Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com
The Council for the Homeless reported in May that the county's homeless population fell 18 percent, from 1,530 people to 1,260. I'd like to believe it. Some of the drop is real, and the people who moved from transitional beds into permanent housing deserve the credit. But part of it comes from counting. Fewer winter shelter beds were open on the night of the count, so fewer people were counted in them. Meanwhile, the number of people in unsheltered families went up 21 percent. Those are children sleeping in cars in January.
I understand why many readers see addiction and mental illness as the cause. You see it downtown and along Mill Plain, and it is real. Anyone who has lost a relative to fentanyl knows it isn't an abstraction. Addiction does decide who falls first. It doesn't explain why so many fall here. West Virginia has worse drug problems than we do and far less homelessness. Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern at the University of Washington compared cities across the country and found that rents and vacancy rates predicted homelessness better than drug use, mental illness, poverty, or climate. Where housing is cheap, people with the same troubles stay housed.
Clark County's housing got expensive through a particular history. Vancouver was once a mill town. The aluminum smelter, the shipyards, and the paper plants paid union wages that let one earner rent or buy. The smelter shut in the 2001 energy crisis, and most of that work is gone. At the same time we became Portland's bedroom community. People came north for the lack of an income tax and shopped south for the lack of a sales tax. The county's population has nearly tripled since 1980. Land and rents here are priced to demand from the whole metro area, and a warehouse or retail paycheck in Hazel Dell can't keep up. The seniors counted last year say the same thing: fixed income, rising rent, out.
I'll admit a gap. Nobody has written a good history of homelessness in this county from the 1970s to the 1990s, and I can't fill it here. What is clear is that the problem grew as housing became something to profit from rather than something to live in.
So I'd ask the county council and the Vancouver council to measure their progress by one number more than any other: what a one-bedroom costs against what a working person here earns. Sweeps move people, and Safe Stay sites buy time. Neither changes that ratio. Housing built and held outside the market, the way we once built public housing without apology, would.
Anthony P. Teso
Camas
