I’m not tossing specific instances aside. My first comment clearly noted how dangerous this structure was and speculated on why the person might have built it. I just frame them as vignettes in a larger picture you’d prefer not be discussed.
And also a decision by the city not to tow those abandoned cars away from the very specific neighbourhoods where they’re sitting, before or after they’re set on fire. And you have no idea who’s committing the arsons. It’s just as likely to be bored white middle-class teenagers from suburban neighbourhoods as it is a homeless person who dropped a match when he was spending the night in one.
Um, you realise that these people aren’t “campers” but homeless people, right? Yes, they live in tent encampments under the freeway but they’re not there because they think it’s an awesome choice for experiencing the great outdoors.
And again, it’s the city that makes a conscious choice not to spend money cleaning up garbage from under freeway onramps, whether it was tossed there by homeless people or by (usually older, usually conservative) drivers throwing litter and cigarette butts out of their car windows. And the city is certainly not going to spend the dollars of upstanding taxpayers like yourself setting up garbage cans and pickup for “the undeserving” who don’t take “personal responsibility”.
When the city decides to put the unhoused up in safe, clean interim housing (tiny house villages, motels) as a Housing First strategy. Other cities that do that have rules about what’s not permitted in those situations. A neoliberal market-based free-for-all, in contrast, means that there are no consequences for bad actions (at least as long as they’re kept out of the more affluent areas of town).
All these decisions I mention are made because a lot of the city’s taxpayers are very specific about which people and neighbourhoods deserve to have money spent on them and which don’t, even when most of those neighbourhoods (including modest and gentrifying ones) are unaffordable to working-class and increasingly middle-class people.
That larger issue of the housing crisis that you don’t want to discuss is what’s chasing people out of Portland more than the specific instances of squalor like this RV you’re insisting we focus on. I know it’s embarrassing to admit that someone with all the advantages who made all the right decisions can’t afford to buy a small house or condo in a diverse and vibrant city, any more than one of those “undeserving” people who lives there in a tent or RV. However, this isn’t a just world and ignoring the root causes of that unfairness that puts you and RV guy in the same situations re: housing means that they’re going to follow you in one form or another to wherever you run.
