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.
It’s funny how Portland keeps spending so much money on Proud Boys who don’t even live there and just ruin the place. Spewing trash, using public resources, destroying property, not following laws.
They should be made to clean up after themselves. They’re ruining the city.
That’s a whole other mess. The mayor and police have basically abdicated responsiblity for policing the fights started by the out-of-town fascists at their increasingly frequent demos unless bullets are fired, implying as usual that the local antifa are “just as bad” as the Proud Boys. Funny how the same cops were eager to wade into peaceful progressive demos by locals with shields and clubs when they were more common. There’s been an on-going effort to recall Mayor Ted Wheeler over this nonsense.
You know I live in a city that reversed a camping ban and then re-instated it. And I get it… having a tide of homeless people from all around suddenly living in unsafe shanties and campsites is unpleasant. It’s unpleasant. It’s a scary problem no matter how you look at it. But it’s definitely part of a larger systemic problem and it is so much deeper than “personal responsibility” which is a cop out and dog whistle at best.
So if it had been professionally designed and installed, and if there had been a technical path for RV owners to pull permits for their second story additions, there would be no concern.
I was in Portland a few weeks ago and can confirm that the police are fucking useless. The night I was there, street racers basically took over the the entire city shutting down bridges and multiple city blocks. By my hotel there was a massive sideshow going on for some 6 hours that kept me awake all night.
The police response was precisely this: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They simply couldn’t give a single shit about total lawlessness and danger to public safety unless someone was actively getting murdered.
“I guess that’s what you get when you defund the police lol.” Even though Portland’s police budget was cut by some $13 million for 2021, it’s still above $200 million FFS. How much budget do you need for the most basic law enforcement? Portland isn’t that big of a city.
I mean they claim they have no resources to stop incidents of street racing, but these aren’t a small group of people doing some late night drag racing - these are massive groups involving coordination and planning. If Portland’s police are supposedly stretched so thin they can’t even send a squad car to flash some lights at a massive sideshow being live-streamed on YouTube, how the fuck can they be trusted to do much of … anything? (I don’t want to link to the YouTube video because the person live-streamed that night it is said to be a PB collaborator/friend and I don’t want to drive any traffic to them.)
Yeah, Proud Boys. I don’t know what the Venn overlap is with the street racing scene since I’m not local to the area. At least the person that was live-streaming the shenanigans where I was that night is said to be affiliated (or at least a hanger on of some kind). I suspect it’s more a “young people are bored and have nothing better to do and turned to cheap entertainment” thing than anything.
Between COVID, a massive homeless crisis, and street violence, Portland is pretty fucked up right now. It’s a real shame because under normal circumstances it’s a great city.
Honestly, this would have been a way more sensical target for the ire of that dudebro that got banned out of this thread earlier today. I mean, I wouldn’t blame anyone for moving away because the police are so inept that they can’t stop teenagers from closing freeway bridges for hours at a time. I mean… christ on a cracker. Send two squad cars over to the block the other end and start rounding people up.
While, on the one hand, we can sympathize with what someone here called “a desperate move”, on the other hand, yes, it is “desperate” as in “half-assed”, calling attention to yourself as in a news service reporting on it, as in “you have been flagged” and will now be endlessly harassed. The bottomline here is really: rent control, not “what to do with the homeless and their provisional abodes”.
This thread seems to have devolved completely. I’m not sure because I don’t really feel like reading it all.
Just back to the original topic:
If you ever want to live in a nomadic way in a city (out of necessity or out of preference) never forget rule number one:
The amount of trouble you’ll get with neighbours and authorities has in inverse relation to the square of the looks. Make it look good and you can do a lot. Make it look bad (like this RV) and you’ll get shit before you cna blink your eyes.
Of course you’ll need to make do with what you’ve got, and if you live in an RV out of necessity that’s probably not much. Even then you should always prefer looks over comfort.
When I lived in holland I lived on a smallish boat for a while. As soon as I had painted the thing and made it look ‘tidy’ I could basically stay wherever I wanted for a couple of weeks before the authorities started to hassle me. When it was still rusty and dingy → guaranteed police visit within a day.
This is not unique to the US but pretty much universal. People complain about the negative sides homeless people have on their (protected, safe, isolated, comfy…) lives but would also NIMBY any politician to a pulp if any kind of shelter or social housing is proposed.
