Op-Ed: Oregon Will Never End Homelessness With Our Current Approach

by Eric Fruits, Ph.D.

What if everything we thought we knew about homelessness was wrong? If that’s the case, many of the policies we’re pursuing are making things worse instead of better. It’s becoming clearer that much of the accepted wisdom regarding homelessness may be nothing more than convenient myths – myths that lead to doomed policies.

The Oregon Office of Economic Analysis claims “we know homelessness is primarily about the inability to afford housing, largely the result of not building enough housing in recent decades.” Multnomah County also blames the “affordability crisis” but credits racism as a “structural” cause of homelessness.

Under this theory, the homeless on the streets are locals who couldn’t afford their rents or were unable to find housing because of systemic racism and racist property owners. It’s asserted that homelessness leads to substance abuse, rather than the other way around. If this is true, the solution is straightforward. Build more taxpayer-funded affordable housing, give priority to BIPOC applicants, and root out racist landlords. Give people housing and opportunities for treatment, and the substance abuse will go away.

But what if that theory is wrong?

Portland’s unsheltered homeless population is overwhelmingly white (68%), male (69%) and working age (73%), according to the latest survey – which was conducted nearly three years ago. That was pre-COVID, when the economy was booming and working-age unemployment was at a 20-year low of about 3%. If a white, working-age man wanted a job to pay the rent, he could have found a job to pay the rent. Something is wrong with this picture.

What’s wrong is what’s missing. The last survey reports nearly half of the unsheltered homeless suffer from substance abuse. That share is likely higher today. According to the Oregon Health Authority, overdose deaths in Multnomah County from fentanyl and methamphetamine began to skyrocket around 2017. From 2016 to 2019, deaths from meth increased 86% and fentanyl deaths tripled. Last year, 126 people with “domicile unknown” died in Multnomah County. Substance use was involved in nearly two-thirds of those deaths.

Instead of a homelessness crisis that’s leading to substance abuse, we have a substance abuse crisis that’s driving homelessness.

In “The Least of Us,” Sam Quinones recounts the story of Eric, a social worker in Los Angeles. Of all the people he met in Los Angeles’ homeless camps, Eric could not remember a single one who lost their housing because of high rents. Instead, they told him meth was the main reason they were homeless. Even so, according to Quinones, “ … policy makers and advocates instead preferred to focus on L.A.’s cost of housing, which was very high, but hardly relevant to people rendered schizophrenic and unhousable by methamphetamine.” Multnomah County’s latest report on deaths among the homeless population recounts the lives of several of those who died homeless last year. None of the stories mention housing affordability as the cause of their homelessness, but substance use runs through many of them.

Michael Shellenberger’s “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities” concludes progressive policy makers and advocates have adopted an ideology that sees lawbreakers as victims. Under this way of thinking, any attempts to rein in lawbreaking will further victimize the lawbreakers. The result is paralysis and an urge to spend money to give the impression of solving a problem without doing anything to actually solve the problem.

On homelessness, San Francisco’s leaders have decided that expensive publicly funded permanent supportive housing – rather than emergency shelter – is the best way to address the problem. This is the same thinking that dominates Metro, Multnomah County and the City of Portland’s policies. Under what is known as a “housing first” approach, residents are under no obligation to seek treatment for substance abuse or mental illness. The hope is that after they are housed, someday eventually they’ll come around to getting help, but only when they’re ready.

It’s a policy that’s doomed to fail. It’s well known in the recovery field that the people who are most in need of treatment are also those who are most resistant to treatment. Handing addicts the keys to an apartment that cost more than $300,000 to build and saying, “Let us know when you’re ready for rehab,” is a recipe for failure. Most of them will never be ready.

Shellenberger and Quinones write that the meth on the streets today is different from just a few years ago. This new formulation creates psychosis and schizophrenia and causes users to commit crimes and violence. Shellenberger argues that drug users arrested for committing crimes should be given a choice of rehab or jail. It’s a form of tough love that may save their lives while protecting the community.

I had lunch with the father of a son in his 40s. While in college, his son developed a mental illness that came with overwhelming paranoia. He thought his roommates were trying to poison him. He thought the medications for his illness were poison, so he went untreated. Eventually he was arrested for pulling a gun in a bar and ended up doing time. As a condition of his parole, the judge ordered the son to take his medications. His father credits that judge with saving his son’s life. The choice of treatment or jail can be a strong motivator. The judge knew that, and the dad now knows that.

A leader of a prominent downtown Portland homeless service provider emailed me several examples of his shelter’s failed attempts to get treatment for people who were clearly a danger to themselves and others. One of these was Rachel Hammer.

… a woman in Old Town suffering from mental illness was regularly reported by [shelter] staff as mentally unstable, and a danger to herself and others, yet was only warned and allowed to remain free without mental examination. She later committed a serious arson and was found guilty of a Measure 11 crime. What could have been a detainment for a mental evaluation and involuntary mental commitment costing the public approximately $20,000 was instead a five-year sentence at Coffee Creek costing the state approximately $1,000,000 (with all law enforcement, prosecution, correction and mental health costs at Coffee Creek Correctional facility included).

Last year, Oregon voters approved Measure 110, which decriminalized personal and non-commercial possession of many drugs, including meth, heroin and fentanyl. Persons caught with a small amount of these drugs receive a citation for a $100 fine. The fine can be wiped out if the person submits to a health “screening.” There is no obligation to seek or receive any follow-up treatment for substance use. Once the person gets the screening, they can keep on keepin’ on.

The homeless service provider who emailed me saw Measure 110 as a disaster in the making: “Incarceration is often an exit point in homelessness for addicts. I estimate the length of homelessness for addicts … to have been about one year, and I estimate this length will easily increase to 2-plus years with reduced arrests [under Measure 110].”

This is coming from someone who has spent decades providing services to the homeless. This is someone who works with them every day. Someone who wants people to get into housing. Someone who cares about the safety of the rest of the community. This person knows – from experience – that the choice of rehab or jail is a powerful incentive to get treatment.

Nevertheless, the fact that he asked to remain anonymous indicates that this kind of talk is not appropriate in the polite society that dominates the Homeless Services Industrial Complex. You see, the Complex needs the crisis to continue or worsen. The Complex needs Metro to come back to voters to renew its income taxes to funnel money to the scads of nonprofits that promise to help the homeless, but not end homelessness. The Complex needs local governments to pass bond measures so developers and construction companies can build so-called affordable housing that costs more than twice the costs per unit of private construction. The politicians in the Complex need more ribbon cutting photo ops.

If you want to end homelessness, ignore what the Complex says. It’s always self-serving.

It’s been 16 years since Portland and Multnomah County adopted a 10-year plan to end homelessness, and we’re now in our seventh year of a city-wide housing emergency. Even so, the problem is worse today than it was then. Something isn’t working. It’s time to bust the myth that most of the region’s homeless are victims of rising housing prices. It’s time to address the real problem – a substance abuse crisis that’s driving people into homelessness and turning residents and businesses into victims of crime and violence.

Eric Fruits, Ph.D. is Vice President of Research at Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon’s free market public policy research organization, which recently published “Homelessness in Portland: Some Straightforward Solutions to a Complex Problem.” A version of this article was published by the Pamplin Media Group on December 17, 2021.

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