Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

791–800 of 1001 posts

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#791

Post by huytersd »

xref wrote: post #675
janalsncm wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I will add that we’ve come full circle on psychiatric hospitals, which is essentially what you’re describing in different words. Budget cuts and deinstitutionalization meant many of those were closed down 50 years ago.

In no small part because psychiatric hospitals were wildly, wildly abused. Basically you could lock people up indefinitely with no conviction of anything because someone said they’re a danger to themselves/society/whatever. Basically used like an on-shore Guantanamo.

Set them up again but increase inspections and have maximum times you can keep a person there.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#792

Post by volkl48 »

panick21_ wrote: post #727
stillwithit wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WFH means biz isn’t coming back there any time soon even with the homeless gone. It’s why homeless are downtown now rather on the fringe; fringe used to be emptier more frequently as downtown filled. Now folks are home on the fringe all the time. I was just downtown for lunch on weekday and it was a ghost town. I worked for PSU for years, am aware of what it should look like and it’s just dead. That’s been the case s…

These problems are so American. Downtown in European cities (that I know) are as vibrant as ever. Europe has done just as many social programs as Portland or probably more. Why do people no live in these areas? It seems to me this problem is much larger then drug law enforcement. PS: US Government haven't given Musk a single $ to go to Mars, what are you even talking about.

As someone on the US East Coast - Boston and NYC are doing pretty fine. This is very much a specific cities problem, not an all cities problem.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#793

Post by culopatin »

alistairSH wrote: post #763
CydeWeys wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first priority should be cleaning up the cities for the benefit of the actual taxpayers. Absolutely do not let drug addicts overwhelm your downtown cores and make them terrible. You don't need to lock them up indefinitely, but you do need to move them somewhere else where they won't have hugely negative effects on the city and its populace. It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for t…

...but you do need to move them somewhere else ... So, make them somebody else's problem? Great plan. :|

Somewhere else could be a recovery facility, housing located in a cheaper area so it’s cheaper to run, not an active volcano or a small town downtown.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#794

Post by blindstitch »

lmm wrote: post #540
bglazer wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did we stop?

Feels like a follow-on from the "white flight" phenomenon. The rich and/or influential (that is, middle-/upper-class, but Americans aren't used to thinking that way) people who set policy for a city no longer live or even spend any time downtown. They push for the policies they think are right, but there's no feedback mechanism to tell them what effect they're actually having.

Why do I have to dig so far down into this thread before finding someone with an informed position based in actual history of cities? Everything else I'm seeing is coming from a standpoint that screams of a sheltered position separated from the realities of the city and a society that fails to provide a dignified existence for these people. I have seen no mention of the fact that america has the most homeless and undernourishment for any developed country, or three times as many empty homes as there are homeless. Or that we subsidize the lifestyle of these suburban dwellers by exhausting municipal budgets just repairing the sewer lines that serve neighborhoods that are 1/5th or less the density of the city. Just a long stream of "this looks bad, I don't like looking at it, we should just push the problem outward."

Portland is the only city in the country that is taking as aggressive an approach towards decriminalizing and formalizing encampments, and it shouldn't be surprising that it is experiencing visible failures this early on, or an indictment of those policies.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#795

Post by dougmwne »

legitster wrote: post #57

Drug legalization is something I have come 180 on (or at least, 90 degrees). Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc. ODs have more than doubled, and the shelters are half empty! They are not one more social program away from cleaning out the streets. I think the experiment has radically failed and I'm ready to say I was wrong. While I don't want to go back t…

I’ll add another inconvenient truth that I’ve realized. You can copy every law and policy that’s working so well in some other (Scandinavian) place and have it still fail horribly. That’s because it was never the laws that were working, but the society and culture as a whole. You can’t bring good laws to a place with a disintegrating social fabric and expect the same results.

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#796

Post by culopatin »

gexla wrote: post #717
bbor wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not make life for the addicts better, but it won't make life for them much worse either Seems like a hard claim to back up. What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? Setting up a giant slum on Mount Tabor? Building a network of trailer parks? I can’t imagine any answer to “let’s concentrate all these undesirables somewhere where we don’t have to look at them and they can’t interrupt us” t…

> What would “moving” the homeless from, say, Portland look like? My guess is you don't. Maybe it's easier for the people with money to go elsewhere than it is for the homeless. So, you get WFH, area small businesses shutting down, less of the casual visitors.

And Portland becomes unable to fund the programs that help these people because there is no tax income and becomes Detroit

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#797

Post by jonfw »

bitcharmer wrote: post #758
swalling wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc." This is not even remotely true. Everyone in the city, from the mayor [1] to the head of the largest services non-profit [2] has been yelling from the rooftops about the glacial slowness to effectively spend the allocated funding for drug treatment. Until just months ago, Multnomah County has been sitting on tens of m…

Appreciate your comment. Terrifyingly high number of commenters (likely Americans) drawing flawed conclusions. We tried and failed, therefore this problem is unsolvable. Dozens of cities in other parts of the world had much success, so maybe you're doing it wrong? Zurich did a great job, especially with the transformation of the infamous needle park.

Doing some research on needle park- it looks like the experiments with allowing drug use were a massive failure, absolutely ruining the park, and it was ultimately cleaned up by law enforcement

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#798

Post by u32480932048 »

thworp wrote: post #750
gigatexal wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Portland native here: it hasn’t worked. I was back just a year or two ago and 5th ave near the waterfront was overrun with homeless openly shooting up and accosting folks. All the food carts across from the building where I used to work left, the Indian buffet restaurant closed, walking up around 10th near the Target to check out other restaurants I loved many I saw many barricaded former businesses. The city…

I really don't know where American ""progressives"" (they're sociopaths imo) got the idea that harm reduction and decriminalization involves just letting people rot (and shoot up) in the streets and just releasing people on no bail. That is not done in any of the places these people use as positive examples of the policy working. This happened on such a scale that I can't help but wonder if the results as seen in Por…

In my experience, they're inexperienced with the world and of a background where problems like these are only hypothetical, and therefore very black and white. It's easy to get behind the feel-good answer if you know nothing about the problem other than a Vox explainer you read 5 minutes ago. They don't know what real harm reduction actually looks like, because that would take more than hitting Like and Share.

"Wow! Homeless people still exist! In my city?! That's not very nice! And the police threw away the cover photo lady's tent and pepper-sprayed her friends sleeping bag? That's really not very nice! All to clean up the area for the visit of some official?"

The violence with which many camps are removed is abhorrent to many, as is the idea of shuffling them around for mere cosmetic purposes (not to actually get them into a better place), so there's a naive "everybody be nice! leave those poor people alone!" attitude that doesn't actually care about pesky details.

Since their experience is hypothetical and they're idealizing and romanticizing The Homeless, discussion on practical realities like the number of violent felons and sex offenders in camps is shut down with a classic "that never happens". They'll pretend it's some kind of made-up minority and not the bulk of people who can't/won't go to a shelter (i.e, because they have warrants or have been banned for bad behavior).

Sure, they got what they asked for, but I don't believe they ever really considered what they were asking for, beyond "stop being mean".

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#799

Post by kzzzznot »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #689
legitster wrote: post #57

Drug legalization is something I have come 180 on (or at least, 90 degrees). Portland did everything! They invested huge sums in shelters, treatment programs, counsellors, etc. ODs have more than doubled, and the shelters are half empty! They are not one more social program away from cleaning out the streets. I think the experiment has radically failed and I'm ready to say I was wrong. While I don't want to go back t…

People should be locked in jail for being drug addicts. Give it a few more years and you'll change your opinion on that too.

That viewpoint is both draconian and fiscally irresponsible

Re: To revive Portland, officials seek to ban public drug use

#800

Post by bart_spoon »

ratg13 wrote: post #164
jmcphers wrote: post #82

I live in the Seattle area, which is struggling with public drug use just like Portland. Like Portland, we've lived for decades with very progressive politicians who have lead successful decriminalization efforts and spent huge sums of public funds on treatment and harm reduction programs. After several decades and many, many millions of dollars spent, the problem is, by every measure, absolutely the worst it's ever…

I think other cities bussing and flying homeless people out west outweighs every possible policy change. We’ll never know if any of these policies stood a chance due to the USA viewing the west coast as a dumping ground for homeless people. Next time you’re passing by these people, ask them where they are from originally. Locals are like 20% of the problem.

That is an oft repeated myth. A recent study by UCSF of California homelessness found that 90% of homeless Californians became homeless while already living in California, and 75% still live in the same county as they did when they became homeless [0]. Locals are approximately 90% of the problem.

[0] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/20/california-a...

Post reply on HN