Feels like a follow-on from the "white flight" phenomenon. The rich and/or influential (that is, middle-/upper-class, but Americans aren't used to thinking that way) people who set policy for a city no longer live or even spend any time downtown. They push for the policies they think are right, but there's no feedback mechanism to tell them what effect they're actually having.
Why do I have to dig so far down into this thread before finding someone with an informed position based in actual history of cities? Everything else I'm seeing is coming from a standpoint that screams of a sheltered position separated from the realities of the city and a society that fails to provide a dignified existence for these people. I have seen no mention of the fact that america has the most homeless and undernourishment for any developed country, or three times as many empty homes as there are homeless. Or that we subsidize the lifestyle of these suburban dwellers by exhausting municipal budgets just repairing the sewer lines that serve neighborhoods that are 1/5th or less the density of the city. Just a long stream of "this looks bad, I don't like looking at it, we should just push the problem outward."
Portland is the only city in the country that is taking as aggressive an approach towards decriminalizing and formalizing encampments, and it shouldn't be surprising that it is experiencing visible failures this early on, or an indictment of those policies.
> Portland is the only city in the country that is taking as aggressive an approach towards decriminalizing and formalizing encampments
Who the hell wants "formalized encampments"?! We going to turn our cities into third-world-style shanty towns now like you can find on the outskirts of Nairobi?
If you really want to destroy a city, I can't think of a better way to do it than going down this path.
> Who the hell wants "formalized encampments"?! We going to turn our cities into third-world-style shanty towns now like you can find on the outskirts of Nairobi?
I mean, it sounds like what you have now is worse. If your city is going to have an underclass either way, a formal shanty town seems less bad than a homeless encampment.
This was part of the 'efficiency' drive. Many cities added or merged with lots of the subburbs. And then those subburbs control policy.
Torronto is a perfect example. It was merged into Greater Torronto, and those new areas are what led to Trumpist style Rob Ford being elected.
And its also zoning. Its always surprising to me how in the US people don't live in the cities. In Europe, the city center are very lived in. The downtown can't turn into a ghost town, even if everybody works from home.
I don't know about that, places like central London and Manchester are quite densly populated, at least by UK standards. And the UK only really got into suburbs after WW2, when huge swathes of the urban population were moved into garden cities.
I live near Manchester, I know, but the city centre is still nowhere as dense (in terms of dwellings) as most towns and cities on the continent. It's changed for sure - lots of old warehouses and factories have turned into flats - but the city has clearly been built for business activity first and foremost. And as soon as you move to smaller towns, like Warrington, the number of people actually sleeping in the immediate town centre falls to almost zero. Brits just want to live in suburbia and in the countryside.
