homelessness in Portland

A man sleeps on a park bench near the Steel Bridge in downtown Portland.

(Motoya Nakamura/staff)

I arrived in Old Town Portland 20 minutes early for my interview with Street Roots director Israel Bayer, so I sat in my car parked near Third and Davis and just watched.

I saw two bundles in the doorways to the left of me. I couldn't tell if they were sleeping people, or just bundles of stuff.

To my right, I watched a man stop near my car, stand with his head against a brick wall, and begin sobbing. Another man, with a thin fleece blanket wrapped around his shoulders, came up and held him. They stood there, hugging, rocking, maybe grieving, for about two minutes.

Passersby ignored them.

A range of possible reactions ran through my mind. Should I say something? Should I lean the seat back and hide? Should I make eye contact?

Can I help?

Can I cry, too?

I live in the suburbs, and I rarely come into Old Town. So, forgive me, reader, if you've seen all this before and long ago stopped wondering what to do about it.

But I was shocked by the homelessness around me. When I later sat down with Israel, I asked him what I should have done.

"There's no clear five-minute plan, there's nothing that's going to make you or anybody else feel more at ease in the moment," he said.

Israel Bayer

If there were such a simple way out, a better way forward, Israel would have long ago discovered it. Since 2003, he's served as director of Street Roots, a newspaper sold by the homeless. He's seen far worse things than the human suffering I witnessed in just 20 minutes on a Thursday morning.

Is it bad, I asked, that I don't like coming to this part of town?

It depends, he said, on why I feel that way.

If it's coming from a place of disgust, maybe I need to "check" myself. There but for the grace of God...

If it's coming from a place of fear, well, everyone has their levels of comfort.

But it's neither of those. It's stressful. I don't know how to help, so selfishly, I don't want to face it.

There is no Miss Manner's Guide to etiquette when it comes to interactions with the homeless. There is no "right thing" to do. There is nothing to make you feel good about yourself when you see suffering up close and personal.

Most of us would stop and help if we saw someone on the side of the street who'd been hit by a car. There's a clear course of action for that: Call 911.

There is no homeless 911. (NOTE: There should be.) And so with no clear means of helping, we form a coping mechanism of ignoring it, or justifying it.

We tell ourselves these people are addicts or mentally ill, and that helps us classify them as "others," not like ourselves. That makes it easier to keep on walking.

I heard Israel speak at TEDx Portland, a recent day-long conference of "ideas worth spreading." Israel spoke about homelessness, and he said "compassion fatigue" is one of the biggest threats to addressing our country's homeless crisis.

Compassion fatigue happens when good people see suffering so often, they start to feel it's inevitable - normal, even - and there's nothing they can do.

But homelessness is not normal.

Modern homelessness, he said, is largely borne from massive cuts to federal housing programs in the 1980s. Between 1978 and 1983, the federal budget for housing shrank from $83 billion to $18 billion, "and mass homelessness in America began," Israel said during his TEDx talk. "Those federal cuts have never been restored, and we have turned hundreds of thousands of people out onto the streets."

Homelessness forces good people into situations where they only have bad options.

And that applies whether you're living on the streets and living among people living on the streets. Of our options to help in that moment like I experienced, none are great.

If I offer food, is it demeaning? Is it worse to throw away leftovers when someone nearby doesn't have a meal at all?

If I start a conversation, will this person be unstable?

Is it right to give money? I'm not just talking about panhandlers. Is it right to offer it, unasked? Is what they do with it my business?

As a community, we still haven't decided what the right thing is. A recent billboard telling would-be do-gooders that giving spare change to homeless people funds addictions was eventually taken down for just that reason.

Street Roots is great because it provides clear parameters for a "normal" interaction between homeless and home-having people. It cuts through the idea of "otherness" that is so divisive in today's politics. The homeless are not faceless others. They are people with whom we share a common humanity.

It can be hard to know where to begin a conversation with a homeless person. "I'll take a copy" is a great place to start.

Solving the homeless crisis will take policy changes, at the local, state and federal level. But what do you do, today, as an individual, for a person on the street? Urge them to vote for an affordable housing measure in November? Tell them to write a congressman?

"Look people in the eyes and simply acknowledge they're human beings," Israel suggested. "I know that this may sound simple and it may sound cheesy, but ... I believe human connectivity is very powerful."

Multnomah County's 2015 homeless count found that 33 percent of people living on the streets self-identified as having mental health issues; 32 percent said they have substance abuse issues.

But it's a copout to tell yourself that every homeless person is "other," unlike us. About half in the county survey had been on the streets for less than a year.

When it comes to food, Israel said he will offer his restaurant leftovers to someone on the street. Most of the time, they'll gladly take it.

If you want to give money, Israel has a personal philosophy: Each day in Portland, the first person to ask him for a cigarette and the first person to ask for a quarter or a dollar, gets it. He doesn't give to anyone else the rest of the day.

"It's a way for me to not feel like I'm tuning out or turning away folks, while at the same time not having to have an existential crisis or a moral dilemma," he said. "It also allows me not to care what they do with their money ... I just don't want to think about that stuff."

-- Samantha Swindler

@editorswindler / 503-249-4031

sswindler@oregonian.com