I found a MASSIVE abandoned camp in our Oregon woods. Easily 2-3 million pounds of trash and no sign of people. Multiple half built houses, thousands of
pieces of clothing, hundreds of cans of paint, over a thousand bicycles piled up over 15 feet high, basements, treehouses, dozens of clearly stolen catalytic converters and a needle pit with over ten thousand needles.
I don’t know who lived here, how many lived here or why the left. I also counted over a hundred teddy bears. It was clear kids used to live there.
There was dozens of tricycles, toys kids clothes and even cribs. The camp is spread out over 4-5 acres. The cleanup will easily be a half million dollars. This is why I support sanctioned camping and to restrict all other
homeless camping. Kids for one should never be out there, the community should not continuously be responsible for messes like this and the fact is there is nothing compassionate with allowing the homeless to live this way.
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“It’s all an illusion” I asked a homeless woman when was the last time a trained professional offered real help and she laughed out loud. She told @tarafaul503 and I she hears and reads about services all the time, but said the way they’re set up, they
are almost impossible to access or when you do access them, it’s nothing but long waitlists. I’m well aware there are two sides to every story but I have heard this identical complaint easily thousands of times. Not hundreds but thousands. So at the very least our current system
has unsuccessfully created an effective streamline approach that the homeless understand. Trust is so low too most homeless have stopped trying and despite there being services out there, they’ve basically given up.
A year in photos. In 2024 @tarafaul503 and I did the most extensive documentation of the homeless population of a major city ever. We met and documented thousands of people currently living on the streets. We photographed them, we interviewed them
and we helped them. I believe what we have now is one of the strongest understandings of why they ended up on the streets and why they stay on the streets. Most people choose to ignore this population. Tara and I have an immersed ourselves in this population and
done everything to raise awareness of this homeless addiction crisis. We have been given access to places most people are not allowed to go because we have built trust with a population that trusts almost nobody.
Housing will never end homelessness. A homeless man who has chosen to live on the streets for 37 years. He told @tarafaul503 and I that throughout his life, he has been offered help many times and has always declined. The current narrative by the Homeless Industrial Complex is
that housing ends homelessness and
why we have literally spent billions of dollars on housing. I have done extensive homeless outreach for decades and just over the last year I easily met/interviewed 40-50% of the homeless population in Portland, Oregon. I can confidently
say over 40% choose homelessness. For them it’s a lifestyle. With enough effort, I am sure we could change some of their minds, but reality is there will always be people who will never want to live indoors. This woman calls the streets “addicting” and has
Shanty town cliff dwellings in Portland Oregon. They are starting to pop up everywhere and are in plain sight.@tarafaul503 and are seeing these in multiple neighborhoods. This is the natural result when you have a system unable or unwilling to end the homeless crisis.
I discovered these Hobbit like houses five years ago. They were in the deep woods though and nearly impossible to see.
These though are in plain sight and impossible to miss. Nobody said that ending the homeless crisis was going to be easy, but after decades in the system, it’s clear we have no standardized model to even try. There are though
The moment I realized the Harm Reduction movement cared less about the person and more about the Social Justice cause. My second position working/volunteering in social services was doing needle exchange in Portland, Oregon 25-26 years ago. I had graduated from
college and joined a nonprofit and one of the first places they sent me was with a team to do needle exchange in downtown Portland in the middle of the night. I knew very little about harm reduction and was eager to learn more. Our team encountered a family. A mother and father
and about a nine year-old girl. The parents were deep into their
heroin addiction. Their child was dressed provocatively, and we learned that she was actually being prostituted by her parents to pay for their addiction. My heart sank and I was
WARNING GRAPHIC. An addict afflicted with the flesh eating drug xylazine that is cut into fentanyl. Nearly his entire body is rotting away. On parts of his body @tarafaul503 and I could see his bones. Soon he will start losing his limbs and then eventually die.
Xylazine is a horse tranquilizer that is added to fentanyl to enhance it. It’s a tranquilizer only meant for horses. It first appeared on the East Coast a few years ago and is now almost everywhere. We begged him to go to the hospital, which he insists he has.
We finally convinced him he needed help in in a few days he said he’s admitting himself into a recuperative care program. We promised we would visit him.