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Sure, $877K in Decorated Honey Buckets Will Fix the Problem!
As has been discussed many times, some of the homeless have a tendency to drop trou in public anywhere the “mood” strikes. But never fear, dear citizens! The Portland City Council is on it! They’re going to put up specially decorated honey buckets in problem areas. And hire homeless people as “Public Space Managers” to tend to them.
Let’s see, they’re going to deploy six honey buckets. $615K of the amount will be for salaries of those Public Space Managers. So, I guess each honey bucket requires a full-time attendant worth approx $102K annually? Oh, and the city isn’t even going to get their hands dirty in this project – they’re just going to turn the money over to a “social service organization.”
Money quote:
In 2016, the city paid $216,000 to buy a 2,400 square foot bungalow with bathrooms, showers and a laundry facility for homeless people, but it was never put to use. The city sold it at auction last year for $45,000 – a $171,000 loss – according to the bill of sale, provided to The Oregonian/OregonLive in response to a public records request.
But the mayor assures everyone that these new honey buckets won’t be sold! “We will not be auctioning these off – we will be using them!” Sure you will, Mr. Mayor, sure you will.
And don’t get me started on the idiotic “famed Portland airport carpet.”
Published in General
I myself would not take that job for a penny less.
I saw a click-bait list of the 25 safest cities in the US. You cannot imagine how hard I laughed when I went through it. Two of the top ten safest cities in the list were Portland, OR and Seattle, WA. New York City was number 3.
I suspect the reason for the ratings were reported crime statistics. In some of those cities I am sure people do not bother reporting burglaries and assaults because the police would ignore the report.
And the police ignore the report because they know the DA and judges would just dismiss the charges and release the perps immediately anyway.
So, the issue isn’t homeless drug addicts, it is lack of public toilets?
That’s why we need more immigrants – to do the work Americans won’t do.
Similar results were in London, where the police had an unofficial “catch and release” policy because they knew few if any of the criminals caught would ever face penalties in the judicial system. As a result, pols got to point to the historic low crime rates while citizens knew that the city was remarkably crime-ridden.
It’s like modern-day politicians hear the “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” quote and say, “Well hey, we can work with this …”
I suppose my wage demands could be undercut by a homeless person, but at some point that price will get undercut by an immigrant. It’s not that Americans won’t do the work, it’s that we generally won’t work for the same wages as low-skill illegal immigrants. Largely because we have other options.
Once the Democrat Progs take over they will get rid of those pesky “other options.” Equality of result will be guaranteed and you will be rewarded to the level of the lowest common denominator – that homeless person.
What do you think the true crime rate of Chicago ? Every contact requires a report to the nanny authorities.
https://secondcitycop-blog.blogspot.com/2013/08/robbery-by-rahm-house.html
“Crime is down.”
Gee, maybe @cliffordbrown should consider using the topic of, um, ordure for July’s Group Writing. I bet it would fill up fast with stories from all over the West Coast. The farmers won’t have a chance and will have to double up on dates.
Honey buckets and moonscapes. Makes me never want to visit Portland.
I had a liberal friend say that homeless people would use those “facilities.” I simply asked her “why.” She had no answer.
In sorta-defense of the attendant cost, assuming the toilets would be staffed 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, the $102K will be spread among many people, so it works out to about $11.64 per hour per toilet.
I am skeptical that people hired from the homeless are likely to have the skills needed to manage these facilities, nor the ability to deal with the many drug-addled and/or mentally ill people who will be trying to destroy these facilities.
Further to @susanquinn comment #12, is there any evidence that the homeless people who are currently pooping on the street, and thus who already demonstrate strong resistance to conventional social norms, will actually use toilet facilities provided for them?
Morbid curiosity: Which size are they proposing?
Imagine you’re part of the homeless population, and you’re not also a drug-addled whackjob. You hear the call of nature, where do you answer it?
You can’t at home, you’re homeless. You’re not at your job 24/7, assuming you’ve got a job. Find yourself a fast food joint? They’re much less happy with your custom if you don’t actually make a purchase. You’ll have better luck at a big box store, but nobody wants homeless people driving away paying customers. Basically what I’m saying is that pooping is a non-trivial problem for the homeless.
That bungalow mentioned in the post, if you click through you’ll note that the reason it wasn’t used was because the homeless didn’t care; it wasn’t used because the proposed hooverville got nixed by the state zoning yadda-yadda.
There are better ways to address the problem, but this one doesn’t strike me as useless from the get-go.
Also, Honey Bucket? That some sort of regionalism?
Honey Bucket is a local outhouse company.
Wonderful story. You have to wonder where it’s heading. Normal people just suffer or leave if they can’t get rich enough to build their own isolation. It’s quite amazing, liberals don’t learn.
If the city had just budgeted to lease some outhouses close to some of the homeless camps I probably wouldn’t have noticed. One problem is that there are many more than 6 camps around Portland. How far are they going to be willing to go hike when the urge strikes?
Why do they have to be decorated? The most efficient method of using portables seems to be trucks driving around picking up the used ones and dropping off fresh. So are you going to have a whole “fleet” of decorated ones?
The concept that they’re going to turn this into some kind of homeless rehabilitation program at the same time is ludicrous. And they’re abdicating that part of it – we won’t get involved, we’ll just throw some money at some non-profit and they’ll do it for us.
So perhaps I might agree with you that it’s not “useless from the get-go”, but it’s another blatant example of trying to throw a big bag of money at a problem without really having an idea of what they’re doing.
Now I’m even more confused.
From a strictly practical perspective, things that are treated as if they’re valuable by some people are more likely to be treated as valuable by others. That is, if the people think your loos are something you care about they’ll be less likely to idly damage them. From a strictly impractical perspective the world is a better place when there are more things in it which are beautiful. One only needs to look at modern architecture to learn this.
Whether the former principle is strong enough to outweigh the cost, and whether the latter principle can stand up to the City of Portland’s dubious notion of ‘beauty’, I’m not prepared to endorse.
Honey bucket as a slang term for a portable container of urine and excrement has been in use since at least WWII. I remember reading references to honey bucket and honey wagon in numerous books about POW camps during that war. (The Germans would discourage reuse of discovered escape tunnels by filling them with the contents of the camp’s honey wagons, and then collapsing them by driving heavy vehicles over the tunnels.)
It may be a portable outhouse company has the name Honey Bucket, just as there was a company called “Here’s Johnny!”(As I recall Johnny Carson sued unsuccessfully to get the company renamed.)
There’s yer problem right there! Did you watch Seattle is Dying? They’re all drug-addled whackjobs. The only way to solve this problem is to treat the drug addiction problem.
“Honey Bucket” was also a bar on Costa Mesa CA when I was in college. Good memories.
I used to take my medical students to the skid row part of Los Angeles when it was a relatively small area. We would visit the Missions and shelters. I wanted them to see where the county patients were living when not in the hospital. The directors of the shelters told us that 60% of homeless were psychotic and 60% were addicts, alcohol or drugs. Obviously, half of each group was both. Children were quickly moved with the parent to a family shelter and the only “homeless” children were hidden by psychotic parents, contrary to mythology.
For several years, five or six, our guide was a guy who had lived on the streets as a crack addict, then recovered. He knew a lot of the street people and was an amazing guy. We watched him give a talk to the “Cocaine Anonymous” group at the Midnight Mission in LA. He was a spellbinding speaker. We were the only whites in the room with about 100 men. We lost him when he got promoted and moved to the San Fernando Valley.
Every time i read this and linked articles i am just amazed at the abject stupidity of this plan…….i cant even begin to deconstruct how stupid it is. That mayor needs to be tarred and feathered and anyone that lives there needs their head examined.
My only excuse is that I live in Beaverton, not Portland.
I was a little harsh…….but that stuff is crazy. Lol.