Portland’s innovative new idea to deal with the city’s homeless crisis by shelling out $50 million for a program to build little “Keebler elf towns” to house the most wretched elements of society is a perfect example of how the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.
Once the jewel of the Pacific Northwest, the Oregon city has like so many other areas that have fallen under the control of radical “woke” Democrats, descended into crime, drug addiction, squalor, and most visibly, homelessness as it has become a magnet for vagrants who have become a menace to residents.
The idea to create a new “Safe Rest Village” program that offers miniature housing units to homeless people has been beset by the expected problems including loud noises at night and criminal activity, especially drug dealing.
One Portland resident, Angela Todd who is a member of the local activist group PDX Real, appeared on Thursday’s edition of “Jesse Watters Primetime” where she discussed the problematic project and the throwing of money at the “homeless industrial complex” that has taken root in the Rose City with host Jesse Watters.
(Video: Fox News)
“Did any thought go into the fact that if you place sixty homeless addicts in the same place that maybe some drug dealers might congregate there?” Watters asked.
“All of us in Portland, Jesse, know what the outcome is here with these Safe Rest Villages,” Todd replied. “This is honestly just a Hail Mary. They have no idea if this is going to work. And it really… it’s an indication it hasn’t worked so far.”
“Our neighborhoods… every time they set up these types of Safe Rest Villages, it’s just [an] area around it of organized crime and drugs,” she added. “We continue to look at this housing first, instead of looking at our mental health and our drug addiction on Portland streets and trying to get people real help.”
“Well they’re not actually trying to get them real help because they are getting real money,” Watters said. “50 million to put up a bunch of little tents with a washing machine? Where did the rest of the money go?”
Todd responded that the Safe Rest Villages are only “a fraction of the money” and that there are “hundreds of millions of dollars every year” being pumped into the “homeless advocacy cartel.”
“The truth is they do not want solutions,” she said. “They want to for life make these people dependent and they want to take away their purpose so that they can put it through to these nonprofits and continue to fund the elections in Oregon.”
“We are completely just fed up with our government profiting off of people’s suffering and saying that they’re the compassionate ones,” she continued. “We have people out on the street that are nearly… They’ve let this fester so long, Jesse, that we have people with mental illness and mental health, drug addiction. It almost seems incurable…. It’s really awful to see this happen to your city.”
Another longtime North Portland resident described the situation to local news outlet KATU.
(Video: YouTube/KATU)
“Life is pretty miserable because we live in a kind of anxiety,” said George Siebert who has lived in his University Park home for 42 years and now is only fourteen feet away from the bathrooms for the city’s newest Safe Rest Village. “We are on the edge every time somebody walks by,”
“Every time there is a commotion, we jump to the windows,” he told KATU. “We’re looking at our cars to see if they’re not getting broken into.”
“They’ve stolen, I don’t know how much stuff out of my yard,” said Chrisanne Boles another nearby resident. “They’re bold enough now they come up on my porch and steal cigarettes.”
“The ones that are really homeless and not doing the drugs, I have compassion for them,” she said. “These ones right here, I have no compassion. They’re not trying to help themselves. I’ve called the cops. The cops don’t do nothing, right? What can they do?”
“The Safe Rest Villages model—outdoor shelters with on-site case management and wraparound mental and behavioral health services—is relatively new to Portland, and similar models have succeeded in other cities,” according to the City of Portland’s website.
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