Piling on
Just as I was writing about homelessness truth-teller Kevin Dahlgren's legal woes yesterday, along comes news of another indictment charging him with similar crimes in Deschutes County. It sounds like the same type of alleged misconduct that got him charged in Multnomah County.
If he's guilty, he deserves punishment, but it's really too bad the guy has been silenced. I hope it's not for long. His message is important.
I am curious what you see as his important message? As someone who has worked in and around the houseless crisis for a long time (a member of what some may lazily refer to as the "homeless industrial complex" - a label I find troubling as no one I know doing this work wants anything other than to end this man made crisis and no one I know trying to make it better is getting wealthy off the efforts), I found Kevin's narrative to be dangerous. He claimed to speak for people experiencing homelessness but spent a lot of time and energy exploiting their misery for advancement of a false narrative that those who want to ensure a basic human right to a home "enable" homelessness and that it can be solved by a broken, blaming Reaganesque model of "personal responsibility" and coerced "tough love" treatment of people our private-property driven housing system was never built to serve. His explanation of homelessness and how we need to address it with more forceful approaches proven not to work aligns with the failed approach to homelessness undertaken by the Trump administration. That Kevin faces growing allegations that he took improper advantage of his position aligns with what we have seen from him with respect the crisis he claimed to care about.
ReplyDeleteYour use of “false narrative” says it all for me. Obviously, his view got in your way.
Delete“proven not to work” by whom? I can’t tell if you think our current system is working but to me any one else with eyesight, our current system seems to be a complete and utter failure, getting worse all the time. I don’t think it’s lazy to say that our system in Multnomah is a disaster.
DeleteDefine "work." Most of the street people are never going to have happy or productive lives. Especially the ones who are now addicted to fentanyl; they will be dead soon. Treatment, even if it were available, has a slim success rate.
DeleteThe issue is whether these people's problems should be allowed to destroy entire cities. What would "work" for me would be if they got off the streets and acted out their individual life disasters without the rest of us having to watch.
As for failure, nothing has failed more miserably than what we've done over the past five years. Nothing.
While many of us applaud the work done at your level and believe your intent is true, do understand our cynicsm and ask you to apply these metrics to judge for yourself the work you perform:
ReplyDelete1. Has all of your work resulted in, at a minimum, stabilizing the rate of growth (forget decreasing the rate) of the overall homeless situation:
2. Is your Executive Director earning a minimum 3x or more your yearly salary managing your organization ;
We can only address what we see: an unending problem despite Billions (with a B!) thrown at it and highly paid upper management who appear to be more interested in keeping the status quo in order to secure their job vs. your goal of ending this man made crisis.
There have been hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries spent through the nonprofit efforts aimed at the “homeless” issue. Anything that upsets that income flow is going to be a target of the people running the scam.
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