Pondering Homelessness and Community
For decades my family hosted a community Christmas Party. Our house was very large and ideal for hosting.
Attendees at our party included a blind internet talk show host who banged amazing jazz rhythms out of our piano, an international business owner, many stay at home and single mom's, their husbands and children along with several residents of a tiny house village.
Today I am writing about the last group. At that time they lived in garden shed cabins on the large lot directly behind ours. At one point when their water was cut off, we provided a hose from our garden area. The City was unhappy and wrote us a threatening letter, but we recognized their need for water. That was the summer of 2009. It was a very hot summer and our neighbor Rick had kidney disease.
You see, the landowner and leader of the group had failed to meet city regulations for community housing standards and resisted demands for building code compliance. Eventually after many court hearings all that was on his property was removed.
Today the neighborhood appears to have improved (by superficial standards), as a nice new home now stands where the village was. But for the people that lived in the village life has worsened greatly. Most are living in parked vehicles, possibly in a neighborhood near you. There have been numerous trips to the hospital for frostbite, kidney malfunction and pneumonia and one has died.
I chose to write after recently seeing the article at this link.
If you follow my posts, you will recognize the officer, whom I hold in very high regard. You can hear him speaking in the second video below. He was much more hopeful then. Even in spite of the circumstance.
(Picture from article)
From the article, at the link above...Decriminalization of drug possession leaves officers in Clark County on sidelines....Vancouver neighborhood police officer Tyler Chavers has watched fentanyl take over the city’s streets in the past two years...
Something I and my neighbor didn't see at his tiny house village before police defunding and decriminalizing most gateway and hard drug activity.
During the demolition, I was very impressed with our police, including officer Chavers, and the respect and self control they showed while enforcing the court order to clear my neighbors property.
In my eyes, it was a very sad situation since my neighbor had successfully created and sustained a house/shed village on his 2.5 acre lot for decades. Although substandard in many ways, the sheds were permanent, warm, dry and shared needed bathrooms and a kitchen.
As landlord, he demanded a standard of behaviors that seemed to minimize impact on the neighbors and still allowed gainful activity to tenants. Several actively recycled bottles and cans. One repaired bicycles and small engines, and others worked at odd jobs. It operated much like the Re-Store in N Portland.
Drug culture seemed low key or absent, and I was not aware of any reports of the kind of car traffic or chaos that comes with drug sales or prostitution, the most common ways of funding drug use among our poor. Once the police did come over a domestic dispute.
But their collection of building materials for recycling was abnormally large and unusual for our neighborhood, as was his 2.5 acre lot located at the end of a dead end street.
He fought the city for about 20 years before being shut down. He eventually agreed to have the City buy his property.
(Hear his perspective in the videos below.)
CREATING HOMELESSNESS (part 1)
A NOT SO BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD
and...
CREATING HOMELESSNESS (part 2)
Destruction and Hopes for Collaboration
In the videos you will hear some explosions. I am not sure what caused them. Perhaps he was trying to feel powerful. I know that he felt he had provided something of value and was angry that it was being discarded. Fortunately, his destructive actions were in harmony with the goals and requirements of the situation.
In an unfortunate contrast; Today, we have a much greater tragedy occurring with our nation wide explosion of both StreetSide Homelessness and, "legalized," Drug Dealing.
I say legalized because today, as many as 98% of the drug transactions that occur are considered either "legal," or merely a misdemeanor, even as the deadly supply mushrooms thanks to our current tolerance of the Cartel fed distribution network.
Instead of incentivizing creative self reliance, in our vulnerable communities, we have incentivized, an explosion of dealer and trafficker profits along with the mass deaths, community suffering and human enslavement that comes with it.
But this is not just happening to strangers, or even neighbors. Currently it has captured the lives of two of our former foster children.
In September 2022 we drove 27 hours one way cross country to offer needed resources and encourage recovery support, just four days after one had been Nar-caned along with a co-user who died. And just days before Christmas another was admitted to Legacy Salmon Creek ED for stabilization after having multiple drug related seizures and then, declared stable enough to be discharged, and so I was called, but they were still so high on either meth or mushrooms that they didn't even understand that I was there to pick them up. They just wandered off while talking to invisible people. I waited for some time and eventually called the police because I was afraid, they would be hit by a car.
Both the hospital and the police could do nothing according to our new community standards.
This seeming gentleness is not kindness or even tolerance. It borders on murderous disregard masquerading in a costume of progressive virtue.
If you marched to defund the police and are backing the decriminalization (that promotes) these criminal behaviors. What are you thinking? Shame on you!
The deaths and destruction they are causing is a result of these very actions and it is happening in each of our neighborhoods.
In the future consider the historical and social context. Movements rarely act responsibly. It took decades to create and adapt the systems we so carelessly destroyed. Keeping police training current, and effective actually requires additional investment. Defunding is an insane approach.
Currently I am grateful for the many church volunteer and city planned efforts that our mayor (in Vancouver WA) has taken to address these problems. Chief among them, Living Hope and Exchange Churches.
Actions surprisingly similar to many of the things my neighbor was doing.
If you are caught in a cycle of addiction, please realize that this is not an effort to attack. I am here to talk about having a healthy community and encourage you to consider the testimony in this link. https://www.driveoutaddiction.com/testimonials
If you marched to defund the police and are backing the decriminalization (that promotes) these criminal behaviors. What are you thinking? Shame on you!
The deaths and destruction they are causing is a result of these very actions and it is happening in each of our neighborhoods.
In the future consider the historical and social context. Movements rarely act responsibly. It took decades to create and adapt the systems we so carelessly destroyed. Keeping police training current, and effective actually requires additional investment. Defunding is an insane approach.
Currently I am grateful for the many church volunteer and city planned efforts that our mayor (in Vancouver WA) has taken to address these problems. Chief among them, Living Hope and Exchange Churches.
Actions surprisingly similar to many of the things my neighbor was doing.
If you are caught in a cycle of addiction, please realize that this is not an effort to attack. I am here to talk about having a healthy community and encourage you to consider the testimony in this link. https://www.driveoutaddiction.com/testimonials
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