Sharon Meieran
Meieran is an emergency physician and Multnomah County commissioner for District 1. She lives in Portland.
We need to face reality. The number of people living and dying on our streets has substantially increased since we first started talking about “ending homelessness.”
I serve on the executive committee of A Home for Everyone, a coalition which advises Multnomah County on housing policy and priorities. Much important work has been done by this group, but it’s impossible not to question its effectiveness when we have more and more resources yet are making less and less meaningful impact on the worsening humanitarian, public safety and public health crises unfolding before our eyes. All of us in this coalition, especially the executive committee, must reassess whether we are achieving what we owe the community and matching the urgency of the problem.
People are struggling on the streets in growing numbers, often experiencing severe behavioral health challenges, along with repeated exposure to violence and trauma. We do not have nearly enough housing or other space for them to safely sleep, nor do we have adequate bathrooms, showers or laundry facilities for them to use. The COVID-19 pandemic –and the federal assistance that came with it – should have spurred us to move faster on behalf of people living unhoused; instead, COVID was essentially used as an excuse to retreat from helping those living outside.
As an emergency-room doctor, I believe we need to treat the humanitarian crisis of unsheltered homelessness like the emergency that it is. When people come to a hospital, their immediate needs are assessed, and they are triaged to receive appropriate care. We attend to patients’ urgent suffering, even as we do all that we can to manage their underlying illness or injury. That is where I believe we fall short in our response to people who are living outside - they are living in often unspeakable conditions, yet we act as if we are unable to urgently help alleviate those conditions.
The city of Portland has taken some excellent actions, including City Commissioner Dan Ryan’s proposal to create “Safe Rest Villages” and Portland City Council’s work streamlining the cumbersome process of siting shelters. But we need to be doing much more, much more urgently, and we need to be working in lockstep. Despite having a Joint Office of Homeless Services, many city and county services remain siloed and uncoordinated. Despite a coalition of advocates advising the Joint Office, key players have been missing from that table for years - including behavioral health, public health, and the city office in charge of homeless urban camping. This needs to change. Again, this is an emergency. We should act like it.
Here are the critical actions I believe we need to move forward:
1. Start with an accurate count of how many people are living outside in Multnomah County, identifying who they are and what they need. This is essential to defining the problem we hope to solve. The fact that we didn’t obtain even an approximate count earlier this year to compare with prior counts is shameful.
2. Establish a crisis task force to come up with a plan to immediately reduce the harm facing people living outside.
3. Expand Portland’s approach to streamlining the alternative shelter siting process throughout the county so that people can sleep in places that are safer and healthier as soon as possible.
4. Add representatives from the county’s public health and behavioral health divisions, Portland’s Homelessness and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program, and all East County jurisdictions to the process immediately.
5. Devise a data-driven strategy so we can measure progress and create an interactive public-facing dashboard so people have real-time insight into what’s happening. We need to embrace accountability, not find reasons to fight it.
As I have pushed for more immediate and effective ways to alleviate the crisis of unsheltered homelessness, I have been told that it’s impossible to do more or do things more quickly. I do not accept this, and neither should you. Homelessness is a complex problem requiring a multilevel and collaborative approach to solutions, but the problem is not intractable.
Advocates, frontline providers, homeless individuals, business owners and other community members express justified frustration at a system and a government that continues to leave people living in squalor. Just in the past week, after the launch of a new organization advocating for quicker action on homelessness, Oregonians flooded my office with more than 1,000 emails underscoring the urgency. To my colleagues who are part of A Home For Everyone coalition, and particularly on the executive committee, I urge you: We need to listen, we need to do this right and we need to do this now.
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"Opinion" - Google News
August 29, 2021 at 08:00PM
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Opinion: Faster action needed on homelessness crisis, starting with 5 critical steps - OregonLive
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