Wheelerville by the numbers

They just recently got around to showing the numbers from the homeless count they did in January for Multnomah County. Here's the main table. They say there were 3057 people on the streets, 1485 in shelters, and 686 in "transitional housing," which I believe is mostly drug addiction treatment beds.

There's a lot of blah-blah in the report about Covid, and of course, about race. And everybody knows that every single number on that table is an undercount. Nonetheless, there's some interesting data there.

Over the last five years, homelessness increased by 1111 people, but the number of people living on the streets increased by 1389. The number of people in shelters dropped by 267, and the number of people in transitional housing dropped by 71.

In other words, folks, we're failing.

Meanwhile, we've decriminalized hard drugs; the racist and bully cops all quit; and the ones that remain are more or less on strike. It's quite a recipe for disaster.

Anyway, when you think about all the tax money that's being thrown at the homelessness problem, it's interesting to ponder that we may be talking about 5228 people. The Metro "supportive housing" income tax alone is reportedly raising about $250 million a year. If, say, 60 percent of that goes to Multnomah County and the City of Portland, that's $150 million, which works out to around $28,700 per homeless person per year. And that's just one of the taxes that are feeding the homeless industrial complex. For that kind of change, the taxpayers shouldn't be stepping over bum doo on the sidewalks and tolerating rampant property crime.