Oregon Democrats Propose Allowing Homeless to Sue If Forced To Move Encampments
“At this point, Democrats aren’t even trying to hide the fact they are out to destroy the country.”
Democrats in Oregon are proposing a law which would expand the rights of homeless people by decriminalizing encampments and allowing homeless people to sue if they feel harassed.
Do Oregon Democrats want more homeless? Because this is one way to get that.
Townhall reports:
Oregon Democrats Want to Give Homeless the Right to Sue If Forced to Move Their Encampments
At this point, Democrats aren’t even trying to hide the fact they are out to destroy the country.
Oregon proposed a law allowing homeless people to sue municipalities for as much as $1,000 per violation as part of a new initiative to decriminalize homelessness.
House Bill 3501, known as the Right to Rest Act, would allow homeless individuals to use public spaces in “the same manner as any other person” without discrimination for their housing status, despite residents expressing frustration over the impending safety and hygienic issue.
Homeless people could also be awarded a hefty sum if they are “harassed” by anyone trying to make them move.
Oregon’s recent growth in homelessness is among the largest in the U.S., growing by 23 percent between 2020 and 2022 and increasing by 3,304 people to about 18,000.
While Portland has seen a decrease in population, homelessness spiked by 50 percent from 2019 to 2022.
FOX News has more:
Oregon Democrats propose ‘Right to Rest Act’ decriminalizing public camping as homeless crisis surges
The bill says that “persons experiencing homelessness” will “be permitted to use public spaces in the same manner as any other person without discrimination based on their housing status” and states that homeless individuals have a right to “move freely in public spaces without discrimination and time limitations that are based on housing status.”
The housing bill comes as homelessness in Oregon spiked in 2022, Oregon Public Radio reported, and residents in cities like Portland and Eugene have sounded the alarm about the negative effects of homeless encampments.
“I love Portland, and I love where I live,” Portland homeowner Jacob Adams told “Fox & Friends” in February in a plea to elected officials to do something about a homeless encampment next to his house, where fires and drug activity have terrorized his family.
“I’m asking you to please do something, so the people of the city feel safe.”
Armand Martens, an 83-year-old Vietnam veteran who also lives next to Adams, told a local outlet he felt safer walking down the streets of Saigon than he does in Portland.
When do the tax paying citizens of Oregon get a little consideration?
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Comments
If the bill actually does what is described and treats the homeless the same as everyone else re use of public spaces wouldn’t that decrease the insanity? Where a statute or ordinance prohibits camping that would apply to all without any carve out for mentally ill, drug addicted transients aka homeless. Same for simple occupation of public spaces; if a business owner can’t use the space between his door and the center line of the street to erect semi permanent structures neither can anyone else.
It’s the “without discrimination and time limitations based on their housing status” part that would forbid removing homeless encampments from public lands. I live in Keizer, Oregon ( basically part of Salem) and have seen the homeless encampments that have built up and the dangerous situations it creates.
It requires evenhanded treatment. If Joe Regular
Guy doesn’t get to set up there then Shifty Bob the transient doesn’t either. Alternatively, use the thing against them by occupation in advance by Regular folks. Pitch some tents leaving no room for transients. Or hell, get a bunch of DGS types to occupy the same space the transients are in claiming ‘squatters rights’.
It’s really not all that hard. Just ban the public from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.
“The law in its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike from begging in the streets, stealing loaves of bread, and sleeping under bridges.”
Ah, the good old days. So quaint and passe
“Homeless people could also be awarded a hefty sum if they are “harassed” by anyone trying to make them move.”
If I had access to a few donated flatbed trucks, it certainly could not be construed as harassment to offer a number of homeless people $20 and a sandwich to sling their kit onto a truck and be bused to way better neighborhoods, places where the Democrat legislators live.
The problem is that those better neighborhoods don’t really have many public spaces for the homeless to squat upon. They make certain their neighborhoods are only accessible to the “right type of people.”
This is how we build a 21st century Bolshevik Army.
P.D. Ouspensky
Ekaterinodar
South Russia
Letters
1919
“The Dictatorship of the Criminal Element”
[…]But it was quite clear that as soon as there should be no bread and shoes, those with guns would get bread and shoes from those without guns. While this process of “deepening” the Revolution was taking place, the leaders of Bolshevism were making their way to power.
[…] A special aspect of Bolshevism has not yet been sufficiently insisted on. I mean the participation in it of decidedly criminal elements. In former days the population of Russian prisons used to be divided into two classes, the minority of ‘comrade-politicals’ and the vast majority of ‘comrade-criminals’. | think that nobody of the ‘comrade-political” ever dreamed that the leading part in the Revolution would be played by the ‘comrade-criminals’.
But this is the truth.
The future historian will have to think out a new definition for the Soviet power: some new word showing the prominent part played by the criminal element […]
[…]At last, thanks to murder, lies, unrealizable promises, and using all criminal elements available in Russia, they succeeded in reaching their object.
[…] The Bolsheviks had no constructive program, and in fact they could not have one. Everybody realized that none of their promises could be fulfilled.
For the final time, they aren’t homeless, they are feral humans who completely lack any capacity for domestication. They destroy everything they touch. The problem will continue to grow as long as politicians are given more money to “fix’ it, which they will never do, and with the fraud by mail system in place, no tax measure to fix it will ever be defeated even if 90% of the voters are against it. Those who were OK with the 2020 election being stolen never considered that they would be the next victim of stolen elections.
Perhaps sufficient encouragement to accept the offer of a bus ticket to Detroit should be considered. Detroit has lost a bunch of it’s population and it is a very blue city, thus ideologically and politically allied to the cause of permanently warehousing folks. They have plenty of room to let these folks camp outside if that’s what they want to do in the abandoned areas of Detroit.
Or to New York City, or Chicago, or to San Francisco, or to Los Angeles.
Subotai Bahadur
I was thinking in terms of a potential outlet for those cities to remove their population of mentally ill, drug addled transients aka homeless. Sort of an upper Midwest version ‘Escape from NY’ but without Snake Plisskin to bust things up.
All of Michigan, including Detroit, has a natural answer to homelessness: winter. You’ve got to be well-equipped and fully functioning mentally to survive camping out when the daily highs are under 10 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of weeks. I don’t hear of bodies emerging when the snow melts, so I have to conclude that in spite of all their mental deficiencies, nearly all the homeless are able to figure out some way to get indoors or to move to a milder climate before the weather gets too bad.
OTOH, there seem to be whole neighborhoods of abandoned buildings in Detroit and Flint, and not much to bar people from squatting there. That’s without heat, lights, or water, and the sewers cannot be working well, but cram a well-built house full of people, and body heat will keep it above freezing even in the worst weather…
Not to worry! These intrepid, neo-nomads are very resourceful when they choose to be. I have every faith that many of them will be perfectly capable of thriving in the hardships of a MI winter. The rest will either adapt or choose to voluntarily abandon the lifestyle which no longer suits them. In any event the problem everywhere else is solved.
Come to think of it, setting fire to abandoned buildings is a traditional pastime for Detroit’s feral children. (Not wild or homeless, just allowed by their parent to grow up feral.) If the homeless are packed into those buildings, they may become _very_ warm.
Not that this is how any of us _wanted_ to solve the homeless problem, but sometimes stuff just happens…
Half the homeless population are people we used to institutionalize. We need to bring those institutions back.
Gerrymandering under Democrat rules of voter infidelity.
I’m all for efforts like this in other states. Every bum and vagrant attracted to a blue state is one less bum or vagrant red states will have to worry about.
The red states should pass laws giving anyone rousted from an urban campsite a free bus ticket to the blue state of their choice as an alternative to jail or fines.
The results? More productive people will leave Oregon. I did in 2019. My friends left there all tell me I made the correct decision.
And yet they are still there.
Doesn’t say much for their decision-making.
There is a volunteer group in my area that traps feral cats, spays or neuters them, and after they’ve recovered, they are released back into the wild. People are discouraged from feeding them. They have captured and neutered thousands of cats. After years of this, one would expect the feral cat population would be decreasing or at least not expanding exponentially. But the population is growing by leaps and bounds. It has been suggested that a “cat farm” be built for them. People don’t necessarily want the cats euthanized. Just not in their yards killing birds. Move them to a “happy place”. No matter how many homes are found for feral humans our society finds a way to create more. Just like the cats. Maybe build a “human farm” off somewhere away from domesticated humans.
The State Capital has a huge grassy campus, ideal for camping.
“When do the tax paying citizens of Oregon get a little consideration?”
Tax paying citizens of Oregon get consideration when they leave Oregon for a red state, like South Dakota.
Oregon has a GDP of nearly $200 billion. All it takes is for one company, say Intel or Tektronix, to decide to move its operations to a more tax friendly and less political environment to start a trend.
Oregon’s politicians may not know how math and economics work.
In the expression f(x) = y, where f=the rate of taxation and x=the tax base, as f increases as a percentage while x, actual collected personal and corporate income tax revenues, decreases, the resultant y decreases also.
I have neither family nor friends in Portland now. I moved my daughter home from there a couple of years ago after my son-in-law died [heart attack] and now both she and I are mildly amused at seeing what Portland has continued to do to itself. It was going downhill when they opened their company 10 years ago, and it just continues to go downhill now that they are absent both her and the company’s assets.
Subotai Bahadur
What am I missing here? ‘”the Right to Rest Act, would allow homeless individuals to use public spaces in “the same manner as any other person” ‘.
Functioning cities don’t allow homed individuals to defecate or urinate in public, nor to sleep just anywhere, nor to camp indefinitely if there are places where napping or camping is allowed. So how does this give the homeless the right to do what’s banned for any other person?
The writing has been on the wall for Portland for quite some time.
Years ago, a client of mine acquired a business in Portland that was a substantial local employer, and merged it with a similar business he owned in the Midwest. His plan was to have the merged company HQ’d in Portland, and so he met with the usual city planning people to see what kind on incentives he could negotiate for the company’s planned new HQ (which would have been an urban revitalization project, whereby they would have converted former industrial space into office / warehouse / shipping).
One would think Portland would have been all over this kind of deal: lots of new, non-polluting, fairly-well paying jobs and a company willing to spend its own money revitalizing a site in a declining area of town. Nope. At the first meeting, the Portland bureaucrats heard him out, and then advised him of what their “incentive” terms were: company would also have to acquire, develop, and give the city a bunch of nearby property for public parks, would have to develop a bunch of low income housing and similarly dedicate it to public use, and the city would dictate how the redeveloped commercial space would look like and be done.
Tax incentives? Ha ha ha. They viewed any employer as a cow to be milked as much as possible.
Client (who was no fool) told them that if they didn’t get real, he’d just relocate the merged company to Scottsdale, and so rather than gaining lots of new jobs, the city would lose several hundred existing ones. The chief bureaucrat told him “that’s fine with us; there are too many people here already.”
That may have been a bluff, but if so it was a bad one. Client did indeed relocate the company to Scottsdale, which was quite happy to have a new major employer, and provided the usual sort of tax incentives to encourage the move. And so Portland not only didn’t get any new jobs or major new additional investment, it lost a slew of good jobs and all the associated tax revenues and economic multipliers.
But I’m sure the leftist city bureaucrats think to this day that their actions were justified. Reality never interferes with their narrative.
It’s clear that things in Portland are going to get much, much worse. Fortunately, my daughter got out of there last week.
I think it is only fair for the Oregon homeless to receive at least $5 million apiece in order to compensate for the wrongs committed against them. The Oregon legislature should impose new reparations taxes on every person with a principal residence. Sounds like social justice to me.
Portland is collapsing as property owners strategically default on un-rentable properties and retail businesses leave the city. So let’s just make it harder for them to survive and thrive.
I’m gonna say this like a broken record. Their intent is to purge dissenters. They don” care what sort of hell hole the create, they just want dissenters to leave.
It worked for Newsome.
“When do the tax paying citizens of Oregon get a little consideration?”
The only thing taxpayers, particularly wealthy ones, receive these days is hatred, despite the fact that they are the ones who are paying for everything. (Yes, not “everything”, but everything before deficit spending begins.)
The Left wants to bite the hand that feeds it.
I am personally acquainted with one of the bill’s sponsors, and sent her a brief note to say three things. First, that the answer is shelters and sanctioned tent camps. Second, that if police are banned from moving people there, I fear that ordinary citizens will take the law into their own hands. Third, that existing shelters have 20% unused capacity.
It won’t do any good, but I felt an obligation to try.
UPDATE: The bill is symbolic. I hadn’t known, but the deadline for newly introduced legislation in Oregon has passed. I have no idea whether the one sponsor will reply to my email. If she does, I’ll ask her why she bothered.
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: I was wrong. The bill was introduced before the deadline.