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Comment by swalling | Hacker News Reader

   "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 millions of unspent funds,[3] and has been perpetually criticized for spending on harm reduction instead of treatment.[4] We actually closed the only local sobering center in 2020!

1. https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2023/03/20/wheeler-slams-mea...

2. https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/11/15/the-ceo-of-portlands-l...

3. https://katu.com/news/local/multnomah-county-chair-fast-trac...

4. https://www.kptv.com/2023/07/08/multnomah-county-implementin...

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Right, but the plan has still failed. If all the key players are on board and you can't even begin to implement the plan, then it was a bad plan, and the people who developed it had little comprehension of reality. We should not attempt this elsewhere.

No, actually we should be trying to fix the stupid mistakes that were made in implementation of the plan, not roll it back and keep on fighting an equally moronic, ineffective, and racist War on Drugs elsewhere.

The best available evidence is that decriminalization essentially had no effect on overdose deaths (https://www.opb.org/article/2023/10/03/ballot-measure-110-di...). It was going to go up no matter what because of the nature of fentanyl. The only thing the failure of Measure 110 has demonstrably done is waste taxpayer funds and give businesses in downtown an excuse for why they are failing (when in reality it has more to do with the death of downtown for purely economic reasons post-COVID, just like other major West Coast cities).

This is the classic approach of conservatives: throw wrenches in every part of a welfare system, then point to its failures to justify its dissolution. See: Medicare, public education, etc.

The conservatives who run Portland and Oregon?

You will note of course that the rules and regulations around how to implement these things are always 'bipartisan' and meant to stir up as little backlash as possible. There's many opportunities to install bottlenecks and roadblocks in systems that end up shaping the entire way they function. To some extent it is progressives anticipating conservative backlash but there's plenty of lines in plenty of laws written into and insisted on by conservatives that have wide-ranging consequences.

Reductionist perspectives on how politics works always end up at this "one side is dominating the other" kind of narrative but it's never actually that way, both sides still have a lot of influence on the various specifics of the outcome.

Are you seriously attributing public sector bureaucratic dysfunction to some sort of subversive public sector conservative operatives, or vague regulatory poison pills that you cannot actually point to here?

It seems a lot more intuitive to believe that you cannot just legislate that all government employees act selflessly towards the Greater Good, and the Homeless Industrial complex is a real thing that is not necessarily working in the interests of the public. Observing waste, fraud, and abuse and reflexively saying "this must be the fault of conservatives somehow" is just sorta sad.

Subversive public sector partisanship is a lot more believable than a homeless industrial complex, I'm glad you brought the two up together.

They mean not leftists enough, its a way to absolve themselves of any responsibility of the situation at hand, if only they were even more leftist.

I live in Portland. Conservatives do not have anything to do with our city or the county of Multnomah. We haven't elected a conservative since the 80s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_McCready. We're the second highest taxed city in the nation.

If you ask me most of our problems come down to fraud/waste/abuse, mismanagement, and dysfunction.

I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.

In regards to Portland, you almost certainly have a problem with the key points you identified, but you also have a problem with the fact that public drug use is intrinsically tied with homelessness. You can't fix one without the other. This involves (in the short term) more public housing, but for a better solution (the long term) it involves better education, welfare, health-care and social equality.

You can't try to fix one of these problems while ignoring the others. It won't work.

What is conservative about Portland politicians and whom are you actually comparing them to?

IMO Portland already does every single one of the solutions that you recommend. It’s not working out for them well, in the same way it isn’t working out for Portugal or Amsterdam.

Maybe some drugs should be restricted and usage controlled. I’m pro legalization, but I would not support opium dens being as common as Starbucks.

Why do you say it's not working out in Portugal or Amsterdam? I frequently hear those two places cited as an example of where drug liberalisation has been a big success. Is that not true? I ask from ignorance.

The programme in Portugal requires people to check in with the authorities, seek treatment and move off the street corner. It by most accounts worked ok for a while, but downtown Lisbon started to look pretty bad recently, and I think they’ve been backpedaling a bit.

In Amsterdam, the drug tourism made the city hard to live in, and the authorities have largely cleaned it up now. Weed is a special case, but using anything else on the street will warrant a check-in from the cops.

I live in Lisbon and I don't see how "downtown Lisbon started to look pretty badly recently". Street drug users, seemingly mostly/wholly homeless, seem to be concentrated in an area I wouldn't call downtown. I don't really know what they do to keep it that way though. Also Porto seems to be an entirely different story from what I've seen there.

In any case, Portugal's strategy was supposed to be diverting funds from the narcotics police to rehabilitation efforts. But those funds have steadily eroded over the years with cost-cutting measures such as the merger of the autonomous drug agency into the main healthcare service. It's not too surprising if it is falling short of its initial success.

Another thing to consider is the inseparability of homelessness and drug abuse issues. It doesn't seem to be possible address one without the other, rising homelessness will inevitably bring more drug abuse. (Still I see fewer homeless people in downtown Lisbon than in Barcelona that won't even let you have a beer in the park).

Fair enough, my knowledge of the situation in Lisbon is mostly second hand from some friends there. When I visited them, there were definitely areas that were pretty dodgy in what seemed to me to be the downtown. Now, I’ve been to places that are actually dangerous, and I’ve never felt unsafe in Portugal, but I definitely did get accosted by a clammy, pale looking gentleman with a nervous tick who tried to steal my phone.

It's only dodgy compared to Ponta Delgada or the well groomed areas of London, which are well groomed thanks to immigrant labour. Pickpockets and annoying sodium bicarbonate or basilic 'drug dealers' are quite common in Lisbon, but then evey major tourist destination has pickpockets. The novelty in Lisbon is the fake drug dealers. I don't know about drugs as I haven't seen any needles or addicts or even stoners on the street.

I don’t know about Portugal. But Amsterdam’s drug toleration (it’s still illegal mind you) happens against a background of pretty intense anti-drug culture. As that culture has become more permissive, drug policy has become more punitive: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/681551

What American cities need more then public housing, is housing. Actual policies that increase housing stock and make it possible to live in these places without a car.

That is how you actually decrease total cost of living.

The US has been trending up, between housing and transportation, a huge amount of people spend well above 50% of their income on that, and poorer people even more.

Public housing can be part of this, but by itself it wont fix anything.

America doesn’t have an housing problem. America has a drug problem.

It’s time we stop deceiving the public.

Too bad the Housing Authority can't help smuggle houses over the border.

There are plenty of houses in America, it just happens so that most of them are in less desirable places.

I think nobody is entitled to live in any city. You and I are not entitled to live in Manhattan if we can't afford it, we are not entitled to live in Beverly Hills if we don't have the means for it, and likewise the homeless are not entitled to live where they cannot be housed.

Otherwise, I would like to apply for a supportive housing unit penthouse on 5th avenue please.

What a useless argument against a position no one is taking! Please participate in the conversation happening here, not some fantasy straw man. Comments like this are less than useless.

That is a common argument. If you spend time arguing with people about housing costs, houses in less desirable areas often turn out not to count for various reasons.

It makes a lot more sense to talk about how to support cheaper communities and migrate people to them than it does to bring down housing costs in expensive areas where the locals are fighting back against bringing in new people.

Mostly because you have to bring people to those places and upgrade the infrastructure to support them there. Do the math yourself if you're unconvinced.

People in cheaper locations also fight back! Why is that location cheap and why do those people live there? Precisely because the density is so low and the community likes it the way it is. An influx of recently homeless people would be a huge disruption and no one would be happy with the change. Would you want to manage that situation? THINK!

You must be new on the topic :) Let me accelerate this conversation for you:

1) Someone says we need housing.

2) I say: great, let's build it!

3) Someone says: but cities are not building enough housing, we need to invest more.

4) I say: great, let's build it anywhere in the US, where it is cheaper too. Population density in the US is very low.

5) Someone says: not like that! Homeless want to live in places like San Francisco, you can't relocate them.

6) I say: nobody can choose to live where they want if they don't have the means for it. <- WE ARE HERE.

You need to learn some manners and some basic critical thinking skills. You don't get to dictate where we are in a conversation.

To build housing "anywhere in the US" you have to build all the infrastructure that makes it make sense to move people there. This country hasn't built a new city in ages, it just keeps expanding metro areas into sub- and exurbs. Are you also going to fund hospitals? Groceries? Building supply stores? A car for everyone? All the devices and supplies for heating and cooling in adverse environmental conditions? How do you think that's going to make sense financially compared to providing services and housing where people are and where they already have human-scale support systems (friends and family)? And good luck bringing together the different governments at different scales to avoid scope creep, budget bloat, and general coordination problems. You're being so myopic and naive that your smarminess and vitriol toward those you consider undeserving is not even funny, just pitiful. People aren't bits in a machine, you can't just move them effortlessly to new locations.

> You don't get to dictate where we are in a conversation.

> you can't just move them effortlessly to new locations.

Turns out we are exactly where I said we would be in this conversation.

We can allocate the homeless to numerous other existing towns without having to build new cities, and most importantly without having to build expensive shelters in places where land is already very expensive, like the coasts.

Where they have friends and family is irrelevant because nobody is entitled to live where they want, unless their families host them. I have friends in Paris that doesn't mean I can demand a flat there. Plus many of them are drug tourists that are from out of town, and those also happen to be the most dangerous ones.

With that said the small minority of homeless that are genuinely looking forward to being re-integrated into society must be given treatment, housing and support. This is a small minority, unfortunately.

House prices suggest there's a gigantic housing market problem.

We can't fill up the supportive housing units fast enough! New York has empty supportive housing units [1]. This suggests that the total number of vacancies might be even higher, as more units are added to the system regularly.

[1] - https://www.theday.com/state/20230529/thousands-of-nyc-apart...

Let's call this what it is: a pithy, meaningless, shameful, ideologically motivated, antisocial comment.

> “ compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.”

As someone from the “rest of the world” I don’t know what people mean when they say that. I think this claim is based on a broad misunderstanding of, let’s be honest, Western European politics by people who’ve never voted in elections here.

I live in Switzerland, have lived or worked in the Netherlands, UK and Czechia. The liberal parts of the US are far to the left of any of those countries.

(Yes, healthcare is cheaper, except in Switzerland. It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but on questions related to drug use in the public square, I think you’d find it’s a lot less lenient here than you think.)

I think if you look at actual class issues such as labor organization, healthcare, housing, public transportation, the adage of all US politicians being consevative stays (mostly) true

Hm, maybe? Public transport, for example, I very nice, I agree, but in fact it’s less affordable in most places than, say in New York. I’d much rather be poor in NYC than in Paris, London or Prague. At least in NYC, you don’t get charged more for commuting from a cheaper area, the city provides heat, there are community programs, etc.

Look up some actual political programs from major parties in Western Europe. You’ll be surprised.

I think most Americans have seen a sanitized version of Europe, just like most Europeans have seen the evening news version of America. Both of those ideas are caricatures.

You honestly think NYC is a good place to be poor? lol

I mean, "poor" might mean different things to different people. Call it working class? I'd rather commute from the Bronx for $2.90 than from Croydon (in many ways the Bronx of London) for, like, $7. I'd much rather get heating for free than pay, like, $5k in London.

If you're on the street, none of this helps you much, but across many metrics, I think NYC might legitimately be more affordable to live for the working class than London or Paris.

i don't know enough to comment on the cost of "normal" living, but think about what happens in NYC the moment you get laid off or, even worse, get sick. I think at that point Paris starts becoming a lot more attractive if you're working class..

The way I see it, current European conservatism manifests as nationalism, anti immigration, anti Islam, and anti green policy. I looked at French and Dutch conservativd parties and that seems like a fair description. They’re still in support of government funded education, healthcare, labor organization, vast public transportation etc… those are all hot topics to American conservatives. American conservatives also have their own colors of nationalism and anti immigration stances, but I’m talking class issues, as opposed to social and culture issues. I don’t live in Europe and not a politics expert, so correct me if I’m wrong

Well, we started talking about drug policy. If you would like to do a comparison between American and European right across a range of issues, then I will subscribe to your newsletter :)

But at any rate, I think European healthcare systems either cost as much as the US (e.g. in Switzerland), end up being two-tier public/private (Czechia), or are near collapse (the NHS).

Union density is higher in the US than in France. French unions make a lot of noise, but don't represent that many people. Unions in many other countries are not very powerful (and the mainstream right is generally opposed to them).

I think there's a way these things are presented for the outside world, that doesn't always match the reality on the ground. I also think there is a tendency for people to pick the example out of a group of 28 countries that best supports their argument in the moment: Swedish unions, Swiss trains and French retirement, as it were.

> I think if you look at actual class issues such as labor organization, healthcare, housing, public transportation, the adage of all US politicians being consevative stays (mostly) true

Australia is way ahead of the US at privatising public transport. Selling off public assets into private hands is a much bigger thing in the UK and Australia than the US. Some Australian states are now even privatising government services such as motor vehicle registration, driver licensing and land title registration. The UK and Australia also have a much bigger culture of commercialising government IP as opposed to the US culture of putting it in the public domain. People always think of the US as more capitalist, but I think these are examples of ways in which the US is less capitalist. Some of these Australian initiatives are almost bordering on anarcho-capitalism (sans the competition part). And they aren’t necessarily the work of “conservatives” - the decision to partially privatise the motor vehicle registry in the State of Victoria was undertaken by the Andrews government, [0] which is arguably the most left-leaning of Australian state governments, in charge of Australia’s most left-leaning state

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-01/victorian-government-...

The OP was talking about politicians and at least for politicians on a national level that is certainly true. Look up any of the many political compass/categorisation sites and you will find the Democrats economic, defence, education... policies typically to the right of the major conservative party in European countries (CDU, French republicans, moderaterna in Sweden...).

Now with social/drug policies it's typically more complicated, and there are vast differences between European countries as well (e.g. Sweden is extremely restrictive for drugs and even the major left parties don't push for changes).

The overall point still stands though. Now among the population there is much greater variety, but this is one of the issues with the US two party system, significant portions of views in the electorate are not represented.

A very American definition of "conservative" is being used when people say that. The converse statement, "other countries' politicians are in general much more liberal", probably makes more intuitive sense, again using a strictly Western definition of "liberal" (Enlightenment, post-revolutionary France, etc.).

You got this wrong: drug use generates homelessness. Most homeless in the US are drug addicts - many of them with serious health conditions partly induced by drug use - and that’s why they can’t hold a job or get a home.

In San Francisco when we give homes to drug addicts, the first thing they do is ripping the sink out to sell it and buy more drugs.

There is a serious drug epidemic that needs to be addressed simultaneously as we try to help the super-minority of legitimate homeless that are bad on their luck and need 2-3 months to find a new job and get back on their feet.

I always felt like I heard this was the opposite. That the drug addicts were the minority population, but the majority of the news stories. I feel like we both would benefit from statistics that prove either way. My feelings are generated from anecdotes I've heard over the years, and I would love to be proved wrong and change my mind. Do you know? I feel like so much of this discussion is fueled by strong feelings without data.

> In 2022, there are approximately 582,462 people affected by long-term homelessness in the United States. The US homeless population is increasing yearly, particularly in younger age ranges. Tragically, homelessness and substance abuse go hand in hand. The National Coalition for the Homeless has found that 55% of homeless people are alcohol dependent, and 25% reported being dependent on other harmful substances.[0]

More than half suffer substance abuse. Accounting for the fact that many of them would deny admitting to drug use when asked, this is probably a conservative number and the percentage is much higher. Also this is an US average, and it doesn't take into consideration "drug tourism" in cities like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle where drug use is literally the main goal thanks to easy drug access, therefore the drug-related homelessness ratio in some places is much higher.

They also probably take into account both housed an unhoused homeless, with the nuance that unhoused homeless are more likely to be druggies and to refuse shelter. Therefore the percentage of homeless population we see every day in our streets (which is the subset of homeless more likely to affect our day-to-day lives) have very likely an higher percentage of drug use.

Finally, the US actually has another problem: we can't fill up the supportive housing units fast enough! New York has empty supportive housing units [1]. This suggests that the total number of vacancies might be even higher, as more units are added to the system regularly.

[0] https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/

[1] https://www.theday.com/state/20230529/thousands-of-nyc-apart...

You're both sort of correct, but that also makes you both sort of wrong too.

Homeless is in part composed of three things (in Portland):

- Substance abuse (drugs, alcohol, etc)

- Mental health (coincides with the above!)

- Housing (which normally stabilizes, somewhat, both of the above!)

We lack single unit subsidized housing in Portland, which makes the former two more visible and at times problematic.

The elephant is the room is that drug addicts are present in large number, they cannot hold onto housing and they cause incredible damage in the cities where they congregate, to themselves and to the community.

For as long as we keep ignoring this, we are stuck in nuances.

These people don't want to get better, so we need to mandate treatment (and give them one of the many available supportive housing units after accepting treatment) or - if they refuse treatment - relocate them where they cause no harm other than themselves. Might as well call it a "government-assisted suicide" campus, because this is what it already is in every major American city nowadays. Today, we are literally letting them die on our streets.

Nobody in modern public discourse is complaining about homeless in the context of a regular Joe bad on his luck, who after a while - with dignity and hard work - goes back to a stable life. We should give our all to him and homeless like him.

> they cannot hold onto housing and they cause incredible damage in the cities where they congregate

You are right, on average they cannot maintain housing, which is why I said "subsidized" - which ensures they don't become homeless (aka publicly visible).

> We lack single unit subsidized housing in Portland

What that doesn't solve is the substance abuse, which is a mental health problem. If your intent is to solve both then you need to spend on mental healthcare and subsidized single unit housing. If you just want them off the street and concentrated to certain areas (eg: where I live in Portland) then you just need subsidized housing.

There is more to being able to maintain housing than paying rent. Are you also going to subsidize cleaning and maintenance staff to scrub and rebuild the apartment every time they deliberately destroy it? If you kick them out for smearing everything in feces or tearing all the copper out of the walls or stopping up all the drains and flooding the unit because the drugs made them think this was a good idea, then you haven't solved the homeless problem. You've just made another homeless shelter which they won't stay in because it has rules they won't or can't follow.

They need to be housed in something like a prison or a psychiatric hospital, after being convicted with due process.

Have you ever personally known someone addicted to hard drugs? I've known several. They can't continue living in a house or apartment with other non addicted people. They would steal literally everything to sell for drugs. Losing their housing is something that happens to every drug addict. Of course their use escalates from there, but it's an early milestone common to all.

Have you ever known someone addicted to hard drugs? What gets them started on it before the transition into homelessness? Safe bet is on the scenario that they're in a stressful, economically insecure situation (including insecurely housed), but still housed, when they begin diving deeper into the drug habit.

Your first question is answered in my original post. I grew up in an affluent community where almost nobody was economically insecure. The typical heroin addict was a high school kid with rich parents. Their parents would eventually cut them off financially and kick them out of the house after all the expensive rehabs failed. They'd usually drop out of high school and spend their time panhandling around touristy areas and then go to the projects to buy and use drugs. If they were a girl, prostitution was pretty likely at this phase as well. Many people I went to school with followed this pattern. Most are dead now, some in and out of jail and still bumming around.

Then your anecdotal cases are not generalizable to the wider public and I'm not sure why you're acting as if your experience is comparable to what's being discussed in this thread. "Affluent" is a relative term, by definition, referring to only a couple percent at most of the population.

You literally asked for anecdotal data, then discount it.

> Teens who are from well-off family face a risk of drug and alcohol addiction that is higher than the national average.

https://www.livescience.com/59329-drug-alcohol-addiction-wea...

This is only true economically in arenas like taxes and government programs. Socially what country are you thinking of that is to the left of the American left?

> I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.

Source? This reads like a Leftist talking point. I’d be interested in understanding who trained on you on this idea.

The Democratic party would be considered right of center to many Western European nations, but certainly not compared to "the rest of the world", and there's a growing chunk of U.S. politicians that are proper left of center as well.

In Seattle, local elections are a contest between Socialists and Democrats. The former may not have much presence on the state or federal levels, but to say they don't exist in city politics is incorrect.

Also, the reason they can't succeed much beyond a few lefty cities is because they can't stop saying insanely stupid shit, like the suggestion that Boeing workers should seize Boeing factories and use them to make city buses instead of airplanes. Most of America doesn't go in for this kind of nonsense. This is a real example btw: https://www.kiro7.com/news/seattle-city-councilmember-elect-...

>I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative

In what way? Compared to almost everywhere on earth, American politicians are extremely xenophilic, extremely tolerant of sexual minorities, extremely feminist, more inclined towards individual freedoms in general and perhaps slightly more capitalist.

All of these things are different axes of politics that are correlated differently in different regions of the world.

> I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative

Pretty much only on the issue of taxes. But the right-wing parties surging in popularity in Europe right now make Trump look like Jimmy Carter.

Please stop voting to steal my money for more social program waste.

I already have to pay a 1% tax on all household earnings above $200k. Before haters hate, please realize I'm already paying 10% to the state on all earned income. Plus the federal rates.

Oregon has consistently mismanaged funds. Giving them more money won't fix anything. They don't know how to spend it.

I'm tired of keeping zero income until the end of April. Especially when all I have to show for it is constant homeless drug addicts. Lwt the private sector handle it or enforce no camping laws and sober folks up in a cell or ship them away, or just give them all fet lined drugs to permasolve the issue.

Conservatism isn't the point, it's the specific tactics being used that they're highlighting. IIRC the same tactics were recommended in that WWII "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" that still makes the rounds on the internet.

The gist of it is: to kill any initiative, form a committee or task force around it and then drag your feet at every opportunity.

I disagree, falsely labeling things conservative is unproductive for the conversation of "what is going right or wrong in Portland, OR, USA". That's to say, context and the goals of discussion are important. We do a lot of committees out here, but most of them are with the aim of including a vast number of viewpoints. If your point is that we fancy ourselves the type of liberals that do everything but nothing well even to a dysfunctional degree then you and I might agree. If your point is to say there's some conservative operator out here speaking to struggles, empowerment, etc then I'd say you're off your rocker.

It's not a false label. Conservatives do in fact do this. It's kinda their thing. Look what Obamacare became once they got involved.

Nobody is saying conservatives have infiltrated the Portland political scene, only that we see similar failures in other contexts when initiatives are half-assed (on purpose). Similar circumstances-- not identical.

It is a false label when there are no conservatives in Portland's government. That yields to two things:

- This is just a common American tactic

- There are other, less nefarious, reasons this happens

Including conservatives in a context where they don't exist and shifting the goal posts outside of American politics on a whim is both entirely inappropriate and distracting if your goal is to discuss how Portland can be better. Nobody in Portland is sabotaging our committees is my point; at the very least they're not doing so intentionally.

What you do get here is what some people call "everything bagel style liberalism" where we do everything, but nothing particularly well, and there is really no North Star when it comes to ethos.

Small-c conservative is a label that is not necessarily aligned with any political party. If I wanted to say (big-R) Republican I would have. Does that help you understand the argument better?

No. There are no conservatives in Portland's government. There have not been for a long time. There has been no one right of the Oregon Democratic party and a good chunk, if not most, have been left of that in recent times. It's part of why I moved here. The issue was not my understanding, the issue is people who cannot fathom that there are problems here outside of conservatism.

She wasn’t elected, although if Goldschmidt’s crimes had been public knowledge she probably would have been.

Taking that as an axiom; then what exactly would the plan be to make the welfare system work? Conservatives are frequently going to be in power, they represent about half the votes.

If half the voters think something is not an option, then it isn't an option. That is the joy of democracy. There needs to be a consensus to implement policies long term. Assuming you are correct (big assumption, but still) then the only real choice is to abandon the welfare system. Otherwise, the alternative is to abandon the welfare system spitefully in a way that doesn't achieve anything for anyone.

Technically, Republicans are not necessarily "half the votes", more like "a third of the votes" which are then joined by another 10-15% of "unfaithful" swing voters - whose opinions don't necessarily overlap 100% with core conservative principles.

Participation rates can also be very low, particularly at local/state level, making that core of strongly-conservative votes actually pretty small in absolute terms.

You can quickly judge the actual opinion of the overwhelming majority of voters on completely abolishing welfare provisions, when you mention a few magic words that happen to extend those provisions to "normies" (medicare etc).

"Unfaithful"

I used to hold that view, but the fact is the vast majority of those voters ask this question and declare themselves independents while asking:

Vote for what?

They want to know what politicians will do to earn those votes.

What you call unfaithful is actually a direct failure to garner votes.

And that means speaking with people, not at or to them.

It means actually asking for those votes too. Go and watch some politicians and in particular the one who lost to Trump. There is almost no ask and a whole lot of speaking at or to people not with them.

The unfaithful ignore voter shaming, again something I used to do:

A no vote is a yes vote for the enemy

Unfaithful voters cannot be counted on. Think it through: a politician who knows they have votes no matter what has very little incentive to work for those votes...

Today I do not judge others for their votes.

Our future is in the votes to be cast and why we might think about casting those votes.

And I do not blame or shame anyone either.

It is on those of us running for office to get out there, talk with the people, garner those votes and then act on them.

Calm down, it's just a technical term when talking about voter behaviour - the "faithfuls" being voters extremely unlikely to ever change their preference (regardless of what it is). It's a fact of life that many voters have "for life" preferences.

I was calm. Just doing a bit of framing in the hope of improving an otherwise solid discussion.

The optics on that term warrant the framing for reasons already given.

Sidenote: one of the most difficult aspects of threaded text dialog is a very high degree of intent ambiguity is ever present. Same goes for overall emotional perception.

Because of this, I avoid personal judgment and very frequently avoid the top responses to "things one may feel compelled to respond to", which are righteous indignation and subject change.

Much better to assume a friendly dialog, give benefit of the doubt and see where it all may lead.

If nothing else, flat out asking about other people state is often better than declaring it out of hand.

BTW: Indie voters are roughly 45 percent.

The two major parties share the partisan vote.

This means Republicans are actually a quarter of us along with Dems.

Party line voting is not the only game in town. Roughly half the nation wants to vote FOR something, not AGAINST "the bad guys"

BTW: Indie voters typically strongly align on one or other side of the partisan divide despite their self-assigned labels. The nature of the two-party system is it binarizes the entire discourse and ends up reproducing the bipartisan dynamics by restricting and chopping up the Overton window according to the two major lines of thought. For more true independence you'll need proportional representation and multiple parties. The problem would (does) still exist but across a wider spectrum of opinion.

Indeed. Significant numbers of indies will no-vote and cite what we are discussing here as part of why too.

This is just about the worst example you could have used for your theory. In this case there are thousands of people that could have just done a 1:1 copy of what they do in Switzerland, Portugal, Netherlands, Scandinavia etc. Instead they copied only the carrot (treatment and harm reduction). Then they didn't just not copy the stick (prison, consequences for missing treatment) they threw away all their sticks.

With this in mind I can understand why many people are now against harm reduction of any kind, when the same people that fucked it all up in the first place now want to try again.

I'm curious why you think there are much fewer homeless in conservative cities (like Provo, Jacksonville, even Orange County)? Is it because everything is backwards? The progressive cities are actually conservative, and the conservative cities are actually progressive?

People have feet and can move between cities...

They're pushed out, either through police violence or a complete lack of viable social support systems. There's many ways to discourage folks from sticking around through ad hoc policies without putting it explicitly into law, or else to simply not mandate the kind of support that other cities have.

Right, but I'm asking if Portland is secretly run by conservatives, why does it have a different outcome? i.e., why doesn't Portland discourage folks from sticking around?

Conservatives don't "secretly run" anything and to insinuate that that's what I'm saying is to misinterpret my comments. So the premise of the question is false from the outset.

Conservatives (and the threat of conservative backlash) can nonetheless meaningfully influence the shape of institutional policies that hinder the stated goals of the organization, municipal government or otherwise. It's not at "tyranny of the minority" levels in many cases but that doesn't mean they're completely shut out.

Intention matters little when it comes to outcomes -- this is the credo of the consequentialist. It's about the material facts as regards what specific elements of specific policies promote or discourage this or that outcome. Deft policymakers can find sneaky leverage points that are only obvious in retrospect as having been a significant influence on the outcome vis a vis the stated goals of the policy in the first place, and it would be naive to assume that large political organizations (parties, PACs, etc.) on both sides don't develop and hire talent to provide exactly this kind of service. It's a battle of shadow consultancies just as much as it is a battle between ideologically-motivated parties, even though you are only exposed to the dramas of the latter in news media.

Yes — the political opposition is functioning exactly like it should.

If Portland is secretly run by conservatives that want to prove that high minded liberal ideas for dealing with the unhoused and drug addicts, they're doing a very good job!

Because if you're homeless, you totally want to stay somewhere with no social programs. Here in California, our Medicaid insurance is infinitely better than any private insurance. Why would you stay somewhere where you get zero help? I. E. Zero Medicaid expansion in conservative states

Which leads to lovely little details like the reason the SF poop map exists: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...

I’ll pass, thanks.

Conservatives? In Portland? How exactly did they manage to throw wrenches there? And also in San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and other deep blue cities? Maybe we need to give some tin foil hats to the managers of those, to shield them from the evil conservative influence?

This reads like total denial. COVID was years ago. The city I’m in bounced back and was mostly normal late 2021. I also was interested in the outcome of Portland’s experiment. It has failed. The war on drugs is anti-liberty and I recognize its racist roots. But racism is no longer a big aspect of the war on drugs as of 2023. Again, denial and excuses. The war on drugs AND Portland’s experiment are BOTH failures. I welcome the next attempt at it.

Which city are you in? All of the major West Coast cities have not had downtown office occupancy return to pre-pandemic rates as far as I am aware.

Not the original commenter, but I took the response regarding bounced back to refer to retail commerce, not office occupancy. I would not expect office occupancy to EVER fully recover in the US.

> I would not expect office occupancy to EVER fully recover in the US.

Remote work was already growing, COVID just accelerated a societal change already in progress. Without COVID, we probably would have eventually ended up in the same place as we are now, it just would have taken longer.

And even years before COVID, I think the US was already ahead of many other countries in this transition. I remember my first business trip to the US in early 2008, I went to Oracle’s office in Orlando, it was near-deserted-I asked where everyone was, I was told “they’re all working from home”. Whereas, back in Australia (Oracle included), there was still a very strong culture of “if I can’t see you at your desk then you aren’t working”. Or similarly, even back then many of the US Oracle executives had remote EAs - remote EAs were not much of a thing in Australia at that time

>racism is no longer a big aspect of the war on drugs as of 2023.

Maybe in some places that might be true, but people are still in jail from the past.

I don't think lack of tech bros manning high cost corporate square footage is what is causing the homeless, crime, and addiction problems in West Coast cities. It seems more like bad policies to me. The time window to blame everything on covid is passing quickly

This is the classic “real communism has never been tried” argument.

Wait, at the end of 2023 we're still allowed to blame covid? Anyway, Portland has been going downhill way before covid, I witnessed it with my own eyes, from early 2000s when I seriously thought maybe it makes sense to move there, to late 2010s where it got seriously scary and you couldn't get through downtown without being harassed repeatedly by beggars and witnessing all the decay. And it's not just drugs, drugs are a symptom, it's all ckmplex of disastrous policies, that yes, affects other West Coast major cities too.

There are a million reasons a plan like could fail that have nothing to do with with it being a good or bad plan, though. And there are a lot of people invested in making sure a plan like this fails, so that the people who supported it in the first place come to the same conclusion as you.

“They did everything except what would work! Let’s all give up and go back to things that definitely don’t work. It’s the only option.”

It's always interesting when someone assumes that failed strategy X would have obviously worked if only had it been pursued even harder.. you might be right, but it seems like an odd assumption to make given the circumstance.

What circumstance? The clamor to use prison time as a solution to homelessness and drug use?

You know what thread we're in, right? You know what circumstances I'm referring to..

People generally don’t ask you to clarify if they know what you’re talking about.

That's interesting, cheers

Appropriate response.

Except as a rhetorical device which the above person is clearly using his request as...

Yes, but you appear not to understand my response.

You think the policy failed because of that supposed clamor? That's an interesting idea: even when your policy is enacted, it's the fault of the policy that wasn't.

It's always interesting when something doesn't work immediately and someone just wants to go back to the shit system everyone hated before because it personally bothered them less.

So this might be a problem specific to Portland. The government is structured to fail. Hopefully it changes.

So, how and why are they "sitting on unspent funds"? Are there delays in building plans or legislature slowing stuff down?

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

the quote is missing what happened after the Platzpitz and later the older Letten train station were cleared: heroin use was decriminalised - not legalised - but only in controlled locations under supervision from medical staff and social workers. It seems that solution helped in multiple ways: - no people using heroin on the streets - no overdoses - drug users became less criminal because they didn't need as much money to finance their use - the medicalisation of heroin use made it less appealing to new users by removing the rebellious aspect

“ However, lack of control over what went on in the park caused a multitude of problems. Drug dealers and users arrived from all over Europe, and crime became rampant as dealers fought for control and addicts (who numbered up to 1,000 ) stole to support their habit. The once-beautiful gardens had degraded into a mess of mud and used needles, and the emergency services were overwhelmed with the number of overdoses, which were almost nightly. Platzspitz, or Needle Park as it was then known, became a source of embarrassment to the Zurich municipal council and in 1992, police moved in to clear up the park.[clarification needed] The drug scene then moved to the adjacent area of Letten railway station, which closed services in 1989. This spot was also cleared by police in 1995.

Today Platzspitz has been cleaned up and restored, and is presented by the authorities as a peaceful, family-friendly garden.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platzspitz_park?wprov=sfti1#

So hands off was a total failure, so they gave up and forcibly removed people.

Be cautious about applying lessons across significantly different culture.

Just because democracy took off in America doesn't mean it will take off in Iraq.

Just because drug legalization worked in Zurich doesn't mean it will work in Portland.

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