Housing Now, Everything Else can Wait
By Jon Robbins
Homelessness in Portland is at a breaking point. If you take a 15-minute walk down any urban street of Portland, you are bound to run into some sort of homeless camp, shelter, or group of homeless individuals. In 2015, it was reported by the city of Portland, that there were 3,801 Portlanders on the street that met the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) definition of Homeless. Our community, the Catlin Gabel School, has approximately 760 students ranging from Preschool to 12th Grade. The total number of homeless individuals in Portland on a January night in 2015 is approximately equal to five times the number of students at our school. Portland is a thriving city with people moving into Portland at rates we have never seen before. People are coming from all across the west coast into our Portland Metropolitan area. In the study mentioned above, the surveyors found that 20% of the homeless population in Multnomah county had resided in the county for less than 2 years. Another statistics showed that 35% of the homeless population in Multnomah county came from our neighboring states of California and Washington. As we see in these statistics, the homeless crisis is getting out of our county’s control and if we are to have any chance of prosperity in fighting this issue, our city must act now and through one mechanism of change: Housing.
During the same period of time as Portland’s Homeless crisis, the city of Salt Lake City, Utah has been exceedingly successful at mitigating their homeless problems. A report compiled by the National Public Radio has stated that Salt Lake City have cut their chronic homeless population by 92%. So what did the residents of Salt Lake City do to cause such a significant impact? They focused on the issue of housing. After comparing the costs of having homeless people on the streets versus housing homeless people, the analysts found that letting the government give these homeless individuals places to live, is cheaper. HUD estimated that the annual cost of having people live on the streets is between $30,000 to $50,000 per homeless individual, as costs include emergency visits, jail time, crime, and damage to public property. I realize that this statement may sound strange, but it's true. After implementing a government invested homeless housing system in Utah, their residents and the overall city have seen huge improvements in homeless population.
Carrying this Salt Lake City example to the city of Portland, there is no reason why a similar system can’t be implemented. As we have seen recently, homeless camps have “taken” over the city, causing disturbances to many Portlanders, with numerous fires and other destructive disasters breaking out in these camps. Our new mayor, Ted Wheeler, has pledged ten million dollars towards solving the issue of homelessness in our town. That figure is surely enough to get most of our homeless populations into housing units and letting them get their feet back on the ground. The effort that the city of Portland have put into building affordable housing units, has been good, but what we need to do as a city, is to target our chronic homeless population and give them these affordable housing units we have already constructed.
Its time Portland to make a change. It’s unacceptable for our community to have close to 5,000 Portlanders on the streets at a single time. These people our a part of our community as anyone else is. Giving them housing and paying for it for a limited span of time, will give each homeless individual a chance at making a modest living. Our politicians have been taking into account an endless multitude of problems that we have to address in our homeless population in Portland including Food, Jobs, and other aspects when we haven’t even fixed the single most important issue of all: Housing
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