Dear Editors,
In response to your editorial on Dignity Village, I just have to object on the grounds of both compassion and reason. You don't like that the Village doesn't fully document all their success stories of homeless moving on into acceptable housing and you would have the villagers be housed "in a roof, four walls, plumbing, and electricity."
Lots of Dignity Villagers are moving on into "acceptable" housing and some has been documented and the village does not have paid, governmental staff who work full time as with other shelters to keep track of all the statistics that might be desirable or would convince you of its value. Give them a little more time, they will give you the statistics as they keep training their own one on challenging job after another -- bookkeeping and accounting, to logistics management, etc.
Until enough housing is available for the homeless, Dignity Village represents a far better and more compassionate alternative to sleeping on the streets. It is better for all the inhabitants of our community. The Villagers, I might add, have created a quality of living in their "ramshackle" living quarters (your words) that many people don't in our area -- a sense of community -- a place where people care for each other in a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual sense, remarkable for a group of people with their backgrounds.
So -- you don't like Dignity Village and you can't "accept a homeless camp on principle." You don't like that the Village has a "glossy brochure" (would you prefer a greasy, black and white flyer or do you find them just not worthy of anything "nice" so as to present their case to the public)? You don't appreciate their "eager volunteers" (are we duped or just misguided, do you think?) who are trying to help this group of courageous people with little or no resources and so many cards stacked up against them!
What is the principle here, pleeze? That there is enough public and affordable housing so we don't need to tolerate homeless people, especially living in a way that some of us don't like? Sure -- give me a break and tell me that there is anywhere near enough of your "minimum standards" housing for the homeless in Portland, Oregon! Would you rather try to make these 1000s of people more invisible by scattering them even more among the docks, bridges, doorways, street corridors, shivering and shaking from the wet and cold, trying to anesthetize themselves occasionally with a sip of liquor or having a smoke or doing a drug (a minority of homeless people) while most just do suffer -- they really, really suffer, hear that and have little to nothing to soothe their way, including encouraging words from the public or many helping hands that might lift them high enough, as Dignity Village does, that they might climb their way out of homelessness. Do you honestly think they have a chance to get out of their condition? Give me a break! They are resigned to being thrown away adults to be huddled in a fetal position every night of their life with little to know real opportunity to get out of the trap. We can do much better for these human beings.
At Dignity Village they get that break -- they become humans again, get resources and training, rebuild a little of their self esteem, can get physically and mentally well and even healed enough to have a chance again to become a productive citizen. You don't like the lack of statistics -- well, do you know that about half of the members of Dignity Village have jobs! They are trying their best to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, a conservative's dream as a matter of fact.
Compared with the alternatives, of which there are very few and not enough, I surely find your lack of compassion something I have difficulty accepting or understanding. Come visit. Take a tour. See firsthand the village and then go walk with me and tour the streets of Portland -- I'll loan you my eyes to see our homeless people. Further, let's stop the car and chat a while here and there with them, and simply be with them -- the time will be well-spent (compared to reading more surveys and reports done by academics and bureaucrats with vested interests in homelessness). Then I suspect that you will run, not walk and go and rewrite your editorial with a lot less "should" in it as compared with practical, hands-on suggestions that might work, not based on some hundreds of millions of dollars that some fairy godmother might gift us with to construct the number of housing units that would be required to house our homeless. You might then consider applauding and sounding the praises of Dignity from the rooftops of our town.
And, you'd also give some deserved pats on the back to certain City officials with the courage and compassion to explore this possible alternative as a "pilot project" to see if it just might work (not perfectly -- if that is the hurdle -- even working imperfectly is far better than lots of other alternatives, including some other existing programs).
In my reading about our Governor-elect wanting to achieve savings in existing programs to assist our budgetary crisis, why doesn't he go beyond inviting select "leaders" to give their suggestions and include all of us common citizens in this campaign? There are others of us that have life experiences valuable to achieving significant savings and efficiencies in our state government. Why doesn't he simply provide a way for ordinary citizens to come out and give their suggestions direct to him -- do that for the first week of his administration, have an "open door" for a week and then in the future, one day a week, rather than having these citizens see their suggestions go the way of the bureaucracy and be dead filed. Many such suggestions can not be understood or appreciated by some junior staffer who may not have worked 30 years in transportation or other industries -- certainly, I can testify to that. I hear many good ideas and know of few people (including myself) willing to wade their way through these staffers who are full of "can't do" and all the reasons why something won't work to the extent that they can't see the promise of well-thoughtout suggestions or new approaches.
Well, this same lesson can be learned with Dignity Village by the Oregonian editorial staff. Get a City Club committee with open minds and open hearts and ask them to do more than address affordable housing as they did in last year's study but go directly into assessing the conditions for our homeless people. Besides asking the experts and reading the studies, get "real" suggestions from the homeless directly as well as their supporters -- then evaluate them openly. Then, out of Plato's cave will come many people, seeing things anew and with practical solutions.
I'm reminded when I spend so many hours with the villagers, who have so many, many challenges and have suffered so much more than I can even imagine, of that passage from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams where she writes about the grown older little stuffed rabbit, with a brown coat that was bald in patches with most of the hair missing from his tail and he was made to feel by the others that he was very insignificant and commonplace with only one other creature, the Skin Horse, ever being kind to him. This magical story of this toy nursery continues here:
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made." said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes." said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
Dignity Village is real, a sort of in-your-face real at times. They are like the rose in The Little Prince -- as you invest in it, care for it, be with it, it transforms itself into something special and worthy of your love. The Villagers do struggle and they are learning and doing (exceptionally well), with lots of steps forward and backwards as they trip, fall down, and get up and move on once again. They are creating opportunities for others -- both villages and supporters and the community.
The homeless now have hope, something ever so touching -- the hope that they might change their lives and have a better life, just as we all wish for ourselves and our children. They are succeeding in moving people into affordable housing, however ill-documented -- there are many testimonials to this effect. They are doing all this work mainly on their own, even paying rent for the property they occupy. What isn't there to like? If and when our community has adequate and enough affordable housing, this may well be the ideal -- and when is that going to be? In the meantime, Dignity Village is an awesome example of democracy in action and how a committed group of people can build something worthwhile while trying to improve their lives. They deserve our support and our love. Thanks for listening.
Leland E.G. "Lee" Larson
Portland, Oregon