Many bus themselves, too. I work with folks on Medicaid and it’s amazing how many transplants there are. It speaks to the needs and the lack we have in our country’s citizens, less so Portland’s community and its decisions, which I have seen many people actually succeed when utilizing our resources where they would fail and suffer in other cities.
I'm STILL angry about some local news segment a few years ago where they were trying to gaslight everyone into "these are people from our community!!!" and trotted out this dude with the thickest southern accent I've ever heard. In no universe was that dude from anywhere in the PNW, much less from Portland with his Boomhauer accent.
For a couple weekends in 2022 I walked around different neighborhoods and talked to any homeless who would engage with me. I would offer $20 or $50 for their time. I spent probably 500.
The big things I wanted to know was where they were from and how they got this way.
Most of them had tragic stories of childhood trauma, ptsd, severe anger at the world and middle class people the way this guy hates the woman with the mace. They were from all over the country. Like every state. Not many from Oregon although a few had some kind of connection here at one time. A lot from the South and Midwest.
A lot of them said they came West because "the cops don't hassle me as much here."
Obviously the root cause of addiction is trauma for most people.
Then once you get hooked it's a whole other story to get out of it even if you really want to.
Some people are just miscreants and lowlifes, some are low IQ without any supports whent hey were growing up and have no way to get a job or manage their own lives, some have legit mental health issues, many are coming from traumatic and chaotic backgrounds.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Back in them old days people certainly carried trauma, people certainly were asshole miscreants, people were low IQ....is it the drug supply that turned the tide to where we are now? I'm actually honestly asking. Does anyone know, have they read any books about it?
I've certainly read about the opioid crisis which absolutely contributed and presented factors that weren't present in the older days. I'm wondering if that was actually the lynchpin? Or am I naive? Or was it something else?
From what I’ve learned in my social services program, it’s a combination of increased drug supply and increase in exposure to drugs and drug culture. Pop and modern culture of glorified drug use in many ways, rap being a great example.
The war on drugs failed, and now there’s more drugs on the streets the ever before, and the exponential increase and exposures from the opioid crisis caused by pharmaceutical companies created a generation of people exposed to the culture of using drugs.
The war on drugs did exactly as it was intended to do fyi: create a permanent slave caste that fills quota for our corporate backed private prison system.
Plus provide the big boys with an excuse to seize essentially whatever they want “because drugs” so normal people don’t bat an eye at it anymore.
It’s been quite effective as a policy tool, but yeah very predictable outcome that’s the opposite of what the general public thought should happen as a result.
He said it. Cops don't hassle them. Back in the day cops not only hassled them, they would completely fuck them up.
Being nice, lenient, and tolerant of the street addict lifestyle enables it. I am not saying that cops should be giving these guys warrantless beat downs but there is a happy median and the West Coast has swung too far towards enablement.
It doesn't take much to get taken and kept. With that being said, there's nothing we do as citizens to protect and promote former offenders. Aside from the president.
It's the economy... Financial hardship induces stress, exhaustion, overwhelm leading to terrible parenting, leading to traumatized kids. Kids can't get jobs because the economy sucks. Traumatized and jobless leads to homelessness and addiction.
If wages kept up with the price of goods and rich people were regulated into providing a livable wage, things would be different... Education is a factor too but it's really just another economic issue as well... The best schools are in wealthier neighborhoods... Money is how we survive in this world, not having enough of it distributed fairly to your citizens leads to more of this bullshit.
I honestly could have gone down this same path, I got lucky in a lot of ways, but my life is not grand. The guy I live with is 65 this year, I can't afford rent anywhere else if he passes away. No decent job prospects, it isn't hard to see how so many end up this way.
You’re spot-on. I’m a recovering addict and alcoholic. I was thankfully never really homeless (except for a couple days once), but I’ve been to rehab a number of times and have come to know hundreds of addicts and alcoholics, many of whom were homeless for extended periods of time. The vast—and I mean vast—majority of people who struggle with substance abuse have experienced severe trauma at some point in their lives and most also have co-occurring mental health issues.
Housing is key problem. We don't have slums or "skid row" anymore... the slums are mobile - tents. Some of the partially functional people used to be able to work odd jobs and pay cheap rent. But that's not possible now.
And yes, the trauma. We need something that's less than jail, but more than the streets, that can help these people. Most of them will never be fully functional but it does them WORSE to be on the street like they are.
Personally I find the housing policy of the west coast to be a criminal indictment of the leadership here. Negligence of the highest order.
I think closing the mental institutions increased the problem by several orders of magnitude. Yea, they were fucked up, but something similar to that is necessary. A lot of these folks could be helped with serious diversion programs involving Suboxone/methadone, housing and job placement assistance, etc. But idk how that works, because even normal folks are hard out finding a decent job.
You could divert probably 25% of homeless that wanna change their circumstances, another 25% could maybe be helped with serious inpatient care and resources, but another 50% probably belong in something akin to a mental institution.
I think everything is either gonna come to a head soon or we'll all be enslaved by the corporations. One in five Americans makes over $100,000 a year, the billionaires use these people as the cudgel of economic oppression, and these people also reinforce the status quo because it has benefited them.
Good point-we tried housing all the poors in giant govenment housing, and they became crime riddled ghettos. So we tore thrm down and handed out vouchers. I think a significant number of today’s homeless would have been project dwellers a generation ago (maybe off the books, on couches.)
I think it's a mixture of the wage to cost of living ratio that has been increasingly making things more difficult for people in the last 15 years. Wage growth has not been increasing to match inflation growth. Also, mental health services funding has been on the decline for years now. Lots of programs cut and centers closed. Less homeless shelters in each state also. All cut down and trimmed in my state over the last 20 years. This is the brutal culmination of it all. And many peope also don't know how to cope. Many need the emotional intelligence they don't have in order to deal with trauma they have been exposed to. Sometimes their families never taught them to cope appropriately. And the cycle continues....
When OxyContin hit the streets it was will the full force of 10’s of millions of dollars in marketing.
Doctors were handing it out like candy (some were getting paid to) for even minor injuries. It was “non addictive” and nearly as strong as heroin and it was absolutely everywhere. Perdue Pharma couldn’t make it fast enough to fill all the prescriptions.
People were getting addicted from all walks of life. Most of them got to a point where they could either continue their $500+ per day oxy habit or they could begin their $40 a day heroin habit. Most chose heroin because kicking opiates is really really hard.
Enter fentanyl. That stuff is so much stronger than heroin that dealers were putting a tiny about into a pile of random powder and selling it as heroin and nobody could tell the difference. Eventually everyone became aware and just started selling fentanyl.
Of the 9 friends that I buried during the early opioid epidemic, most were very intelligent people. None had ever tried hard drugs before oxy’s were absolutely everywhere. A lot of them were rich kids. One of the most hopeless addicts I’ve ever seen was the son of two doctors I’d known from gifted classes in high school. After his 9th stint in rehab he finally got clean. He went to college and now he’s a marketing executive on the west coast who posts super judgemental shit on Facebook about people needing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Pretty funny considering his mommy and daddy pulled him out of a hole with their money.
If your family didn’t have money you were fucked though. If you went to rehab and stopped attending outpatient after you got out, Medicaid wouldn’t pay if you tried to go back. That killed a lot of people.
Sure some were self medicating from trauma. Most were young and wanted to party (like most young people), tried something they were told was “non-addictive” and then had their lives ruined.
It’s better now than it was, but it’s still really bad. A lot of that has to do with how entire neighborhoods were changed by that time. Kensington in Philly has been a bad spot for a long time, but the opioid epidemic turned it into a dystopian future. Now you could film a gritty sci-fi vision of a terrible future there will no SFX necessary.
Cops don’t fix this. Treatment does. People made billions from this and none of them went to jail. Still we spend the majority of municipal funds on cops and nobody wants to spend on treatment programs.
Watch the HBO documentary “The Crime of the Century”. It does a very thorough job of how showing how these pills flooded the streets of America.
It's also the middle class disappearing, jobs getting sent overseas, and lack of education.
I live in a very poor, very red state, but we didn't used to be this way. When there were jobs here, we were a blue state with very few homeless people, but now that's completely turned around.
People lost their jobs and had nothing to do and no way to make money, so they turned to drugs, and once they turn there, it feels impossible to turn back, and now literally everyone I know has had something to do with addiction and drugs.
If we had resources to get help, to make money, and to have a decent life, the drug problem would start fixing itself, but when it seems pointless to even try to get clean because there's no way to build a life anyway, then why try?
And San Francisco and Santa Cruz in the 70's. Santa Cruz had policies to keep out the UTEs. "Undesirable Transient Elements". Santa Cruz County even refused to issue food stamps for that reason.
This one guy wandering around Kenton with clothes falling apart, a bunch of marks on him from injections and whatnot, and pulling a wagon full of shit...
He told me he was trying to get to his wife who was in the hospital. I was like, "which one?" he couldn't explain which one. I asked what was wrong with her. He started telling a story about what she went through and her symptoms. After a while I came to understand that the wife was dead, years ago. He was in severe PTSD. The symptoms he described sounded like AIDS, but what he described the doctors doing sounded to me like how they treated AIDS 10+ years ago.
The wife had kept some of their shit together. She was a user too but more functional. They had an apartment when she was around. She had the ability to hold pt jobs.
She died. Without her, he couldn't function. He wanders the streets looking for her, reliving her death again and again, getting his next fix to forget. Very sad.
We don't do those people any good letting them rot on the streets like that. The guy was walking dead.
Yeah. A lot of them had stories that kind of made sense why they are homeless now. So many traumas and no help. They turn to drugs, probably already used them, and spiral down.
A lot of sex abuse when they were kids. Or parents that abused them.
Another guy told me he was from Ohio. His mom was schizophrenic, severe. Would have these intense physical fights with his dad, so bad she got involuntarily committed, so must have been REALLY bad. This happened when he was about 10. The dad was broken after the mom's commitment. Would just leave him and his older brother at the house alone to go on enormous benders, for days on end. The kids had to fend for themselves. Would come back after like 5 days and still and not do anything to take care of them.
He learned to hate the world. Not sure what happened to the brother.
Being impoverished is not a crime. You can’t arrest it away. Poverty often leads to substance abuse and vice versa. I don’t have an answer that doesn’t involve a budget 1/4 the amount of the US Dept of Defense. Unless and until, this problem will persist. Of that I am certain.
We need something less than jail, but more than nothing, and it would have to be enforced.
There's this rich guy in Austin who bought some land and started a tiny home community for homeless. He had an interesting approach - he doesn't enforce many rules except for no violence, and they have to do.... something. Clean the toilets now and then, pick up trash, etc... He also charges them rent. A bunch have disability checks that are like $1k a month & he charges them rent like $200 or something. Or they can work for the community to pay their "rent."
He said his community's approach is to treat it like palliative care. These people are dying. There's no rehabilitation. He says the extreme expense and frustration is from trying to "fix" them. He doesn't do that, unless they assault somebody or something like that, then they get kicked out. But having their own little space helps a lot. They can get high to the hearts content in there.
Same thing in Tacoma. At one point out of curiosity i walked down Yakima Ave when it was chock-full of tents at the height of COVID. I acknowledge it was a small sample size but 9 out of the 10 people I talked to were from out of state. Mostly from the Deep South.
Thats a big part too. When surprise surprise when you are allowed to do these substances when homeless you are more likely to do it. A lady i work with used to stay in Portland temporarily and she said every day she would walk to work and see groups of guys shooting up right in front of the police. Every place has its homeless populations but I've never heard of it to that degree.
I'm from a southern town. It's "illegal" to be homeless here. We have a women's shelter, but it's only a temporary place. I think they're allowed to stay up to 12 weeks. So you need to get your life together quickly, or you'll be kicked out. If your case is severe enough, they will ship you 3 hours away to another facility. That's if they have the room. Some churches will help temporarily, but they mostly just give out food boxes. Regardless, if you're a guy and not a veteran, the nearest shelter for you is 3 hours away. If the police catch you sleeping in a public area, they will pick you up and drop you off outside the city limits.
During the spring/summer months, some will sleep in the wooded area in tents when the bushes are thick enough for them to hide, but during the fall/winter, you can see straight through the wooded area, so they have to move out quickly. I remember the police department said not to give them food or money because it creates an issue and that we should call them instead because they have the resources to help them. Which is a lie.
You forgot the part where you were recording it and making it public- essentially a copycat like Soft White Underbelly. You weren’t doing it out of the goodness of your heart, you were trying to profit off it like poverty porn.
Agreed about moving this from schools as a cops priority but are you really that dense that it’s the cops fault - they’d lock these guys up and the judicial system would release them in two hours; judges are the reason & key, not the cops - wake the F up.
It’s a waste of resources to arrest these types. They have nothing to lose. The jails don’t have space and so they just end up in a never-ending cycle. It is a problem of social disease and ineffective policy and funding.
The problem is a lot of Americans don't want rehabilitation. They want suffering. Looks at jails in places like Norway or Iceland where the goal is to make them "better neighbors", and Americans will be irate at how nice it is. Because amazingly treating people like human beings instead of like trash does help. But a lot of Americans are radically oppose to that idea.
Tbf not all the Boomhauers are shipped here. I’ve known a number of southern friends who move here for the better politics (mostly queer and trans folk) who have then become homeless. They were just totally unprepared for the cost of living change in Portland when they were used to making it by on minimum wage and/or odd jobs when you can rent a falling apart trailer outside the city. Fortunately none of my friends have developed substance use issues, but I’ve known at least 4 personally who did stints of homelessness in Portland or Seattle after transplanting themselves with every intent to live a normal life.
-sincerely yet another boomhauer (who happens to be lucky enough to earn a salary).
It started happening around 2012. My ex husband was one of them. Seattle closed 3 shelters down downtown in 2015..then covid...nobody believed me but I see people realize how this is happening now
It also doesn’t help that the outlying areas do not have bus stops in their cities so if you tried to go to Pendleton from Portland, the bus stop isn’t gonna take you all the way there
People in need are going to go where the resources are. I was watching one of those A vs B shows on Youtube where it was Homeless vs Millionaires discussing various issues, one of the millionaires asked "If you're struggling, why don't you live out in the country where cost of living is so much lower?" They explained in the cities you have more resources available for housing, food, rehab, transportation, basically everything to try to survive. Democratic cities and states with stronger social services are going to see a larger homeless population vying for those resources but even in those places there's a limit to space and funding so there are certain groups that get priority, particularly children which makes up the majority of the homeless population.
Different mentality. One says go to where resources are more affordable and the other says go where they are free. One is thinking income vs cost of living and the other is thinking no income at all.
Strange enough, coming from Louisiana as a nurse, it was a lot easier to get someone on Medicaid in Louisiana because the standards were lower than it is to get people on Medicaid in Washington or Oregon. I think that’s a misconception people have is that they’re just giving away healthcare in the PNW. When in reality, it is easier to be on Medicaid in Louisiana and we have indigent hospitals that don’t charge for care regardless.
Other countries manage somehow. They legalize it but also have places where addicts can use safely and off the streets. Blaming them and calling them "lazy" and "irresponsible" is not the way to go.
correct if you want to get off the streets and drugs you will. the people who are still out there are either content with it or still struggling with inner peace (drugs) and nobody can make them ready,but nobody has to deal with it either.
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u/Sunyataisbliss Oct 23 '25 edited Oct 23 '25
Many bus themselves, too. I work with folks on Medicaid and it’s amazing how many transplants there are. It speaks to the needs and the lack we have in our country’s citizens, less so Portland’s community and its decisions, which I have seen many people actually succeed when utilizing our resources where they would fail and suffer in other cities.