Well, Pilate DID try to cut him some slack but his own people were agin’ it. Truly it has been said that no good deed goes unpunished.
Doesn’t Costco provide health insurance for their employees, or is he not eligible?
There are always going to be people who fall through the cracks, and it’s tragic.
Health insurance doesn’t pay 100%, in fact, depending on what it is, it often doesn’t pay much at all, or anything at all up to the deductible.
And if you have a $5,000+ deductible, which is fairly standard, that’s usually not a cost that people on the edge can absorb.
True, BUT at the time, wine was often much safer to drink than water.
That is true, and sometimes the employer charges enough that some people cannot afford it.
p.s. $255,000,000 could build a few decent apartment buildings, fully furnished to boot.
You’d think so, right? And yet, for 23 million the city has plans to turn out a whole big SIXTY UNITS!!! TA DAH!!! At this rate they could blow through the entire 255 million and still only have beds for six hundred of the approximately 5200 unhoused people in Portland. Amazing!
Not really…
That’s over 380K per unit. They could have bought them houses for that.
Well, to be fair, not in Portland at the moment where even teardown shitboxes are going for over 300K just to get access to the lots and one wall to keep the new house permitted as a “renovation” rather than new construction. Conservative estimate is that building any single family residence in Portland is going to run 30-40K JUST in permits and the process is so lengthy the builder/investor is guaranteed to be making a minimum of a year of payments before having even a snowball’s chance of getting the property sold again. Shit be broken here ATM.
NIMBYism is a huge obstacle.
Look at what Finland did with the similar amount of 270 million euros:
See now, that’s a COUNTRY tackling its problems. I guaran-fucking-TEE you that if Portland were to manage to house and deliver needed services to the homeless population we would be inundated in short order by yet MORE homeless people who’ve been shoved onto Greyhound buses with a one way ticket to our fair city from the GOP hellholes they were previously in. Because that is what red states DO, they shove their problems off onto states that aren’t actively trying to kill people. This is why I say that until there is a concerted and coherent FEDERAL response the homeless problem will continue to get worse and worse. Right now it’s a giant game of whack-a-mole and cities like Portland where people don’t simply murder homeless people for fun continue to be inundated. Not sure what’s gonna give first but incidents of violence against the homeless and clashes between the housed and unhoused are escalating briskly and it’s getting damned dangerous out here.
True, but also note - And the country is successful: It is the only EU-country where the number of homeless people is declining. By no means is the homeless problem solved in Finland, they are, however, really on their way to most homeless being homed. Finland also institutionalized the worst .
What is important to know is that -
In comparison, “Housing First” is cheaper than accepting homelessness: Now, the state spends 15,000 euros less per year per homeless person than before.