“The decision, first reported by KGW, comes as Portland officials vote on an agreement with Multnomah County on their partnership to reduce homelessness. Portland Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, who is running for mayor, has blasted the county for its policy on tarps and tents, arguing that their distribution harms the city’s “livability and the ability for small businesses to thrive.””
A city is its people. Spending a pitiful amount of money on distributing tarps and tents to the citizens of a rainy city who have no shelter provides them livability.
Saying that to do so harms the city’s “livability and the ability for small businesses to thrive” is neolibspeak for “Homeless people are a nuisance to everyone else; even though funding such small measures would only be a stopgap measure (in what should be a much broader and much more comprehensive effort to provide proper shelter, support, education, mental health services, and jobs training), they are not worth spending $10 a pop to keep them and their clothes dry. We’d rather they just fuck off so that we don’t have to look at them because doing so causes our subconscious to elicit feelings empathy, the emotion that is the archenemy of capitalism.”