A TALE OF TWO CITIES

The Humanitarian Crisis Of Our Lifetime

BY MICHELE DARR ARTWORK JAMAAL HALE

Everyone has a story. Recognizing this is a key to empathy and compassion for the journeys, trials and triumphs of others and a guide that serves as a roadmap for the richness and complexities we individually experience along the winding paths of the human experience known as Life.

While most of us have stories that the majority of us will never hear or know about, the predominant outlets for the stories of those experiencing houselessness in America are inarguably most controlled by the mainstream media. Coming through channels the people experiencing houselessness themselves have little to no control over, the media narrative is thick with condemnation and character judgement and noticeably absent of reflection on the growingly catastrophic systemic realities and failures that are forcing human beings out of their homes and into the streets in greater and greater numbers.

Skyrocketing housing costs, a global pandemic, economic distress from a collapsing federal reserve and its unbacked paper money, 3 major global wars, countless US global interventions, the seemingly endless “war on drugs”, “war on terror” and wars on life itself have created and are responsible for maintaining an unparalleled degree of mental illness in this country. And I’m not just talking about the mental illnesses of those easy targets for the label, I’m talking about the degree of mental illness it takes for ALL of us to continue our uncomfortable participation in the real life hunger games of the 21st century, pretending the wars will never come for us, never invade our individual silos of growing discontent.

One of the ways that we can move beyond the pejoratives blatantly created by the mainstream purveyors of “news” and the stigmas they create to keep class structures in place and participants in line, is through first-person narratives that take us back to the roots of the struggles individuals face navigating this crisis-driven reality.

As the son of an FBI agent father and a mother who was a human resources manager of large tech companies, Eddie Holford grew up in majority Black neighborhoods from Topeka, Kansas to Houston, Texas. Culture shock ensued when his family moved out west to Hillsboro, Oregon where they were the first Black family to live in the area. Despite successfully acclimating to the environment and living a seemingly normal, upper-middle class existence with parents who were featured on the cover of “Money” magazine, there were problems bubbling below the surface. Holford’s parents divorced and his father moved to another State while he was a sophomore in high school, causing the young Holford to slip into less than helpful coping mechanisms to deal with the pain. “There really wasn’t anything to do in Hillsboro except drink and smoke weed in the country so that’s where the use started for me,” he remembered. Despite achieving a measure of success through college scholarships and opportunities, Holfords drug and alcohol use never stopped. “It eventually progressed into a problem, and one that I could no longer control. It controlled my thoughts, how I woke up, how I went to bed. From that point, life started to unravel.” Progressively capturing more and more attention from law enforcement led to jail time and eventually, periods of houselessness. “My story is no different than anybody who has ever been behind walls and has risen,” Holford said. “I came to the point where I got tired of the cycles, tired of being lost. I went to my parole officer and emptied the drugs and paraphernalia on the desk in front of her saying, ‘you can either put me in jail, put me in treatment or I’ll walk out the door and that will be the last time you see me because I’ll jump off the Fremont bridge.” The parole officer acquired him a bed in a treatment facility and Holford began his journey towards healing. “That was the beginning of the rise,” he shared. Navigating the troubled waters of past trauma and the arduous journey through the pain and redemption of feeling led Holford to his purpose of helping others through the trials and struggles of addiction recovery. “Today I have the keys,” Holford shared. “Today I am ok with whatever happens, even things I don’t like because I am doing the work through an emotional and spiritual approach to the problems.”

Destigmatizing those experiencing the depths of despair through first hand stories such as Eddie’s is the first seed in growing the compassion and empathy necessary to combat hatred and fear in hearts not familiar with the modern-day gauntlet that only a fraction of our society can successfully navigate. In a polarized climate where the majority don’t understand the challenges, hurdles and roadblocks of an entire demographic, the misery and despair behind the glaring mounds of trash, crime and drugs in their neighborhoods and splashed across their flickering screens are invisible, creating tripwires for landmines that far too frequently have life and death implications.

Despite declaring a ‘state of emergency’ with regards to houselessness in 2015 and extending it five times since, Portland still struggles to implement long term solutions to the multi-faceted problems plaguing the City. Mayor Ted Wheeler has even issued an impassioned clarion call for effective intervention on his Portland.gov page, calling the houseless situation “The Humanitarian Crisis of Our Lifetime”.

“One of the most challenging issues facing Portland today is our homeless crisis,” Wheeler said. “According to the 2022 official point in time count, thousands of people are living unsheltered on our streets, and unsheltered homelessness in Portland increased by 50% from 2019 to 2022. Those who want affordable housing face years-long waiting lists.” Grim statistics outline the incredible dangers of experiencing houselessness in Portland. Accounting for 20% of all homicide victims in 2021, a 53 percent increase in deaths throughout the city and 31 percent of Portland’s fire deaths, Wheeler and Commissioner Dan Ryan crafted a “Five Resolution Plan” to address the problem. The proposal, which passed City Council, allocates $27 million to build 20,000 affordable housing units by 2033. In addition, the City intends to rewrite its outdoor camping protocols and connect people experiencing houselessness with available sanitary, mental health and substance abuse recovery services. In addition, Wheeler is passionate in promoting Temporary Alternative Shelter Sites while people wait for long term housing. “What is up with these new temporary alternative shelter types is we will refer people into them who can benefit from soup to nuts case management, connections to behavioral health, connections to substance abuse disorder treatment and navigation to appropriate housing when they want to or are able,” Wheeler shared.

While the Mayor’s approach is novel and backed by a solid plan to help guide people into a long term solution to their plight, there is no one size fits all approach to the problem. No one knows this better than houseless advocates across the City, including Jacqueline Hodges.

“As long as you lump everyone into one group, many are going to fall between the cracks,” Ms. Hodges sighed. “There has to be education in the sense that in order to reach some of these people, you have to be able to listen to them at whatever level they are on. You can’t address the issue while you are thinking inside the box. You are dealing with people, emotions and circumstances that are not human, not normal. They revert to survival mentality, meaning you have to offer them something and be with them while they process through their emotional issues–feeling bad, feeling guilty, feeling angry. They already feel invisible.”

Kristle Delihanty and Adriana Gonzalez of PDX Saints Love, a direct outreach/mutual aid organization primarily serving E. Portland and Clackamas county since 2017, believes that the answer lies in relationship building from a deeply human perspective. “The way we differ from the hundreds of other organizations serving is that we believe in creating relationships,” shared Delihanty. “Not just sitting and holding space for 5 minutes but the kind of relationships that go through trauma and crisis and mourning and laughing and crying with the people we walk with. In those relationships, we begin to understand the real need which is very complex. No one can put our homeless crisis into a paragraph, yet we all keep trying to.”

Networking with neighborhood business associations is another powerful strategy that can provide a bridge to understanding and a means to accessing resources for property/business owners and people experiencing houselessness alike. “When I’m sitting in meetings with business associations, I let them know that sometimes what we are calling a ‘homeless crisis’ is actually systemic and goes back further than we are seeing on the streets now,” added Delihanty. Helping the street bound navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy from local shelters to the VA, Social Security, housing, available financial resources and addiction recovery programs is a good start. Additionally, formation of rapid, compassionate response networks ready to help intervene on behalf of property and business owners and provide help with neighborhood clean ups and repairs are but a few ideas for how neighborhoods and business associations can be part of solutions that take everyone’s needs into consideration. Meet and greet potlucks in the park for people to come together and get to know each other on a human to human basis can also provide another effective venue to get beyond our perceived differences and down to the core of what it means and takes to be a human being doing our best to survive in 2023.

“Here in Portland, we have to not look at people as cattle,” concluded Jacqueline Hodges. “We have to see them as human beings, who were once thriving kids with a mother and a father, maybe siblings. They weren’t born homeless. They weren’t born with mental illness. We have to address the root causes of the issues if we are ever going to come up with solutions that honor the humanity of those who can’t hold on anymore, can’t cope.”