Isaac briefly diverts from the Rose City to look southward to Clackamas County and its most important race on the 2022 ballot, which is neither of the races for the county commission, but the campaign for county clerk, in which Catherine McMullen, a Multnomah County elections administrator, is challenging longtime incumbent Sherry Hall. The most visible function of the county clerk is to supervise the county's elections. Ms. Hall has racked up an impressive number of unforced election errors since she was first elected in 2002, amassing enough mistakes and bad conduct to fill a Willamette Week article in 2012. In the ten years since then she's continued to fumble county elections, which WW helpfully compiled into another article this summer. Voters in Clackamas County should give the office an upgrade that's long overdue, and replace Ms. Hall with Catherine McMullen.
One position on the Portland City Council is on next week's ballot. Incumbent Jo Ann Hardesty and businessman Rene Gonzalez are in a runoff for a council seat. Mr. Gonzalez has made street crime and homelessness centers of his campaign. Commissioner Hardesty responds that she led the push to improve Portland Street Response, a non-police response to persons having crises of mental health, and has supported funding increases for permanent housing. Underlying their debate is the City's interpretation of a Ninth Circuit case from 2018, Martin v, City of Boise, which some believe bars Portland from prohibiting the homeless from camping outdoors.
Before I turn to the Martin case, let's start with some data. Since at least 2009 Multnomah County has conducted biennial censuses of homeless persons, though the census scheduled for 2021 was postponed to January 2022. Homeless persons are counted in three categories: the unsheltered (people living outdoors, in tents, and in cars), people in shelters, and people in transitional housing. From 2009 to 2019 the number of homeless persons counted in Multnomah County was fairly constant, ranging from 3801 in 2015 to 4655 in 2011. The unsheltered population was also fairly constant, ranging between 1,591 in 2009 and 2,037 in 2019, with a typical number being about 1,800.
Something changed between 2019 and 2022, because the 2022 census found 5,228 homeless people in Multnomah County (up 30% from 2019), of whom 3,057 were unsheltered, living in tents or cars - up an astonishing 50% from 2019 and unique in the tri-county area. (Over the same three-year period Clackamas County's count of the unsheltered fell from 371 to 327, a 9% drop, and Washington County's count of the unsheltered went from 232 to 227, essentially flat.)
What has changed since 2019? Isaac suggests these four factors, one of which is unique to Portland and another to Multnomah County. The first is that in 2020 Oregon voters approved Measure 110, which decriminalized possession of many ordinary street drugs for personal use. Measure 110 was billed as replacing drug policing with drug treatment. The drug policing has stopped; the drug treatment has not started. (Read what OPB said about Measure 110 last year.) Consequently demand for street drugs has increased, and with it the customers' search for funds with which to buy drugs. Glass repair shops and street-level retailers have become the involuntary funders.
Second is that even as Portland worked to get people off the street and into shelter, Multnomah County happily handed out tents and tarps to enable homeless persons to continue to live outside. Last year Multnomah County distributed 6,550 tents to the homeless in the county, meaning mainly to people living on Portland streets and in Portland parks, which is somewhere between two and three tents for each unsheltered person in the county.
Third is that Portland took Martin v. City of Boise as barring the city from removing tents and prohibiting public camping unless the city could provide shelter to every unsheltered person in the city. On this point I believe the city erred. This short piece in the Harvard Law Review explains the ins and outs of the Martin decision in detail. My take is that the decision prohibits cities from prosecuting the homeless for sleeping in public at night if shelter beds are available. If not enough shelter beds are available on a particular night to accommodate all unsheltered persons in the city, then the city may not criminalize those who sleep without shelter. It may, however, restrict sleeping and camping to designated areas; it may prohibit camping in other areas; it may continue to prosecute the unsheltered who take and dismantle cars.
That brings me to the fourth factor, and back to the city's election. The fourth factor is that the city council and the Multnomah County district attorney have sent a clear message to the Police Bureau to stop enforcing minor laws, in particular property crimes. Commissioner Hardesty led that message, both by securing a $15 million cut in the police budget and in pushing to cut another $18 million and 42 vacant police positions, a move that failed in 2020 and is one of the causes of downtown Portland's pandemic of broken windows.
The happy day when county prosecutors will revise their priorities must await the election of 2024. Portland voters can take one small step toward refreshing the city by giving Rene Gonzalez the chance to argue his policies as a city councilor.