Hearing people suddenly talk about homelessness and drugs, like "oh, it's supermeth!" / "no, idiot, it's not supermeth, it's...
Hearing people suddenly talk about homelessness and drugs, like “oh, it’s supermeth!” / “no, idiot, it’s not supermeth, it’s housing prices”
Okay so when I arrived around 2010 there was agreement that the downtown homeless thing was def. addiction, they had opened a non-sober housing project for long-termers in conjunction with the redevelopment of the Pearl District warehouses
The thing is… the Pearl District had been a working waterfront, docks and a railyard, it had always been a place the lowliest cutouts & castaways (The Decemberists came from Portland!) could find cheap lodging and support themselves and the monkeys on their strong backs, just after containerization the ones who had it together enough to leave did and were replaced with de- or postinstitutionalized mental cases, and all the nonprofit service providers focused there, and it was a self-sustaining and conceivably interruptable cycle
Now they’re like “oh the new homeless are just previous regional residents that were priced out of their homes everywhere in a hot market” and like okay, but when pressure cranks up they get knocked out basically the most marginal and weakest networked first, which is disproportionately addicts. Like, that “Faces of Meth” campaign came from Portland, when I first showed up by Alberta the pitiable addicts were mostly crack but I know what a Portland methhead looks like, and even as you get into the methier outskirts of town they’re a visibly higher share of the car encampments
Like, are they homeless cause of meth? Well, the equivalent figure not on meth might have held onto a home, yeah. Are they homeless cause of the housing market? Well, even in 2015 a disability check fixed income would keep a roof over a methhead’s head at like, 128th Street, yeah.
The counterfactual of “Addiction rates don’t change, but housing becomes way more affordable/plentiful” -> “homelessness crisis ends” seems obvious here, but does the alternative “Housing affordability doesn’t change, but addiction rates plummet” also lead there? I’d imagine you’d still have a similar amount of people stuck out in the cold, if landlords are willing to price out a certain % of the population, or if there aren’t enough houses to go around.
Agreed. Also, some of the issue is really that methheads are more of an problem to see establishing encampments nearby because on top of the fact at any given time they could be on meth, or unstable as a result of regular meth use, they’re quite possibly immersed in a criminal methhead subculture and necessarily already have at least one foot into the criminal enterprise world of meth trafficking, all of which raise the chances they’ll do something to be a problem over and above just being there