Dignity Village is not a solution to homelessness. Every resident of this city should have decent permanent housing. In this respect, your recent editorial on Dignity Village was right on.
You are mistaken, however, when you conclude from this that Dignity Village should be disbanded. The Village was never intended as a solution to homelessness. It was created out of necessity by homeless people who needed an alternative to the doorways and bushes that were the only other shelter available to them.
Unfortunately, the necessity for such an alternative is at least as great today as when the Village was founded (and if the proposed state budget cuts human services go through, it will almost certainly be greater).
JOIN, whose work you rightly praised, helped over 350 homeless people get into housing this year, including many who lived at the Village. Nonetheless, on one typical night, JOIN's outreach workers identified 1400 additional individuals still sleeping outside.
For the vast majority of those people there was no emergency shelter or short-term permanent housing option. According to the City of Portland's own count, on any given night, hundreds of individual men, women, and families who ask for emergency shelter have to be turned away because the shelters are full.
Meanwhile, sustained unemployment, reductions in government benefit programs, increasingly rigorous tenant screening criteria, and a seriously inadequate supply of private and public housing for very low-income households mean that it takes most homeless people many months, if not years, to secure permanent housing.
Closing Dignity Village, therefore, would not put 60 people into permanent housing, or even a shelter, it would put them (or those they displace) back into the doorways. The question you should have asked is whether this would be a morally defensible thing to do. And the answer is no.
Life in the doorways is dangerous, destabilizing, and alienating. Those who are forced to live in public have to fear for their personal safety every night. They are frequently awoken and moved along or ticketed by police. They often have to carry or push their worldly possessions with them. And they can spend hours traveling between programs just to meet their food and hygiene needs.
These are bad things in and of themselves, but they are also significant barriers to maintaining employment, completing treatment, or taking whatever other steps may be necessary to end one's homelessness. By providing a safer, more stable, and supportive temporary living situation, as well as access to all basic services, Dignity Village removes these barriers for 60 people every night. It has done so for hundreds of people since its inception, including many single women and people with disabilities who were particularly vulnerable on the streets. And the Village provides these benefits inexpensively and at little or no cost to taxpayers.
By providing stability, Dignity Village complements, rather than competes with, JOIN's housing placement efforts. The Village does not "sustain homelessness." It sustains homeless people as they work with JOIN and others on the difficult, costly, and time-consuming task of securing permanent housing.
The elected officials and other Portlanders who have supported Dignity Village should be appreciated, not chastised. They recognize that our failing is not that we permit Dignity Village to exist, but rather that inadequate resources for homeless services and low-income housing make Dignity Village a necessity.
Marc Jolin
Author: Marc Jolin is an attorney at the Oregon Law Center who has provided legal assistance to Dignity Village for the past year.