Trouble in Pee-Town

How would you feel if one day, out of the blue, the city placed a portable toilet for homeless people near your house? I would not be happy, to say the least. Would you?

You might think that the Portland City Hall bureaucrats would anticipate a hostile reaction to this sort of move. But they're so far removed from reality that the surprise they're expressing about the blowback from neighbors is probably genuine.

Anyway, blowback is definitely what they're getting.

In one particularly troubling string of incidents, residents of Southeast Portland’s Creston-Kenilworth neighborhood so vociferously opposed having a portable toilet near their homes that they got into faceoffs with workers trying to install it. The porta-potty at the location was stolen three times, and neighbors vandalized a truck that was reinstalling one.

I don't know what the answer is to the city's homeless problem, but one thing's for sure: The current local government crowd sure isn't making it better.