An acquaintance of mine owns a few stores in Portland. He has told me numerous times of the problems he has with homeless people around his businesses. Regularly, he has to take a pressure-washer or a bucket of hot, soapy water to the façade of his establishment to clean the human feces and urine off his building.

Why does Portland allow a bunch of lawless individuals to deface your businesses and homes? If you cannot do anything else, why not do as the Europeans do and build public toilets every three or four blocks? Kurfurstendamm in Berlin, a shopping street to rival any in the world, has multiple public toilets on both sides of the street. The city of Berlin is clean, as are most other major European cities because they understand human physiology and make facilities available to take care of “the call of nature” we all experience multiple times a day.

Portland closed down a multimillion-gallon reservoir because two folks urinated into it, and closes off the Bull Run watershed so there won’t be any human contamination in its water supply. But it allows the homeless to defecate and urinate on your public streets and allows that to be washed down into the Willamette River for those downriver to deal with it. I smell hypocrisy, people.

Mike Early, Mulino