Over the weekend, the LA Times published a piece about a Portland-based neighborhood advocacy group’s efforts to address the homeless crisis that has significantly impacted their community over the last couple of years. The title of the LA Times’ piece, “Neighborhood advocates or vigilantes? A group in Portland makes life tougher for the homeless,” doesn’t try very hard to hide reporter Thacher Schmid’s opinion on the group. But the group, the Montavilla Initiative, isn’t standing by while the paper portrays them as “conservative” “vigilantes” in an attempt to push its agenda.
Describing the Montavilla Initiative as a “conservative nonprofit,” Schmid writes that “the debate over homelessness” in the once highly-regarded Montavilla neighborhood “has taken on an edge in the last two years as a neighborhood patrol has marched up to the line of vigilantism — and, some say, crossed it.” Schmid describes similar community-based attempts to curb the increasingly pervasive homeless issue on the West Coast as a “conservative,” “tough-love response to the problem.”
“Montavilla Initiative began doing its own foot patrols; the city-partnered neighborhood association stopped doing them,” writes Schmid. “Interactions between citizen patrol groups led by Montavilla Initiative and the area’s homeless are now at the center of the neighborhood’s divide. On the one hand, local officials and homeless advocates accuse Montavilla Initiative of harassing vulnerable homeless people. On the other, leaders of the nonprofit say homeless encampments foster crime, and they’re just trying to make the neighborhood safer.”
While Schmid offers some defense of the group, most of the article is dedicated to detailing the accusations against the Montavilla Initiative, including that they are “harassing our [homeless] clients, and making them feel stalked and scared,” according to one county official, and go around “running havoc on houseless people,” according to one homeless advocacy group leader, supposedly “slashing their tents, throwing cold water on them, following them around,” writes Schmid.
After the “slashing their tents” accusation, Schmid eventually inserted a correction, noting that the homeless advocacy group leader admitted that he never actually witnessed any of the alleged actions of the members, stating, “This is happening in the neighborhood to those people, but we don’t know for sure that it’s Montavilla Initiative.”
The Montavilla Initative, which describes itself as committed to “foster[ing] relationships, community building, and safety initiatives in Montavilla that enhance the quality of life of residents in the neighborhood and beyond,” has published a blistering “open response to LA Times” that addresses the paper’s “biased, contextually blind and misinformed” reporting (h/t John Sexton).
The response begins by slapping Schmid with some heavy sarcasm: “While the recent article in the LA Times (Neighborhood advocates or vigilantes? A group in Portland makes life tougher for the homeless) is biased, contextually blind and misinformed, it does provide Montavilla Initiative an opportunity to speak to issues that affect not only our neighborhood but all of Portland and communities all across our nation. Thank you Thacher Schmid,” the group writes.
“Mr. Schmid wants you to know that some of our MI members participate in neighborhood walking patrols,” they continue. “It’s true. There are at least 8 other patrol groups in our neighborhood, but we are unable to answer for the actions of anyone but ourselves. We support a patrol that reaches out to the homeless community, including doing cleanups, providing food, clothing and pointing to transition services. Through this outreach we have spent hundreds of hours talking to people living in our public spaces. Some, we have helped to get off the street and have even brought some of them into our homes. We also care a lot about public safety. We advocate for law-enforcement and emergency services for all residents. Patrols have collaborated with police and emergency services to respond to assaults, thefts and fires in progress, while neighbors sleep. Especially, and most controversially, these patrols have spotlighted the unsanitary conditions and health risks, harassment, crime and deadly violence to which people are subjected, who live outside in the city.”
The group then turns Schmid’s “diversity” argument on its head and drops some eye-opening statistics: “Our neighborhood, no matter what the author claims, is more diverse than most Portland neighborhoods. It is made up of a mix of incomes, including minimum wage earners and blue collar workers. Property values are well below the city average. There has been a nearly 50% increase in crime in the last few years. All members of our community (long time residents, newcomers to the city, immigrants, the housed and unhoused) are being robbed and vandalized and the City of Portland has decided to do too little about it. Portlanders are given mixed messages, with the mayor’s office insisting that all laws are being enforced but police officers saying that they are not given the power to arrest criminals. Meanwhile, the District Attorney claims they cannot effectively prosecute those who are arrested. Neighborhoods are generally left to their own devices – but, we advocate compassion and law enforcement as the most effective measures against vigilantism.”
Underscoring that they have the support of at least 7,000 Portlanders who have signed on to the “Enough is Enough neighborhood livability campaign,” the group describes the current state of once-beautiful neighborhoods due to the incompetence of local government: “Our once clean, welcoming city is littered with graffiti, trash and hazardous waste. Portland churches, offices and businesses cannot count on help from law enforcement to protect their property and provide a clean and safe entrance for their visitors. Vacant homes become rotten cores of crime, decaying filth, and fire hazards on their blocks. We aren’t the only people living here who are fed up with garbage, pilfering, break-ins, assaults and robberies. Ours isn’t the only neighborhood organizing to advocate for sanitation and responsible law enforcement.”
They then counter Schmid’s take on their action regarding the needle exchange: “Some of our members joined a patrol one evening, to stand across the street in order to verify complaints from neighbors that the program had become a threat to public safety, who cited needles and human waste in neighbors’ yards, a large vehicle hosting drug deals in the parking lot of the exchange, heroin users shooting up and passing out and then driving off intoxicated, people urinating and defecating in public, clients shooting up in neighbors’ yards, even having sex on a neighbor’s front porch.”
The drug counseling services the program supposedly offers is almost non-existent, they note, and those frequenting the center are often threatening: “On the night that the author refers to, our group was threatened with physical violence and warned that we would not be safe in our homes, a woman standing on the street in our group was called a ‘n%gger b%tch’, because we were present to see that instead of a needle exchange this site had become a bazaar for dealers of heroin and meth, and an unsanitary, unsafe, public injection site right under the nose of county and city workers,” they write.
They close the open response by blasting Schmid’s reductive description of them as a “conservative” group. “We are a diverse group from different economic, racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Our members include liberals and conservatives and everything in between,” they write. “What brings us together is that we want to make a positive difference for everyone in the Montavilla neighborhood.”