Of course it does, but right-wing media has decided that Portland is their target of opportunity. “See? The left coast libruls are destroying 'Murka!”
So if I give you a port-a-potty and a tent, you’re selling your house tomorrow? People aren’t sitting in their apartments saying “If I could just get over my aversion to shitting in the streets, I’d be able to save rent money!”
I subscribe so I’m not sure if you can read the whole article. This is an attempt to address not the protests but the circumstances of the people living on the street (and therefore of associated garbage):
The proposed $38 million package would be used over the coming months to create hundreds of additional sheltered beds, increase the number of outreach teams that help those living on the streets connect with housing and social service providers and double the size of a city program tasked with removing refuse from unsanctioned camps and often sweeping its inhabitants.
Hey, sorry for the double post, but I thought you should see more about the downfall of civilization in Portland. 
That’s not the way to look at economics. A fundamental principle is that changes happen on the margins. Somewhere out there are people who are on the margin between homelessness and finding a place to live, It’s those people who may have their decisions changed if you make staying homeless marginally harder or easier. Obviously indigent or mentally ill people are not going to suddenly run out and buy a house.
There are homeless people in some cities who have some means. San Fransisco has people like service workers or even employed junior coders living in tents because the rent is too high even for them.
But the basic principle is that when you change incentives, it causes behavioural change on the margin. It’s pretty fundamental.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t do some of these things, like putting in porta-johns or allowing safe injection sites or whatever but we should do so with the recognition that anything we do to ease the suffering of such people will also perversely cause more people to be in that situation. That’s the nature of ‘wicked’ problems in complex systems. A lot of human social problems fall into that category.
I’m left speechless by someone who sees workers who can’t afford rent in the city they live, and thinks “you know what the solution is? Let’s make it harder for them.”
They float anyway, right?
Naively applying “fundamental principle” reasoning to complex situations doesn’t always produce reliable inferences, and I think your argument here is a good example of that failure.
Your claim here is more of an article of faith than an empirically supported finding.
For example, study results have shown for more than a quarter-century that needle-exchange programs do not increase injectable illegal drug use.
This appears to be because individuals’ decisions to inject illegal drugs are not significantly influenced by marginal-analysis calculations about the relative safety of different sources of injection needles. Because human beings’ decisions are often irrational, heavily subjective, and/or just plain messed up, and this is exacerbated when substance abuse is involved.
So no, we cannot in fact assume that “making homelessness easier” in some ways will automatically “cause more people to be in that situation”, just because naive appeals to “fundamental principles” suggest so. Homelessness is indeed a “wicked” problem due to its complexity, and simplistic theorizing about it from reductionist “basic principles” won’t help us understand it or predict people’s behavior about it.
I was pleased to be able to work this video segment (as well as Shrek’s “An ogre is like an onion”) into a recent class as examples of “the trouble with metaphors.”
Don’t even come at me with “That’s not the way to look at economics” as we have a history there and I’m perfectly aware at your abilities, as well as lack thereof, when it comes to economic issues. Either way, solving homelessness is a hijack of this thread, but your callous disregard for the homeless didn’t deserve to stand without response.
coolness.
One thing I do have to say is that one problem Portland has is that the concept of the needle EXCHANGE seems to have been lost in translation. Some local group keeps giving out shit tons of clean needles without requiring a used one in exchange, with the incredibly foreseeable result that shit tons of dirty needles get dropped everywhere, creating a big biohazard for everyone.
I had a thought last night watching John Oliver, who did a segment on the homeless crisis. During it he waxed irate over NIMBYism, and yeah, it’s a problem BUT I think a lot of people are missing a big part of the issue with it and why it’s so vehement. When looking to site low income housing or sanctioned camping spots for the homeless, city government ALWAYS looks at the lower end of the socieconomic spectrum as the targeted areas for these programs to land. Somehow nobody ever thinks it’s a good idea to put low income housing in the nice areas, probably accurately thinking that those people can afford more and better lawyers to fight off the projects.
Thing is, and I know this because I LIVE in one of those low end blue collar neighborhoods, we fucking resent always being the place where the shit gets shoveled to. We bought our houses or pay market rent, we work our jobs, we already bear the brunt of the homeless crisis in theft and vandalism and crazy motherfuckers trying to kill us with box knives and our cars being used as fuck palaces/shooting galleries when they haven’t already been stolen to be used to transport hoboes on their nightly catalytic converter gathering expeditions. We’re the ones slipping in the shit piles and having to get emergency HIV prevention treatment when we find the dirty needles in the worst possible manner. We’re tired of the whole thing.
A solution has occurred to me–city owned golf courses. From an environmental standpoint golf courses are completely indefensible. The average golf course runs about 150 acres, already cleared and landscaped. A monster fuckton of low income units could be sited at each golf course without the need for eminent domain claiming of residential units, with plenty of lovely greenspace left over and even land for garden allotments for the residents. Tiny house developments, large single room occupancy/studio units, efficiency apartments for families, a range of buildings for all the various needs of the proposed tenants will have plenty of room to be developed, with existing office and clubhouses and bathroom/shower areas given over to community use and offices for service providers.
Now, these golf courses tend to be in the nicer areas of town, but residents are going to have an uphill slog trying to justify why the city shouldn’t repurpose land it owns to something that will benefit a lot of people rather than a very few who like to and can afford to play golf. Those who can better afford to beef up their security and replace stolen property and clean up vandalism and who drive newer cars that are harder to steal will thus be in the proximity of the problem and those of us who’ve spent the last twenty years trying to stay afloat and battling against the rising tide of homelessness can have a fucking break for once.
I really think I’m on to something here.
This is not a bad idea. I like it.
Less water wastage too.
Okay, Mr. Carlin. Happy to see you woke up from that little death of yours. 
Grew a goodly pair of tits too!
Nonsense. Unless you have a cite for a statistically meaningful percentage of people who are choosing to give up their stable housing and live on the street because some town installed a public bathroom.
My city just tore down an “encampment” . . . I guess I should look for the number of homeless to decrease in the upcoming months now that we’ve made it “harder to be homeless”?
If affordable housing is provided to the homeless but it’s only available in limited quantities, wouldn’t there be a vetting process with personality tests and in-person interviews and such to try to find the best candidates for the limited housing available (which maybe comes with a job opportunity that perhaps suits someone’s stated or proven skills and gets them paying their bills), and then you also by default determine candidates for drug and/or mental health rehabilitation facilities from the same pool of candidates.
Sounds harsh, but someone more down on their luck due to the sheer inaffordability of housing that has job experience and isn’t addled badly in some other way should be considered ahead of someone that is clearly heroin addicted and mentally unstable, yes?
Whereas there’s little chance of the housed voluntarily becoming homeless in order to score some sweet free housing, there is a very real problem with homeless from places where they get rousted on the regular and hassled a whole lot and where the weather is deadly in winter moving on to places where these conditions do not apply. For those of us resident in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals the specter of Martin vs Boise means that homeless people tend to regard the Left Coast as hobo Mecca. Our homeless population is growing faster than any economic shift could credibly account for–it’s growing faster than it did after the '08 financial crash for instance and zombie RVs sporting WAY out of state license plates are a common sight. I bet a significant percentage of homeless in Los Angeles aren’t from around there either.
You would lose that bet…as has been repeated in this thread and many others, most homeless were previously residents of the very cities in which they are now homeless…
One of the more enduring myths about California’s homeless population is that the vast majority have traveled here from other states, seeking generous government assistance and weather more hospitable to living outdoors. It’s a baseless claim perpetuated by both sides of the aisle — Gov. Newsom has made it repeatedly.
While comprehensive statewide data is lacking, local surveys indicate people living on the streets are typically from the surrounding neighborhood. Example: 70% of San Francisco’s homeless people were housed somewhere in the city when they lost housing; only 8% came from out of state. Three quarters of Los Angeles County’s homeless population lived in the region before becoming homeless.
Also from the same article, to counter the whole denial of housing costs as a major driver of homelessness…
Mental health problems, addiction, childhood trauma, interaction with the criminal justice system and poverty all play significant roles in whether someone becomes homeless. But the primary reason? They can no longer afford rent.
About 1.3 million California renter households are considered “extremely low income,” making less than $25,000 a year, according to the California Housing Partnership, a nonprofit organization the state created to advise affordable housing builders. Predictably, these financially strapped households can barely afford the state’s escalating rents, and are most at risk of falling into homelessness.
Lots of people live at the edge of homelessness in unstable housing, like cheap motels, couchsurfing, in cars, etc. If the city allows sleeping in public spaces, some people may decide that an encampment is a better option. And that seems reasonable to me. If someone is begging for money, spending $40 on a motel room can be a huge financial commitment. So I would expect that the removal of the encampments means many of those people would go back to those unstable housing situations they had before. Certainly some of the people are truly homeless and they’ll find some other scrap of land to live on, but some will go back to sketchy motels, living with friends, living in cars, and so on.