In response to Steve Gilbert’s guest column about the homeless destroying his neighborhood: Good. I hate how Eugene treats the homeless. Feel free to destroy any neighborhood you like, although I suspect that’s pure hysteria. He doesn’t say what that destruction is. I would guess it’s simply seeing the homeless. Respectable folks want the poor pushed out of sight. Highway 99 is kind of crap anyway.

I do agree that homeless services should not be concentrated there, they should be spread out around the city, but that means confronting homeowners in other neighborhoods, which our City Council doesn’t want to do. They long ago gave lip service to the idea, and then it never happened.

So 20% of the homeless come from somewhere else, and he thinks this means Eugene is a magnet for them? That’s ridiculous. People move. Every city in the country has a homeless problem, and they all think the homeless came from somewhere else. People who do come here and become homeless usually do so because they think they have a job or place to live lined up, and then it falls through.

There are rational ways we could deal with the homelessness problem, but it’s hard to get the City Council to listen. The city continues to harass them while never providing enough shelter or enough housing. We have a homelessness problem because we have a shortage of affordable housing, pure and simple.

If the city cannot come up with the money to provide more of the kind of nonprofit-managed shelters we have now, which serve only maybe a third of the homeless, I would suggest they stop harassing them and allow them to set up small self-managed camps in designated areas of city parks, provide portable toilets and trash service, and leave them alone as long as they’re not causing trouble.

People say that won’t work. My answer is, as compared to what? Except for the nonprofit shelters, nothing is working now. We need a system that does the least possible harm, and helps keep people from dying on the streets. We will probably have to replace some of our city councilors to get it. Right now they are locked into what doesn’t work.

Lynn Porter
Eugene