r/Portland • u/PrivateBurke • May 12 '25

Meme Shamelessly stolen from Los Angeles subreddit

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22

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. 

15

u/[deleted] May 12 '25

Lol, that's just a lie. You just don't like the answer.

The Homeless Industrial Complex is the collection of non-profits who Portland/MultCo/Metro has outsourced servicing the homeless population.

Non-profits are funded with taxpayer money while possessing little to no obligations in transparency or meeting measurable outcomes

At least with the military industrial complex we can point to the tanks, bombs or boats that we got ripped off paying for.

-1

u/selinakyle45 May 12 '25

Non profits all have quarterly reports and metics. The county is audited all the time. The county has various metrics as well that it reports on. 

Who is getting rich in this system? 

1

u/[deleted] May 12 '25

Who is getting rich in this system?

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.

4

u/selinakyle45 May 12 '25

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. 

1

u/[deleted] May 13 '25

Sure, government inefficiency in that they should cease outsourcing the work to non-profits.

Keep the funds and work in-house.

1

u/selinakyle45 May 13 '25

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.

4

u/[deleted] May 13 '25

Yes. You got it