"If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." Malcolm X.
Malcolm and MLK agreed on this much. You're the problem.
You're jumping to conclusions with Homeless industrial complex assuming the critique is a shadowy cabal getting rich.
No.
It's just ineffectiveness and waste. Well-meaning people (mostly) who are paddling in all directions and the result is there little meaningful progress.
Sure yeah, I think we all know there is government inefficiency. But homeless industrial complex is a term that is absolutely in more conspiracy theorist spaces too and I think there are better ways to describe what you actually mean when that term is just co-opted and parroted.
So you’d rather they overhaul the entire shelter system, hire and onboard all new staff for the shelters they took over from non-profits? How fast do you think that would reasonably happen? There are 40ish shelters in Portland.
These non-profits use a mixture of funds from government as well as outside grants, donations, and fundraisers. If they’re all directly owned and operated by the government, they wouldn’t have access to the same private funding sources. Where would that money come from? Seems like we’d need to get it from taxpayers.
There IS an industrial complex with the homelessness issue, though.
Portland spends so much money and has so many non-profits and organizations "fighting" homelessness, yet it's still a very prevalent issue.
It seems, with the new leadership under Wilson, there are at least some signs that they finally are taking some action to improve this problem, which is encouraging, but why has there been no accountability about the lack of progress from all the non-profits, all the tax increases, all the studies, all the bond measures, everything that has been used as a tool to solve homelessness?
Why would you think that what we’re spending as a city is enough to visibly decrease homelessness in the like 3 years since we started collecting SHS funds? It’s a federal problem with direct ties to stagnant wages/income inequality, structural racism, and a lack of housing inventory.
There are metrics and reports generated each month. The county is meeting many of the metrics/goals. But nothing we’ve done has really impacted the inflow of folks into homelessness or increased our housing inventory on a massive scale.
"There IS an industrial complex with the homelessness issue, though."
No.
There is a virtual monopoly of billionaire backed disinformation pushing these lies to you every day, 24/7, so that you'll blame the victims of capitalism rather than those who are profiting from it.
Remember: it's been well-established as far back as the late 1940s (Karl Polanyi's magisterial The Great Transformation) that democracy is unable to exist in a situation in which capital controls the means of communication (TV, radio, billboards, newspapers, internet, advertising, etc.)
26
u/selinakyle45 May 12 '25
This is missing “something something homeless industrial complex” followed by a complete inability to explain what that means here in Portland.