Homelessness: an Issue of Humanity, not Lawlessness

By Cameron Whitten and Chuck Currie of Portland, Oregon. Cameron is an activist for an intersection of social justice causes. Chuck Currie is a long-time activist and minister in the United Church of Christ, who regularly blogs at the Huffington Post.

The face of City Hall has dramatically changed in the past year. What was once an open forum for human beings to voice their opinions about societal causes has become a barren slab of concrete dominated by a food cart and lawn chairs.

Portland is a city that is recognized worldwide for facing Homelessness head on, partnering with community organizations and experienced advocates to design innovative and humane solutions. That shining legacy has been tarnished in the past few weeks, as proactive policies have been aggressively replaced with strong armed tactics focused on slapping a ‘criminal’ label on every homeless person living on the streets and deeming them unfit to be seen in public.

This year, City funding for housing services flat-lined, while campers protesting for the right to sleep have been displaced from what was formerly constitutionally protected sidewalk outside of City Hall. Unarmed security personnel, some of whom have literally saved lives, received the pink slip with the blame thrown at budget woes. At the same time, the Mayor’s Office has risked sliding into a double-standard by dishing out thousands of dollars to purchase a lawn table and house a food cart that had been conducting business 40 feet away.

Clearing away camps of unhoused people from the urban core is nothing new. When there are valid concerns about violence, drug use, or public health, trained officers are called in to serve eviction notices and restore safety to the area. What is different about the Mayor Hales’ decree is that every single person, whether they are a parent, a traveler, a veteran, or someone suffering from mental health crises, is now in danger of being labeled a ‘lawless criminal’ and can be punished for having no other place to go.

This mandate from the Mayor draws into question how conservative our nation has become with the use of the term ‘lawless’. It is sadly reminiscent of Reagan-Era politics, where poor communities and people of color were disproportionately incarcerated and labeled as ‘crackheads and criminals’ during the War on Drugs, while more affluent white families received drastically lighter sentences for cocaine, which is chemically almost identical to crack.

Housed citizens often break laws without being punished, dehumanized, or labeled. We have seen many individuals who have admitted to lawbreaking move on to become Mayors of progressive cities, and even the President of the United States.

Mayor Hales actively defends his sidewalk eviction rule, claiming it is not about discriminating against any person who is homeless, just people who have no respect for the law. I’m not sure if anyone else knows a person who sleeps on a sidewalk with all of their possessions and is not homeless. The messaging from City Hall should be seen as it is, a game of semantics that labels people experiencing homelessness in a negative light.

For too long, the Portland region has been running on the fumes of the 10-year plan to end homelessness. We've done a lot of good work as a community but we are far from ending homelessness. That won't happen until we have a permanent source of revenue to create affordable housing in Portland and the larger community. What will be our legacy? Building more shelters and camps or finding the moral courage to create lasting change that actually brings us closer to that goal of ending homelessness? The alternative is we continue on this path that Mayor Hales is walking down, of criminalizing the less unfortunate, the homeless, and the poor. We need our Mayor and our entire community to quickly change direction.

Setting up Food Carts will not fill the void for the leadership that our City needs to fight homelessness. There is room here for all of us.

Aug. 27, 2013