[jyl]

Portland government has structural problems. Beyond the outdated "commission" form of city government, which was (in my opinion) not properly addressed in the recent charter reform vote, we have overlapping governments - City of Portland, Multnomah County, and Metro. Almost all the money available to deal with homelessness. mental health, drug abuse, housing, and other social problems is controlled by the county and Metro. Voters are furious at the city for failing to deal with those problems, which the city lacks the ability to tackle, while having little awareness of country and Metro, whose elected officials are thus largely unaccountable.

There is another problem, which is that Portland's political establishment is insular and tribal. I know many of the local political leaders and observe that they suffer from groupthink, judge people by if they are "in the club", think ideologically rather than pragmatically, and basically live in their little bubble.

An interesting conflict will emerge in the next couple of years, I think. Oregon is shifting rightward, from "deep blue" (Democratic) to purple (swing state). The reason is how Portland is viewed by the population in the suburbs. Oregon is blue only because of about nine electoral districts that comprise Portland and its suburbs. If a few of the suburban districts flip to purple, Oregon will flip as well, even if Portland/Multnomah County itself remains solidly blue. Those suburban voters' image of Portland is largely shaped by the profusion of homeless camps all over the place; they want to see tents off the streets, by any means necessary. Democrats at the state level know this (Tina Kotek barely won the governorship and her ads were all about how she's going to rapidly tackle homelessness) and they realize they need to quickly "clean up" (i.e. move to be out of sight) Portland's homeless camps or lose control of the state. Democrats in Portland/Multnomah County don't understand this and are sticking to their long-term "housing-first" strategy. Kotek needs the Multnomah Democrats' support to stay in office, but she also needs to radically change their approach to homelessness to stay in office. How she reconciles this conflict will determine her, and Oregon's, political future.

I'm fairly pessimistic that she will be able to thread the needle. I can't stand Kotek, had numerous run-ins with her office during my involvement in local politics and historic preservation, was on the receiving end of her "racist card" tactics.

The city's current proposal to build several large supervised camps and force homeless to camp there instead of all over the place is basically a "quick clean-up" effort. The local activists are all attacking the proposal, saying it won't address the root causes of homelessness. They are correct and they also completely miss the point. Watch to see which side Kotek comes down on.