Nicholas Kristof
Kristof is an author, journalist, farmer and former Democratic candidate for governor of Oregon. He lives in Yamhill.
The Oregonian/OregonLive’s editorial following the end of my campaign for governor this month encouraged me to “remain in Oregon public life,” tackle problems and identify solutions (“Kristof’s abbreviated campaign raises enduring questions,” Feb. 20).
Mission accepted. I’m in.
While I don’t know precisely what my next chapter will be, I will continue to wrestle with the challenges we see around us. Years ago, I grew tired of returning from humanitarian crises overseas only to find unaddressed suffering in my own backyard. I’m haunted by the genocide I covered in Darfur but also by my Yamhill high school friend, Stacy, who froze to death while homeless in McMinnville. More than one-quarter of the classmates on my old No. 6 school bus are now gone from drugs, alcohol and suicide — and we all know that there are buses like that in every corner of this state.
What I learned campaigning around Oregon is that the problems we face are deeper than even I had expected. We all know that homelessness is a problem in Oregon’s major cities, but in tiny Bay City, population 1,400? I hadn’t anticipated that.
In Lincoln City, I learned of a woman who has a job at a supermarket and yet still can’t afford skyrocketing rents there. So, for the last year she has lived in her car, even though she has a colostomy bag.
Most worrying, we still don’t have an effective strategy to address homelessness in Oregon. That’s partly because Oregon is short approximately 140,000 housing units, and unless we build another 30,000 each year the problem gets even worse.
We should learn from other jurisdictions. Dallas and Houston are both Democratic cities that cared about homelessness, and both tried to address it. But in Dallas, despite the best of intentions, homelessness rose; in Houston, it dropped by more than half, as The Texas Tribune reported.
Like Dallas, we have good intentions and plenty of resources, but we don’t have the right policies or sufficient follow-through and implementation. And when 22,000 Oregon children are homeless, good intentions are not enough. We need accountability.
Housing is also linked to mental health and addiction, and there too we have stumbled – Oregon lost 150 residential treatment beds last year just as demand was increasing.
I learned of a 13-year-old boy in Bend who suffered a mental health crisis, but no bed was available for him. So, he was kept in hospital emergency rooms for two months and then transferred to an institution in New Jersey. Can you imagine anything more traumatizing for that boy?
I’m close to three generations of an Oregon family that has enormous talent but continuing struggles with addiction and crime. The youngest child was the first born in decades without a prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol, and we all hoped that he marked a turning point. But now ,his parents have relapsed, and the child is in foster care.
We as taxpayers have spent (and will spend) enormous sums incarcerating members of this family and now paying for foster care. How much more humane – and thrifty and effective – it would be to provide adequate mental health and addiction services, and job training.
A final missing puzzle piece in Oregon is first-rate public education. Economic historians suggest that the best predictor of where a society will be in 25 years is the state of education. Yet a majority of Oregon third-graders can’t read at grade level, one of the best predictors of high school completion, and we have one of the lowest reported high school graduation rates in the country. We are failing these kids before they fail us, and the problems will get worse if Oregon schools hemorrhage teachers and staff this year as many expect.
Yet it’s still true that we’re lucky to be Oregonians, fortunate to be bathed by Oregon rains, buffeted by gusts of clean Oregon air and awed by Oregon’s mountains — and endowed with a can-do spirit that helped us pull through the pandemic with low COVID-19 mortality and high vaccination rates. We can fix our state’s problems and illuminate a path for America.
We have outstanding models in place around the state that can be scaled, including relief nurseries for early childhood, Square One Villages for homelessness, Provoking Hope for addiction treatment, Friends of the Children for intergenerational poverty and Lines for Life for substance abuse and suicide.
I’m not going to be the governor to tackle these problems around us, but I will continue to work as an Oregonian — until my ashes are scattered on the family farm I love — to cooperate with others in trying to make a difference. A reasonable starting point is to acknowledge a reality that I heard over and over when I was on the campaign trail, from people of every political persuasion. It’s a blunt assessment with a penumbra of hope: “Oregon can do better. This is not the best we can be.”
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February 27, 2022 at 09:00PM
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