitable appeals for funds.” Because of this, panhandling, solicitation, or begging are protected speech under the First Amendment.
