In the Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life, the despairing do-gooder George Bailey is shown a vision of the miserable hellscape his hometown would become had he never been born. Multnomah County officials have their own George Bailey complex—overlooked, unthanked, subject to abusive tirades—but no guardian angels to show what difference they’ve made. Well, call us Clarence, because last week we acknowledged that the county’s spending on homelessness has been effective by several measures (“Home Stretch,” WW, Dec. 3). If not for rent assistance, some 12,656 households would have lost their homes. You see, Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, you really had a wonderful life. Now, when do we get our wings? Here’s what our readers had to say:
florgborgle, via Reddit: “Sure, I’ll give the county some additional credit for doing a better job with stuff like rental assistance. I think what this overlooks, though, is the persistence of untreated drug and mental health issues within the street homeless population and the county’s seeming unwillingness to deliver stronger interventions. The ludicrously expensive deflection center performance is a good example of underdelivery by the county.”
Seems2Me, via wweek.com: “Setting aside the housing and emergency shelter components, one thing that seems like a missed opportunity is identifying definable subgroups of homeless people. People who have never used drugs or alcohol, have no criminal record, have worked all their lives, but got old with no savings, are a different group from many single moms escaping domestic violence, who are different from chronically addicted chronically homeless, chronically criminally inclined, and so on. What are the different groups? What do the people who make up the subgroups need? In my experience, they have different recovery paths…