When Candidates Make Bad Calls

Reflecting on my conversation with a guy running for office and his views on the housing crisis

I don’t know why I took that call. I never take a call from a number I don’t recognize. Well, never is too strong a word. I try to remember never to take a call from a number I don’t recognize.

But I did. It was a guy running for local office. He was polite enough to ask me what local issues concerned me, and that approach hooked me. Here was someone honestly asking me my opinion. Or so I thought.

Having had a couple seconds to respond out of the blue, I gave him a generic answer about recently moving here, hearing of the city’s budget concerns, and services like library hours and emergency responders being cut back.

Then I added I was also aware that the city’s budget woes had in part to do with much of the city land being occupied by nontaxable state property, being the state’s capital. A legislative action to remedy this problem had been working its way through the most recent session but hadn’t gotten very far.

I managed to say all that off the cuff to the candidate. Then he jumped in as if on cue and began telling me his solution for the city budget – and it had to do with the homeless situation. What we’d been doing the past two years wasn’t working and we needed to reallocate $30-some million away from “housing first” (one approach to the housing problem) to other more tried-and-true methods. I think he meant the ones we’d been trying for years without success. And then, he said, “People land on the streets because of drugs.”

Irritation Number One. Don’t lead on, as if you are willing to listen and then not listen. By now I realized he hadn’t called to get my thoughts as much as to tell me he is a problem solver and here is how he’ll solve the city’s problems. Just trust him to know what to do.

Irritation Number Two. He proceeded to go on and on about why the homeless situation is as bad as it is, not aware of or interested that I had been engaged with public policy on houselessness for more than a decade. It was not a conversation; it was an infomercial.

I am by no means an expert on the issue of people living without sustainable housing – and while I have a broad understanding of housing statewide, I admit I am new to this city. But when this guy told me that the primary reason people are living on the streets is because of drugs, he started to lose me. I agree that an extremely high percentage of people living on the streets have substance abuse challenges, but an observation does not necessarily lead directly to causality, even less to a solution.

What I could have told him:

• PTSD as a leading factor in houselessness among veterans has been well documented. While veteran houselessness has decreased significantly over the past 15 years, 35,000 vets nationwide remain without safe, stable housing – half of them sheltered and half unsheltered.

• In Oregon, approximately 3,000 high school aged students are houseless and unaccompanied, meaning detached from their biological family or some other guardian. A third of these are institutionalized. A third could be housed with host families. Another third have been disconnected from stable homes long enough that it would be difficult to place them in traditional family settings.

• On the question of which comes first, drugs or houselessness, houselessness often does. For example, kids don’t generally leave home unless home is so toxic that the streets – or a friend’s couch – feel far safer. The streets demand coping mechanisms, such as drugs, even if self-destructive.

• 20% of young adults who have been in foster care growing up become houseless the moment they’re emancipated at the age of 18. 50% of the U.S. houseless population spent time in foster care as children.

• Formerly incarcerated people are almost 10 times more likely to be houseless than the general public – and good luck finding places to rent if you have a record.

• The turning point for someone living on the streets is three months – if they don’t find stable housing by then, their chances nosedive, and the longer they remain on the streets, the harder it is for them to get off the streets.

• Drugs are a coping mechanism for dealing with intolerable pain. Child abuse, spouse abuse, dysfunctional families, military-based trauma, all cause intolerable pain.

• We really do have a housing shortage in this country and a severe shortage of affordable housing here on the West Coast. During the Great Recession, new housing construction all but disappeared just as the next generation was coming of age to start buying. That housing crunch has helped fuel prices (for both buying and renting) over the past decade to the point that young people and working-class people are priced out of affordable housing options.

• There is a trickledown effect. When middle income people can’t find housing to suit them, they find or remain in lower-standard housing, which cuts down on housing options for lower-income people. In Portland, Oregon, for example, developers overbuilt on upper-income housing to the detriment of affordable housing.

• There are 61 affordable housing units for every 100 families needing affordable housing.

• Oregon has a shortage of 140,000 housing units.

Whenever I think of this chicken-and-egg question about houselessness and drugs, I remember a report I watched on KGW TV back when I was living in Portland. The story was part of a series on access to drug therapy and housing in The Dalles on the other side of the Cascades. The Dalles is a small, rural community and – like most rural communities in Oregon – lacks the breadth of resources the Portland Metro has, as limited as they are.

The TV segment was about this guy in his thirties, who because he’d lived much of his life on the streets, looked multiple that age. He’d fled an abusive home situation as an 11-year-old boy. Coping on the streets was bad, maybe not as bad as a violent father, but bad enough. And so, by the age of 13, he was taking drugs just to cope. Two or more decades on, he’d love to get rid of the drugs, but he hasn’t found a way yet. It’s hard to do when you are living on the streets. There are resources (90 miles away in Portland), he hears, but not where he’s living.

Another story comes to mind, this one about a man who lived in caves, a graveyard actually, on the far side of a lake. No one knew what to do about him, but they didn’t like him living in their neighborhood. In fact, they cared more for their property values and their livestock than they did him.

The Gospel writer Mark (chapter 5) says Jesus crossed the lake to meet him. The man, self-identifying as Legion, ran to him even as the demons inside of him were repulsed by Jesus. Jesus commanded the evil spirits to leave the man.

There’s a whole additional part of the scene where pigs drown and neighbors get mad. But skip over that for the time being and what you see next is that the man, formerly known as Legion, is sitting, dressed, in his right mind, talking with Jesus and wanting to follow him wherever he goes.

Now, this story doesn’t tell me much about housing policies for our town. But it does tell me a lot about priorities. People are top on Jesus’ priority list and so they should be on ours. It also tells me that if we want to be like Jesus, we need to be going out of our way – crossing lakes and mountains – to meet peoples’ needs wherever they are. Drugs and demons, property values and livestock are all important. But in the end, it is all about people.

I don’t know that exorcism will fit into the city’s budget. Best leave that to the churches. But I do know that we are to be about meeting people’s needs with the resources we have. Maybe this candidate on the other end of the line does have the answers; or maybe all the people I’ve been working with for the past decade do. All I know is there is a disconnect between what he told me and what I’ve been learning.

I should have told him to find me 100k of that city money and we’d start a Second Home program for houseless, unaccompanied high school students here in Salem like we’ve done elsewhere. With a 94% high school graduation rate, the program gets kids off the streets and is likely to keep them off for life. I should know: I was privileged to oversee the team that made it all happen.

Mr. Candidate did tell me in the end to save his number on my phone. After he’s elected, he said I can call him with any concerns I might have.

I get the guy is running for office. He’s a real estate agent by trade and not a politician, but he’s already got all the right moves to fit in. He lost me when I realized he was only asking me my thoughts as a springboard for his. I don’t know his competition. They haven’t called me yet. At least not that I know of. I’m sensing this guy will win the election, so maybe I will keep his number whether I vote for him or not.

I’d really like to have a conversation with him over a cup of hot chocolate at a nearby coffee shop. Ask him questions, probe his thoughts, get at his motivations. I applaud people running for office. We need office holders, after all, and we can’t find them unless people want the positions – and the often-thankless work that goes with it.

I don’t know if this man is a Christian. Even if he is, that doesn’t necessarily help me understand him. If he is, I’d want to know how his faith informs his policymaking. And if he isn’t, I’d want to know how whatever beliefs he does have (and we all have them) inform his policymaking.

Either way, like all of us, he is bound to live out what he believes, and I want to know what his underlying beliefs are. I won’t necessarily vote for a Christian over a non-Christian, but I will be more inclined to vote for someone who lives a life wholesomely integrated with a helpful belief system that puts people first and that acknowledges that we answer to Someone beyond ourselves.

Character means a lot in my book. As does true compassion for those less able to advocate for themselves – like kids who’ve fled toxic home situations to live on the streets because they don’t know where else to go.

For more information and resources on the housing crisis, check out my Resource Page. And if you’d like to subscribe to this blog, sign up here – for free!