I don’t agree that the strategy of increasing the housing supply is a bad strategy. Indeed, it’s the only way to solve this issue long-term. But it does take time and money which raises the question of what to do with thousands of people in the meantime.
I see that cited, and wonder where that number comes from. The document they cite is from Grants Pass, and just also says that number without saying where they got it other than “Portland Officials.” I’m not necessarily saying it is untrue, but it seems dubious at best. Even if it were true, were there stipulations to that housing (no partners, no pets, no drugs, etc)? If so, the high number may be related. Housing first (which should include other social support structures) is shown to work; housing with conditions is marginal at best.
It certainly raises questions but I think there’s a lot of missing information there. Who are they asking? Every unhoused person or just the most disruptive groups that they most want to move? And why are people refusing? Is the offered shelter substandard in some way? You could write a whole article about just that statistic.
But if they have shelter available the courts do allow them to ban camping in public spaces which is needed in my view. Public space is very limited in America and there are real costs to that space being monopolized by a small group of people. If they truly have nowhere else to be then fair enough but as soon as alternatives exist then they should be there instead and not on sidewalks and public parks.
One problem may be the extreme restriction of autonomy that sometimes accompanies public housing. You see this tendency to treat adults receiving any sort of aid as if they were children.
It also tends to be the case with VA housing. The way they treat veterans living in VA condos is absurd. It’s on par with what you’d expect to see in like a halfway home, except these folks usually haven’t done anything illegal. They signed their lives away, came home with PTSD, and get treated like trash by the VA for their troubles.
The strings that go with public housing often make the idea of looking for another way to get a leg up more appealing.
I don’t think there is enough unused housing in some of these cities. Also, some fraction of these people are mentally ill and would severely damage or destroy whatever housing they find themselves in. We saw this with some of the hotel shelter programs during the pandemic.
Men's groups are challenging traditional "cowboy" masculinity that promotes emotional suppression. Loneliness, anger, and isolation plague American men. Organizations like Journeymen offer safe spaces for vulnerability, connection, and healing through sharing emotions and stories.
What I see in the article is that the devide is between professional and social settings.
In the educational or professional space lots has been done and a lot of progress has been made, so much so that the young women interrogated didn’t feel like sex was an obstacle in those areas.
In the social, or romantic sphere though things still seem largely unchanged with men and women still in very classic gender roles.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if things haven’t moved as much in these spheres, it’s because there’s less pressure to achieve equality here. This could be due to the fact that inspite of the issues women face there is still an advantage to their place in social circles and romantic relationships and as such feminism hasn’t touched on them as much, or it could be that some of the issues have a more biological component that we will need to accommodate and compensate for rather than trying to simply level the playing field.
I agree with your overall conclusion, but not with your theory. Yes men and women have more equality in education and professional settings. However, women have changed the social and romantic spheres through feminism SIGNIFICANTLY. The household division of labor and the power dynamics in a relationship are two pretty big examples of change. Yes, women haven’t changed the systems that benefit them. I don’t think that’s out of a desire to “maintain a benefit”. I think it’s because it is hard to see a system that doesn’t hurt you, or one that benefits you. That’s the whole concept of privilege: the benefits are invisible to those that benefit. These aspects of patriarchy hurt men, and it is therefore men who must demand and create change, to take down the patriarchal systems that hurt us.
We just never noticed because before because on the whole cis straight white men benefited and everyone else suffered. Now that everyone is taking apart all the systems that hurt them (often to our benefit), all that’s left are the parts that hurt us (sometimes to the benefit of others). We just need to keep taking the patriarchy apart!
This is not going to be received with nuance in “men’s liberation” (as a man I scoff at the very concept) but Happy Valley Oregon is in Clackamas County just southeast of Portland and even though they are a Portland suburbs they position themselves explicitly as an anti-Portland in terms of gender expectations. So you’re going to get a pretty skewed picture of what boys are expected to be, compared to even just literally a couple miles northwest in Portland. They went and interviewed the sons of the maga dudes who think everyone in Portland is a weak soyboy antifa cuck or whatever, of course those kids are going to say that they value traditional signs of masculinity and feel like they can’t cry when they are sad.
Happy Valley Oregon is in Clackamas County just southeast of Portland and even though they are a Portland suburbs they position themselves explicitly as an anti-Portland in terms of gender expectations.
Has the city council released some statement on the matter? Where can I read the city’s position on this?
Oh, sorry, were my feelings supposed to be hurt or something? I was trying to be charitable and assume you’re not just an asshole, but then you went and admitted it.
“For the longest time, it was: The male is the provider,” he said. “I was that guy. But now I’m not ashamed to say this is who I am in my life. That’s what Covid did. We had a lot of downtime to reflect and think about what’s important.”
The real silver lining of Covid is that lots of us realized how much more we can get out of life if we didn't focus on being busy and commuting to work. I know that for myself I can finally focus on the life I really want to live since I work from home and see the value in simple pleasure at home. I never thought it about it changing traditional gender roles but it makes sense that anyone at home can do cleaning and cooking for the entire household.
Solara Salazar, a director of Cielo Treatment Center, which serves young adults in Portland, now receives about 20 inquiries a day about rehab services. “And the majority of them we can’t help,” she said.
Cielo offers outpatient therapy and sober housing. That is great for people who have already begun managing their addictions, but Ms. Salazar, who survived addictions to meth, OxyContin and fentanyl, keeps hearing from those in acute crisis who need a bed in a residential program right away.
She gets pleas from people leaving hospital detox, who have not yet gone through inpatient rehab. Oregon’s Medicaid patients can wait months for a treatment bed, she and others said.
“You just can’t skip a step and expect people to be successful,” she said. “We have a really low success rate that way.”
“I talked to a woman the other day who’s living in her car, and she was sobbing and crying and so desperate for treatment. I’m trying to give her some hope and I say, ‘Just keep trying and you’re going to make it,’ but I know that’s a lie. She’s not pregnant, so she doesn’t meet the benchmark for an immediate bed. And I’m going to tell her she has to call every single day for four months and then maybe she’ll get a bed?”
There's no way to help people without truly helping people. We can't just try decriminalization without any proper social services and say "welp that didn't work, let's jail them all." Criminalizing drugs is not the way to cure a society, but writing tickets without helping people just leaves people desperate on the streets.
Before I left reddit I was shut down for expressing the option that children shouldnt even be laboring to sell cookies, popcorn, or candy bars. It’s all exploitative. Some people think this is character building.
I’ve seen the opinion before, in community college. I was assigned to read something, and it laid out a damn good argument for why working a register never taught anyone “life skills.”
That’s not entirely accurate. My first customer service jobs in high school taught me invaluable lessons about how douchey people can be to a kid slinging popcorn at a movie theater. I learned a great deal about how to deal with assholes with an inflated sense of importance. Above all I learned that I would never be like those assholes.
These are skills that I still use in my job today.
I agree. I worked McDonald’s whilst I was at college. I learnt a huge amount about dealing with different types of people, both customers and staff!
A lot of people in the UK look down upon people working low tier service roles which I now strongly defend. It also taught me, as it did you, how stupid and ignorant an average person can be and I always try to keep that in mind not just for the actions of others, but my own.
I’m a “skilled” worker now, but should needs must, I’d be absolutely unopposed to going back to a job like McDonald’s.
I used to joke that I’m against national service, but that everyone should be drafted to work two years in the service industry!
You can absolutely learn life skills from working a cash register provided you are doing more than just checking out and bagging. At the very least you should glean some basic customer service skills
With all due respect, fuck that. It would be one thing if they were forced to do that to support their families, but they’re not. In 99% of cases they’re doing it to support an activity they enjoy. For instance, the girl scouts of America is not a business and their activities are not free. Selling cookies is how they afford to do fun shit.
Do they really need to be selling junk to people to do fun shit? Can’t the families and community support them without making them labor to sell some company’s junk product for a pittance?
🤦♂️ Any company found abusing children should be immediately shut down permanently. No fines. No discussions. No deals. No second chances. Just immediately put out of business, all assets seized and sold off with the money distributed to the out of work employees.
Punish the people in addition to the business. Anyone who knew, or would have any reason to know, the age of the child should be fined if they are given prohibited duties and jailed if any harm comes to the child while tasked with prohibited duties.
Nothing will happen if a business is put out of business, rich people will just scoop up the resources and continue on with a small cost of doing business. All corporate and business practices that harm people (employees or the public) need to have the chance of jail time for business leadership to discourage it in the future. It doesn't even need to be draconian, just consistently enforced at the individual level.
It’s appalling that this is even a question. Children don’t need better terms for working at the abattoir, the garbage dump or the sawmill; they need not to be working in those places.
The need for capital to find ever cheaper labor to exploit, accelerated by Republicans. I was trying to avoid loaded terms like “civilized” and “third world”, but it does not make the USA look good at all.
They should allow children to work to get money, if that is the only way to get money. Of course, it would be preferable that no one has to work to survive. Or do you think the government should provide free money only to children?
I think a guaranteed basic income for young people only would certainly make up for keeping them from working. Like you said, nobody having to work to live would be the ideal, but to ban people from being able to support themselves and doing nothing to make up the difference creates artificial dependence that keeps people in abusive situations with no recourse.
That it’s still third world shit perpetuates our tolerance of it at all. Our manufacturing industries shouldn’t br able to move factories offshore to developing countries where they can hire workers for pennies.
Can’t even get young people to vote, no chance in hell they would ever become organized enough to form a union. Besides, it shouldn’t fall on our young to protect themselves, that should be the role of leaders and we should apply immense pressure to make them do that.
They are prevented from voting due to age discrimination. There's nothing physical or mental preventing most young people from voting, only cultural and legal.
Of course under 18 can’t vote in the US, I’m just saying that even those over 18 (~25) who can, don’t. They have the means to influence change and they can’t be bothered to do so, therefore how can we expect even less mature youth to organize something as complex as unified labor?
Some labor unions dominate their industries, and make it super uncomfortable to hire non-union.
So it might be possible to unionize child labor, then force employers to only hire union kids, and then make them unaffordable as a means to discourage child labor practices. Kinda like taxing recreational drugs relentlessly to dissuade their use.
Voters in the US can affect very little change, either by referendum or through very local representation. At the state and national level, both parties are extremely conservative with one of them actively working to roll back progress and neuter elections.
So while we’re in a situation where we are voting to preserve democracy, our young people are taught voting is how they affect change, when it doesn’t do that in state or federal elections at all.
Currently progress is very slow, and may get overrun either by civil war or the climate crisis impacting populations.
It should really only be a stop gap while we handle the education bit of addiction, but that will never happen. And I mean from early education on. Give kids useful lessons like critical thinking, mindfulness, etc
I was addicted to fent. I am from east coast, and hung out in shooting galleries, tent cities, bandos, you name it.
I watched people steal from passed out people. Picked my way through bodies. Watched multiple people get shot, and was caught up in a drive by where i had to dive behind a parked car. Robbed at gun point, knife point, arrested a bunch, served a little time, went to rehab. I don’t miss that life at all.
I am an advocate for criminal justice reform all the way, especially decriminalization of drugs. But tbh, I would have never gotten clean without jail and rehab. The jail part was unnecessary imo. I just needed a chance. Any chance to break the cycle of addiction. I was a semi functioning addict, barely, and sometimes not at all. I had people that cared for me though…and many of these people can’t say the same. I probably would have never checked myself into rehab, but I was also poor and couldn’t afford to not do drugs, so i could function for work to survive. No health insurance either. I think it would be OK to arrest people for a light sentence and not strap em with acriminal history afterwards… but the justice system is really archaic and absolutely fucked ime. Once these people get out, there ain’t shit. No job. No housing. No one and nothing but drugs, police harassment and back to jail, cause once the hooks are in, the legal system doesn’t let go. These poor people are $$$ to it.
I don’t rely know how we should handle the problem, but I think decriminalization, even to the point of manufacturing pharmaceutical grade drugs for consumption, while offering rehab, housing, and support will go a long way in easing the suffering, and getting people on a different track. I think alot of the drug culture in America comes from the fact it is illegal as well. It is romanticized in some areas, namely large areas surrounding open air markets.
Tbh it’s all just a by product of the larger system. It’s a feature of our greedy society. People seek an escape from their shitty existence where money is God, and money is then made off the problem on multiple fronts. Pharmaceutical companies pumping out methadone, suboxone, for profit prisons, for profit legal system, keeps cops busy, and it gives a platform to politicians, all while gutting specific populations and classes.
The smartest people I’ve met in my life were in a real bad way. They’d mean trouble in society quite frankly. Not in a bad way. I don’t know. I just felt like ranting.
Thank you. It's good to hear the perspective of someone who knows what it's like.
I think the problem with the American legal system is the ongoing insistence that we use it to punish rather than reform. I know that there is a small subset of people who cannot be reformed, and for those we maintain imprisonment. But that's not the majority. Most people would thrive if given the opportunity for true reformative justice.
And the secondary problem, in my opinion, is the dismantling of psychiatric facilities. Yes, we need to prevent closed-door facilities from becoming the abuse factories that they used to be. But replacing them with nothing is what got us a lot of the problems we see today (overcrowded emergency departments, deadly encounters with police, homelessness and drug use in public).
Some people need good inpatient or residential psychiatric facilities. Instead we just dumped them on their families without any social support of any kind.
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