Neighborhood Advocacy Group: LA Times Smeared Us As ‘Vigilantes’; Here’s The Truth

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.”