I’ve noticed a certain response when people find out I live in my car. They wince. Their eyes get a little wider, and their spine gets a little straighter. Their muscles tense up.
They try hard not to appear judgmental. It might be easier for me if they just came out and said what they think: You live in your car? What a loser.
My PCP gave me some suggestions about nutrition. He assumed I have a kitchen. It’s normal. Most people have kitchens. And bathrooms and a proper bed to sleep in, a place to hang their clothes. I waited until our third meeting before I mentioned my situation. His response, after wincing, was to ask if I’d seen the clinic’s case manager.
What can a case manager do that I’m not already doing? Put me into treatment for a drug problem? Give me a bed for one night in a shelter?
I’ve been seeking low-income senior housing for over a year. I’m on three or four waitlists in various cities in Oregon. Recently I came to the top of a waitlist for a studio apartment in Veneta, Oregon. I started to feel a glimmer of hope. After talking with the property manager, I thought chances were good I might be housed by October 1. I started thinking about what kind of bed I would build, what kind of mattress I would buy. Getting my paltry stack of belongings out of storage.
After our conversation, the property manager left over Labor Day. Another property manager took over. She called me for clarification on one of my references. During the phone call, she asked me what move-in date the previous manager had promised. I said October 1. She asked me where I was currently living. I said, in my car. I couldn’t see her face, but she said, oh! in a way that made me think she might be wincing. Like, what kind of loser old person lives in a car?
We had a phone conversation last week about my financial situation. She walked me through the form, box by box, line by line, and things were going well, I thought, until we got to the box about other income. I told her I was semi-self-employed and that I had a job as contingent faculty for an online for-profit education college. The process stuttered to a halt.
“I don’t know how to handle this,” she said. “I need to talk to my supervisor. I’ll call you later today, tomorrow at the latest.”
That was Tuesday. Today is Saturday.
She could be out of the office with Covid. Maybe she just went out on maternity leave. It could be she reached a breaking point trying to wrangle elderly tenants who can’t fill out forms and walked out of her job. It takes a lot of patience to work with elders. When I told her she could text me, she sounded pleasantly surprised. Like, wow, an older peson who can text! Maybe unicorns exist after all!
There’s nothing I can do to make housing happen. I’m over it. Even if something comes through, I have other things to do, other places to be. Scottsdale in November, Quartzsite in January. I’ve got a lot on my dance card. It’s all a lot more fun and interesting than hanging around Portland waiting to earn non-loser status.
It occurred to me as I was walking in a park somewhere, I can’t remember which one, that deporting people we don’t like has a long history, dating back to at least the start of the Christian era. In fact, Jesus was the ultimate deportee. I don’t know much except what I have forgotten from Sunday school at my mother’s Presbyterian church; however, it’s not hard to imagine that the authorities of that time (I think they were Romans?) hated any rabblerouser who could rouse a rabble that might threaten the regime.
All the paintings notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure Jesus had brown skin and brown eyes. All the locals did back then—it was the Middle East, for crying out loud. Further, although the ancient Romans who killed Jesus might not have been as White as our homegrown Christian White supremacists, odds are the Romans were whiter than Jesus. Choosing to marginalize a group by skin color is a time-tested excuse when that group holds an undesirable ideology, especially if the group is growing in numbers and power.
So it’s not hard to see why Jesus got some flak. I’m not a Christian, but even I can see the guy was doomed.
“Go back to where you came from” probably started around that time. It’s comical that not too long after he was extinguished, he once again crossed the border. That is, the border between heaven and earth, if there is such a border, to which I personally do not subscribe but I hear many earthlings do.
In other words, he was an immigrant, he got deported, and like so many have done since, he returned to try again.
Nowadays, he’d be detained in a concentration camp for a few years before he was finally expelled, but you get my drift. My drift is that I’m pissed off.
I can hear you complaining already: But Carol, all these undocumented immigrants with brown skin aren’t Jesus! They are criminals and thugs, fathers and uncles, mothers and brothers, and yes, some are children, we admit, but we don’t want them here. They threaten our comfortable bubble. They’re not like us. They’re brown!
Again, I’m not a Christian, and I’m sure not a Biblical scholar, but isn’t there a thing in that book somewhere about showing compassion for foreigners because most of us (with the notable exception of Native Americans [who also were “deported” to concentration camps, which we call reservations, because of the color of their skin] were foreigners once ourselves? Or our ancestors were. Mine came from the whitest part of England, so there’s no mistaking me for having Italian, Greek, or Asian heritage.
Which means I might escape the pogroms, but I digress.
Humans are so predictable, but it’s not our fault. We are hard-wired to protect self, family, tribe, and nation, in that order. Anyone who threatens self, family, tribe, or nation must be repelled—and preferably destroyed. The fear of welcoming strangers is no match for the existential fear of losing what you have (wealth and power) or not getting what you want (wealth and power).
Fox and Fanatics co-anchor Brian Kilmeade said mentally ill homeless people should be executed by lethal injection. I’m sure many hold similar views, especially when they see their neighborhoods overrun with tents, trash, and broken down RVs. Just kill them all. It’s a neat solution to a messy problem. It wouldn’t be all that hard. We could just put something in the water at the gas station where they fill up their water jugs. They wouldn’t feel a thing.
Alternatively, we could bash in their car windows, pull them out by their hair, throw them on the ground (after tasing them a few times), put them in zipties, and then detain them in concentration camps, where they receive little food and no medical care. If they survive that, then we’ll spend millions of taxpayer dollars to send them to a jail in a foreign country where they don’t speak the language. Pat on the back, job well done, here’s your medal of freedom.
Whenever I read news of the number of unhoused people on the streets of Portland, Oregon, I am curious to see who or what the author blames. Something or someone is always at fault. Homelessness isn’t a force of nature. It isn’t caused by a drop in barometric pressure. Homelessness is a people problem caused by people’s behaviors and attitudes toward other people.
When attributing blame, the easiest tactic is to blame the unhoused themselves. If only they weren’t so [stupid/ uneducated/ lazy/ addicted/ mental/ belligerent/ uncivilized], they wouldn’t find themselves without a place to live that isn’t a dorm room filled with bunk beds (AKA a shelter). In other words, it’s on them. If they just [got a job/ took a shower/ dressed in clean clothes/ stopped using drugs/ quit pitching their tents in my backyard], they would be able to successfully integrate into polite society like the rest of us.
The corollary to that position is to blame the mental condition of the unhoused. It’s pretty obvious that nobody in their right mind would choose to live in a busted down RV parked on a busy street parked end-to-end with other busted down motorhomes and flat-tired trailers. Like, who would want that? Therefore, it stands to reason anyone living like that must be insane. It’s a logical conclusion. The solution, based on that conclusion, is that we need more mental health services for the unhoused. Because they are all bat-shit crazy. However, when asked if they would be willing to fund increased mental health services, citizens balk. Let the government handle it (but not with our tax dollars), and for sure, no half-way houses in our neighborhoods.
Those with some measure of compassion are willing to consider the idea that the homeless are not to blame for their situation (well, most of the homeless). Instead, these good-hearted folks attribute the homeless problem to a lack of affordable housing. Anyone can look up the stats and discover that in most places in the country, and certainly in Portland, the demand for low-income housing far outstrips the supply. The solution: Build more housing, naturally. Duh. Tenements, housing projects, pack ’em in like sardines (but not in my neighborhood). At least, they will have a place to stash all the crap they previously dumped in the parking strip outside my Inner Eastside bungalow.
Well, but then, you might say, how do we get more housing? We need developers to build that housing. If developers would build more low-income housing, problem solved. But alas, they won’t because they would never be able to recoup the cost of construction. Rents are too damn low, they cry. We’d love to help, but our financial hands are tied by the urban growth boundary, our obligations to our stockholders, and our desire to make ten million dollars in profit this year.
Okay, if the developers won’t step up of their own free will, then maybe they could be enticed by government incentives. It’s not developers’ fault. They have bills to pay and bottom lines to feed. The blame lies with the government for not being willing to subsidize affordable housing. Which government? It doesn’t matter. City, county, state, federal—at every level, elected officials are reluctant to fund low-income housing. There’s no money for that, and besides, local zoning laws don’t allow in-fill construction. Our hands are tied. If only the zoning laws were changed, then maybe we could think about offering builders incentives to build.
Then how do we change the zoning laws? How do we force the government to give developers the financial incentives they need to build more low-income housing?
For the time being, we still live in a representative democracy. The people choose their elected representatives, who presumably carry out the will of their constituents. The elected officals shrug and say, if the constituents don’t want us to vote for zoning law revisions, if the voters don’t want to spend their taxpayer dollars to subsidize the construction of affordable housing, then what can we do? The voters have spoken.
Hey, wait a minute. Aren’t homeless people voters, too? Yeah, but who cares?
The votes that matter are homeowners. The ones who bought, built, or inherited wealth in the form of real estate. Lucky them. Here, I think, is the root cause of the homeless issue. Homeowners don’t want affordable housing in their neighborhoods because it could lower their property values.
I have news for them. How valuable do you think your property is when your neighborhood is occupied by homeless encampments? Do you think that bulldozing them from Mt. Tabor to Montavilla is going to help? It might solve the problem in your parking strip, but the community is interconnected, and I have more news for you: Homeless people get around. They are supremely mobile, much more than you are, Ms. Homeowner. You can’t pack up your belongings and be someplace else in five minutes. You are trapped by your little quarter acre of the American dream. The homeless are like squirrels. You can run them off with poison, but soon they will develop an immunity to your poison, and next thing you know, they’ll be back with their tents leaning against your $5,000 fence.
Mr. Homeowner of the house on the corner, what if I were to tell you that building affordable housing in your community would actually increase your property values? Think about it for a second. If you built affordable housing of various types–single family homes, duplexes, triplexes, small apartment buildings–you would attract people who work in your local hospital, grocery store, nursinghome, or elementary school. These workers would not have to commute from Hillsboro or Gresham, but more to the point, they would become part of the fabric of the community. They would shop locally. They would participate in local civics because they care about the safety and beauty of the neighborhood. There would be less crime.
You would be safer. Your neighborhood would be cared for by residents who care. You might even make new friends, who knows? Even if you live behind a tall fence with your yappy dog, you have to come out sometime. Meet your neighbors. You can all walk your yappy dogs together.
Come on, NIMBYs. Get on board the compassion train. Put your heart and money toward a real solution, instead of blaming everyone else for the homeless problem. YOU are the problem. Join the solution or quit whining. You can’t have it both ways.
And if you aren’t ready to become part of the multicultural magical fabric of a vibrant community, then lobby your elected officials to legalize fentanyl. When it comes to taking out drug addicts, candy is dandy, but fentanyl is a lot quicker. That will take care of the worst of the problem. Then all you have to worry about are the old women in your neighborhood who are living in their cars.
Like tar burping out of the ground at the La Brea Tar Pits, my name bubbled up to the top of a waitlist at a low-income senior apartment complex in Veneta, Oregon. Veneta, Oregon, you say. Where the heck is that? And more to the point, having Google Mapped it, why on earth would you choose to live there?
I found the place the way I find everything: wandering aimlessly in the hinterlands hoping the GPS Lady will rescue me. Veneta, Oregon, is a small place just west of Eugene, which is similar to Portland in the sense that it is big, congested, and ugly. However, in contrast to Portland, Eugene is overrun by college students, to whom I am completely invisible, which is fine, unless I want to buy something at Best Buy, which in that case, I have to yell at the top of my lungs for some brat to notice me. I use the term brat in a perjorative sense.
Anyway, a studio apartment in Veneta came open at the same time my name came up, and thus I received an offer: Do I want to rent the place?
There was a time when I would have demanded to see the apartment first. Now, I don’t care what it looks like. As long as I can afford it and it doesn’t have cockroaches, I can make it work.
I have to give the property manager a lot of credit. She started trying to reach my former landlords and ran into some roadblocks—nevertheless, she persisted. I did my best to resolve the roadblocks. I think she might have gained the information she sought, but I haven’t heard from her yet this week, so it’s possible the info she received wasn’t positive. In her defense, it was a holiday weekend. Maybe she vacationed in Eugene for a long weekend. What am I saying? She probably lives in Eugene. No young person would choose to live in Veneta. Maybe she is out of the office with Covid. Who knows. She might have said, enough already, and quit like several property managers I’ve met in the past four years. Dealing with wackjob tenants is probably a thankless job, especially if they are over 65.
Thankless, perhaps, but not because of me. I thanked her profusely, even though she probably had nothing to do with how long it took for my name to rise to the top of the desperate heap. I’m grateful, for sure. However, I’ll feel a lot more grateful when I finally have the keys in my hand. And when I see for myself there are no cockroach bait traps under the kitchen sink.
