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Homeless woman says Portland makes street life ‘a piece of cake’: 3 meals a day… just wake up, get high

January 3, 2023 | | Print Article

A homeless woman named Wendy who is living in a tent in Portland, Oregon, claims that being on the streets there is “a piece of cake” that involves waking up, eating, and getting high, while blasting leftists and bluntly stating, “They are loving us to death.”

“‘It’s a piece of cake… you get three meals a day and don’t have to do sh-t… wake up, eat get high, wake up eat get high’ repeat. A homeless woman shared with me why it’s so easy to be homeless. She was brutally honest because she hates the enablement ‘They are loving us to death,'” she told social service worker Kevin Dahlgren who is with the community engagement organization “We Heart Seattle.”

Wendy noted how progressive drug policies are causing more and more tents to pop up on Portland’s streets.

There are more than 700 homeless encampments across the city within a radius of less than 150 square miles. It has spawned widespread violent crime and the unfettered sale and use of cocaine, heroin, LSD, oxycodone, and meth which authorities decriminalized in 2020. Fentanyl use is also on the rise. Drug-related deaths have risen 41 percent since 2020, according to the Daily Mail.

“It’s a piece of cake really that’s why you probably have so many out here really because they feed you three meals a day and don’t have to do sh*t but stay in your tent and party,” Wendy told Dahlgren.

“I appreciate the honesty, doesn’t feel like that’s really helping anybody,” Dahlgren responded.

“It’s not, that’s why you see all the tents – people are up all night and sleep all day,” she asserted.

Wendy is originally a hairdresser from Florida. She found herself in Portland, living on the streets after she divorced her husband.

Someone stole her dentures and she hasn’t been able to go back to work.

“They do that here,” Wendy remarked. “I can’t get new ones because I just got the first one paid for, so I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t go to work without teeth.”

Although it’s not known where Wendy gets her three meals a day, there are a number of homeless organizations in Portland that serve the community. There are also outreach services that provide clothes and food as well as behavioral health services, transitional housing, and addiction help.

It all sounds noble, but according to Wendy, it is making the problem much, much worse.

Dahlgren told Wendy that people had set up a fundraiser to help get her new dentures so she can go back to work and get off the streets.

“I used to be just like everyone else, I used to have a really good job… I had a salon in Washington State, I drove a Lexus, and a house – and I loved to do hair,” she recounted.

After Dahlgren posted on Twitter Wendy’s story, her brother and ex-husband found her and are in the process of reconnecting with her.

“You found my sister,” John Mitchell wrote Dahlgren in a tweet. “Thanks Kevin for posting this. We knew she was homeless and likely in Portland but that’s about all. Thank you for being nice to her.”

Tent cities are overflowing in Portland which was once a beautiful Pacific Northwest city. Tourism is being scared off as well as residents in general as the problem explodes. Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler has vowed to shut down unsanctioned homeless camps in the city, calling them a “vortex of misery.”

“The magnitude and the depth of the homelessness crisis in our city is nothing short of a humanitarian catastrophe,” he added.

An estimated 7,000 homeless people are now inhabiting the Portland metropolitan area, according to the Daily Mail, including those on the streets and in shelters.

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