Michael - I greatly appreciate your sincere concern about houseless folks and how the city or Portland, PSU and the community at large treats them.
I've worked in IT most of my life. I've earned over a $100k working for big corps and then walked away in disgust over their insatiable greed only to go back after struggling trying to survive economically at smaller companies or NGOs. I've also experienced homelessness and housing insecurity in my times of big tech / capitalism rebellion. I've also served the homeless community w. Food Not Bombs and Sisters of the Road. Food Not Bombs helped w. the PSU Food Pantry for students struggling with meeting their nutritional needs. I even recently became a union carpenter in the hopes of helping to build tiny houses for homeless people. But I'm struggling with my own economic survival and the reality that there's not enough space to build 4.000+ tiny houses in PDX. As a PSU alumnus and someone who obviously cares about how PSU treats the homeless in our community, I encourage you to contact PSU and inquire about the "abuses of resources." I know from experience the chronically homeless have a litany of problems and needs that are being solved or met and that sometimes that does lead to some of them being abusive to other people or abusing public/private resources. In a way, homelessness is a very complicated problem but it also has a very simple solution, give anyone who doesn't want to live outside a place to live. They did it in Salt Lake City and reduced the homeless population by 75%. All it took was someone to provide the city with the data that it actually costs the city more in police, fire, hospital and other services than it does to just provide housing. -- Mike _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
