Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: I'm Alex Stone, former military service member and law enforcement officer, now CEO of Echelon Protected Services, one of the fastest growing private security firms on the west coast. And this is ride along, where our guest and I witness firsthand the issues affecting our community.
I believe our proven method of enacting meaningful change through compassion and understanding is the best way to make our streets a safer place and truly achieve security through community.
Hey, Alex Stone here. Welcome back to the ride along. Today's guest is John DiLorenzo. He is a specialist in government relationship, and I would say he's at the forefront of a lot of great positive change here in Portland, Oregon. John, why don't you introduce yourself to the people at home and give us a little bit about yourself?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Thanks, Alex, for having me. I sure appreciate it. I am a practicing lawyer. I have been a trial lawyer for 43 years now.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Wow, that's amazing.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: And for 20 of those years, I was a lobbyist at legislature and had the opportunity to author quite a few laws that I now come across in the organ revised statutes every once in a while.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: That's exciting.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: But I am at Davis, Wright Tremaine. We're a pretty large law firm. We have over 700 lawyers throughout the country and quite a few offices. I'm headquartered in the Portland office, but also practice in New York and in Washington, DC.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Yeah. In fact, you call me quite early sometimes in the morning.
[00:01:50] Speaker B: That's because I'm on the other coast.
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Quite often. Yeah. Actually working in New York is pretty fun because I have an opportunity to actually get two or three block hours in before anyone's awakened on the Pacific coast. So I can actually get some work done.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: That's amazing. Yeah.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: But I take quite a few impact cases, I call them, and these are litigation cases that are calculated to make the government have to do something or stop doing something.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: Fascinating. Right?
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
Normally, a court is not going to involve itself in micromanagement of government.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah. You can't legislate from the bench and.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: You can't legislate from the bench.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: They're not there to write the law.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: And you can't sue the government for incompetence.
Right.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: We would all be wealthy if you.
Everyone would be a millionaire in this country if you can see the.
[00:02:54] Speaker B: But sometimes the government doesn't follow its own rules. Sometimes it offends other statutes. And if you have the right case, you can utilize a court action to make something happen. So many of my lawsuits are catalytic. They're designed to produce another result.
And so it's just been very fun.
I do quite a few lawsuits for the industry I'm involved in, which is the real estate industry, but also anything I can do to help make where I live better. And recently we've been working together on what appears to be an intractable problem, which is the homeless problem. And we've actually been able to utilize some of these techniques to our advantage and to the advantage of the community.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: I think you're right. And taking it back ten years, this really wasn't that great of an issue. I mean, I would say on the, on the west coast, we have amazing weather from San Diego all the way up to British Columbia. So we're always going to have higher populations that want to live outside. It's more conducive to do so. But ten years ago, it wasn't as dramatic as it is now. It almost, you know, I call it an urban refugee crisis because it reminds me of my time in developing nations and Africa and the Middle east.
[00:04:26] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it was not only different in terms of the numbers of people involved, it was different in terms of character and the characteristics of it. You know, Portland always hit a skid row. I remember when I was in high school, I grew up in Beaverton, and my father worked downtown. And from time to time I'd meet him downtown for lunch. I remember along Burnside, there were always people who were alcoholics who were, you know, stumbling around and others who camped under bridges and things like that. But there was nowhere near the same type of addiction problem that there exists today. And, you know, I respectfully dissent from the viewpoint of many of the progressives who think that the reason we have so many homeless people is because landlords are too greedy and rents are too high.
I would suggest that for the majority of people living in tents, it isn't that the rents are too high. They can't pay any rent, they can't manage their lives in any kind of a community surrounding. They are hopelessly addicted to drugs or they are suffering from mental illness to the point that they cannot congregate in a community.
So that's the main problem.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: I'd like to focus in on that. So in the seventies, there was a landmark case, O'Connor v. Donaldson, which essentially said, you can't hold people long term against their will just because they have a mental illness. Right? This led with the sunset clause and the Reagan era to a lot of these institutions, state institutions, where people who had chronic mental illness were being treated. It led to the closure of these institutions. You know, Geraldo got famous going in there and showing these types of scenes and the horrific behaviors happening. But now we have a system that there really is no long term care solution for the mentally ill. And I know when I'm on the streets, it feels like either. Either the mental illness led to a. A drug problem which increases psychoses, or they're in mental health psychoses or drug induced psychoses for so long, it creates a long term mental health issue. But now on the streets, it seems like the majority of the population are suffering from one of the two.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: Well, I was hanging out the legislature quite a bit in the 1990s and the early two thousands, and I can tell you that money was a big factor, too.
Money, or lack of money in the budgets had a lot to do with deinstitutionalization.
And, you know, it's true that there were a lot of institutions that did not treat its patients well, but that was just a factor of money. We didn't have enough money to have good and well run institutions so that investors over there. Right. And so the, the. The tendency was to advocate for community health treatment. In other words, people would be de institutionalized, be put into the community. Inpatient, outpatient, inpatient, outpatient, all that. It didn't work.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: It doesn't work.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: It was an ill conceived idea designed to save money.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Maybe someone who's suffering from, like, you know, this. I don't know, you move to the northwest, and they say you gotta get in the sun. Right? Cause you get seasonal deficiencies, vitamin D deficiencies.
[00:07:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: But for people who are suffering from long.
Yeah. That outpatient care kind of program doesn't seem to be working, at least here in Portland.
[00:08:06] Speaker B: Well, it's because we couldn't get them resources.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: You can't even find them sometimes.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: And, you know, I'm a believer in institutions, but well run ones.
And to do that, it takes money.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: It does the right level of investment.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Right. But you don't just leave people on the streets to their own devices and expect that they're going to get better.
That's. That's one of the problems with our, our current policies.
We have quite a few people who are in control of a large sum of public money right now who believe. You've probably heard the term talking about.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: Locally, the local county and the city.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: Yeah. You probably heard the term housing first. Right?
[00:08:48] Speaker A: Very, very popular term.
[00:08:49] Speaker B: Right. Housing first. We have to.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: So if you're homeless now, if you're living on the street, we shouldn't bridge you to detox. We shouldn't bridge you in a hotel. With vouchers, we shouldn't get you into a shelter. That could then transition you into housing, but we should take you and put you directly into an apartment, condo, or house.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: That's. That's basically the view. I think that view is wrong. It's wrong for a whole variety of reasons. First of all, I don't think putting a person who has a hopeless drug addiction or a mental health issue in community housing, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit you pay, is going to do any good. They just have a. They cannot live in a community environment, given their current states. Okay, but even if that was a good idea, it takes five to six years to build all that housing. What are these people supposed to do in the meantime? So, you know, to me, the housing first policies that Multnomah county especially are advocating are condemning people to an early death on the streets. Most of them won't survive five years, you know, in time to find this promise of housing.
I'm more interested in immediate strategies that basically address Maslow's hierarchy of needs. First, shelter from the elements. How about that? And then safety from attack by criminal elements. How about that? And then third, treatment so we can move people and transition them to the point where maybe they're going to get well enough to be able to live in a community environment.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Yeah, and I'm glad you're talking this way, because I think a lot of people in that housing first that are propagating that housing first narrative. I think they look at you and a lawyer, right, and they think, this person's not compassionate. They don't have a heart for the homeless. They don't really care. You're just here to make money. And the reality is you're not. You do care, and you work on these types of solutions every single day. Every conversation we have has always been led with integrity. It's always been led with compassion. You always show that how much you actually really do care about the individuals on the street. And the reality is, you have to prepare people for the life that you want them to live. Right now, the people on the street, they're living the life they want to live. And if you're going to say, I'm going to convert you like a missionary to the life I want you to live, you got to lead them down a pathway of how to manage money, right? Financial management of your own life. You got to lead them down. And I think the only way to do that is to bridge them with programs, some type of housing program, like a sheltering program that can teach these things. I mean, you have to get people regulated on their drug regimen if they have mental illness, right? And so if these aren't. If you're just saying we're gonna skip all that, we're just gonna put you in a house.
It's almost cruel. It's almost like a fake, Cinderella sitting fairy tale story.
[00:12:11] Speaker B: Well, let me tell you how I first became interested in these homeless issues and compliment you at the same time, because I had an ideological point of view, having read Schellenberger's book San Francisco and others.
And, of course, I bridged the sixties.
I was a kid in the 1960s, and I was somewhat politically aware. And I remember the great society programs, and I remember the model cities programs, and I remember the critiques of those programs which are replicating themselves now. But I have to tell you, my sensitivity to this issue began with my work with you when there was that intractable tent encampment at 12th and Taylor.
[00:13:10] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:13:11] Speaker B: And I happen for your studio audience. I happened to own a building, an apartment building, which was right at ground zero there. And I had friends who owned the other buildings that surrounded it. And we had probably 65 tenants in this one building, primarily single women and students, who were complaining about the gunshots they were hearing from the tent encampment, the harassment daily from the campers, the filth and debris left at this huge encampment that must have, at one point, amounted to 30 tenths, around 30 tenths, maybe 30 tenths. And they would complain and complain and complain to the city, and we would complain. Two years, my friends would complain. And so I started to dig in. And first I started with, you know, why isn't the government responding? Later, I got even deeper into the intricacies, which you helped me with. But I found out a couple things about city government.
First of all, you know, it is the tendency of a politician to avoid controversy, and it's their tendency to maybe discount responsibility and direct it to someone else, because the one thing a politician cannot tolerate is blame. Okay? So if you can blame a politician for something, you're gonna get results. What the Portland City Council did was it basically abrogated its responsibility for these ten encampments to its own department of finance, which in turn, abrogated its responsibility, remember, to this triumvirate of city employees, whose names I have, but who I will not name for the purposes of this interview, but I know who they are, and they, in turn, believe it or not, abrogated their responsibility to an algorithm and a computer.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: And they would take all these complaints coming from all around the city and they would put in 60 different inputs and the computer would tell them how to prioritize.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Not crime, not, not. Yeah.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: Now look, I've been litigating. I've been a trailer for 43 years now.
I have sued lots of governments over.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: In fact, this is what you do.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: That's my job over unlawful delegation. Okay. I have never had a delegation case that involved a computer and an algorithm. Okay? So I found out all this. I was just absolutely outraged. The system was a mess. Nothing was going to get done by traditional means. And so I asked Echelon to embark on a different sort of strategy. And we got all of our building owners together and we hired you and we told you, we don't want you to be intrusive, we don't want you to look intense, we don't want any x ray vision. We just want you to document what anyone who had the stamina on that street, who had the stamina to stand on that street corner 24/7 would see.
And you spent two weeks doing that.
And lo and behold, we ended up with a report that changed my entire view of the homeless situation. And the tents. See, I initially thought that the occupants of the tents were involved in nuisances. Right? They were nuisances to me, they were nuisances to my tenants. They were nuisances to the patients who visited medical facilities there. They were nuisances to the customers.
But I discovered they were really victims.
They were victims of an organized criminal element.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: That then co opted them and made them their involuntary servants.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Okay, so what did your investigation showed? It showed that there was an organizer who was running a horizontally and vertically integrated business.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: He was involved in wholesale narcotics sales.
He would roust people up at 445 in the morning. He would make them get on their bicycles, take off in opposite directions with brown paper bags and packages going all kinds of places.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: Oh yeah, we tracked them across.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: And you track miles. Right. Because he became the distribution point for all of that.
[00:18:24] Speaker A: He was the lead distribution for narcotics in the downtown corridor.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: You also discovered that they had also an integrated retail business. They were making 20 retail narcotics transactions per hour while Lincoln high school students were walking by to the food court.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: We had more than two schools within 1000ft, which makes the a felony. A felony, you know, to distribute narcotics. And yeah, they were. In fact, I think we were getting over 100 cars, vehicles, nice vehicles a day. And then you had foot traffic and then you had bicycle traffic.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: But then most troubling of all was the white van. The white van that would show up at 04:00 in the afternoon and a phalanx of women drug addicts would show up. The ringleader would give them free drugs in exchange for services. They would go into the van, it would take off for parts unknown, come back at 730 or eight at night and dump them off. So he was running a wholesale narcotics business, a retail narcotics business and a.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Human trafficking business, commercially sexually exploiting women, drugging them and putting them in tents for prostitution.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Plus he picked the perfect level.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: I mean, these were girls, these weren't women.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: Plus he picked a perfect location. He had a location where one could get off the freeway, do the illegal transaction, get right on the freeway? So, you know, if this guy had been dealing in a legal enterprise, we would have said he was a brilliant retailer and that he was a brilliant wholesaler. But. But that's what was happening. And he was enslaving the camp.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: But he dressed even though he was making all this. And I would even include firearms because eventually, when the police did an interdiction, there were multiple firearms in his tent.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: So here's why the police did the interdiction. We presented your report. We did, and we had a whole cast of characters, including people from the city attorney's office, the DA's office, the US attorney's office. We had the mayor's staff, we had many people in the police department very high up. And one of the police officials looked at me after our presentation and said, so, John, what do you want us to do?
And I said, well, with all due respect, that's the wrong question. I want to know what you're going to do. And I won't do anything for five days. And after that it's going to be a surprise.
And all of a sudden, the next.
[00:21:12] Speaker A: Day, the very next day, we get.
[00:21:14] Speaker B: A call who says, well, John, you've probably seen some action in the neighborhood. I said, yeah. And I said, based on your evidence, we felt we had probable cause to look inside the tents and we discovered a cache of weapons and ammunition and the like and it disappeared.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: All in possession of felons, previously convicted felons.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: So that changed my attitudes because I became much more sympathetic to the plight of people on the street, which is why I think these housing first policies that the county is hell bent on pursuing are really the worst of all alternatives.
[00:22:03] Speaker A: They are because they're allowing a system to propagate that is based on involuntary servitude.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: Drug dealers will front up to a month or sometimes two months worth of drugs to someone on the street, and then that person will be perpetually indebted to them. And then they will go out to Patagonia or retail stores. They'll go to. They'll go steal bikes, and they'll engage in multiple, multiple forms of property theft in order to pay off that debt, but they never can pay it off because they're addicted to drugs.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: So anyone who suggests that our approach is not compassionate should look at the current situation with that lens, because I think the county's policies are the least compassionate of all.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: So these stories are very, you know, they're hard to hear, especially the trafficking, involuntary servitude, you know, and when we talk about these things, we got to realize the city's critically underfunded when it comes to emergency services. And I know there's great stories out there. What do you see as the city's victories when it comes to what they're doing?
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Right. Well, I think the city's made some pretty significant strides, and in contrast to the current county policies. And I'd like to talk a little bit about our case, which resulted in a settlement with the city, because that's a really good example of what it did. Right. We had a situation two years ago where most of our sidewalks downtown were blocked by tents and encampments and all of the things that go along with those, and none of the strategies were working. And most building owners and business people wanted to go after the city for this and that and the other.
[00:24:07] Speaker A: Such a gray area. Right.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Yeah. And they had no. They had no theories, and there was.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: The city doesn't necessarily own all the sidewalks, but not all the sidewalks are privately owned. The city's indemnified, according to the charter. The sidewalks, the private business is responsible to maintain the sidewalks. But yet the city took the right of transportation on public and private sidewalks that are public easements, and they transformed it to the right of accommodation.
[00:24:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:37] Speaker A: And so this is for people that aren't from Portland. They want to know how we got here.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: Well, and what's even worse is it's all property by property by property.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: And it's all property by property.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: So, you know, I was thinking about, what kinds of legal theories can we develop to end up getting a court to order the city to do something that would then ultimately allow us to keep the sidewalks clear so we could improve the circumstances downtown. And a woman I know who's been very active in Old Town asked me to attend a meeting, and it was a meeting of a whole group of people who suffered from mobility disabilities.
And we met at a hotel right in the middle of Old Town. I decided that I would walk to the meeting, and I walked from my office, which is in the Wells Fargo tower at Columbia and forth. And all of a sudden, I encountered all of these encampments, and I could not navigate the sidewalks, and I had to commingle into the traffic. And as soon as I got to the meeting, the first thing I thought was, well, if I couldn't get through, how in the world are people in wheelchairs with disabilities supposed to get from point a to point b to as much as buy a tube of toothpaste?
[00:26:11] Speaker A: So, yeah, people suffering from blindness, people all kinds of.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: So I met with this group, and I realized that they had a lot in common with the business community, who also wanted to keep the sidewalks clear, except they had a legal theory, and the theory was around the Americans with Disabilities act, because there's a 9th circuit case that says sidewalks are the responsibility of cities and municipalities to keep clear.
[00:26:45] Speaker A: And the ADA is what, Ted Kennedy's kind of prized legislation right back in, what, 82 or 80, something like that.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: Well, there were. Yeah, a number, all kinds of people involved. But I can tell you that we thought that there was a pathway to sue the city under the Americans with Disabilities act for not allowing people who had mobility disabilities or blindness to be able to utilize what is a city facility, which were the sidewalks.
All of a sudden, the city became interested in resolving the case short of a three or four year litigation path. And we ultimately settled the case. But one of the first issues that arose was why we hadn't sued the county.
And I told the city attorneys that we did not sue the county because the county has no responsibility for the sidewalks. And if you're going to sue somebody under the American Disabilities act, you have to sue the party who is capable of resolving the issue. And the city was in charge of the sidewalks. Well, they didn't like that because the county has all the money and the city had all the responsibilities.
And I said, well, that's 50 50. They have the money. You have the responsibilities.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: We should all sit down and talk about this.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: They didn't like that either. So I said, well, show me your contract with the county, because your audience may not know offhand that the city and the county maintains what is called the joint office of Homeless Services.
And that joint office really takes the lead on homeless policy. The county runs it. The city has very little to say about it other than to contribute $45 million a year to its operations, which they pay quarterly. So I took a look at the contract and lo and behold, I discovered what was a clause. It's called an indemnity clause. And it provides that if the city is sued for something that was the fault of the county, the county would have to pay the city for the cost of the lawsuit and the cost of resolving the problem.
So we were wondering, where in the world are all these tents coming from? They're brand new tents.
Somebody has to be furnishing those tents or paying for them. And so we sent third party subpoenas over to the county.
Show us all your records concerning distribution of tents. And I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry when we discovered that the county had used $2 million of our taxpayer dollars to distribute 20,000 tents and 60,000 tarps, which ended up on the sidewalks, which the city, in turn, had to pay $8 million to clean up.
So I was sort of. I was sort of analogizing that to trying to walk up the down escalator with these opposing forces that get you nowhere fast.
And it was.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: And none of that is putting people into services. None of that is getting. That isn't even housing first. None of that is helping anyone on the street.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: Okay? Now, that's not to say, Alex, that the county isn't spinning money for good purposes. Well, yeah, they're. Look, they're paying. They're paying rent for people to be in hotels. They're opening up a new detox center. Now, they're doing some things that actually are addressing Maslow's hierarchy of. They are.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: They maintain around 2000 beds.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:51] Speaker A: Shelter beds.
[00:30:52] Speaker B: What I was shocked about, though, was the dissonance between the city approach and the county approach and the fact that they should be. There should be one governmental solution on the same page.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: The left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. There should be some semblance of working together towards one shared goal and vision.
[00:31:13] Speaker B: Exactly. So there should be one approach and we should be paying more attention to treatment and less attention to hiring high paid architects who are going to design, you know, homes of the future that aren't going to appear for the next five years.
[00:31:35] Speaker A: Yeah, well, people are dying and suffering a mental illness.
[00:31:38] Speaker B: Look, when Ted Wheeler declared a homeless emergency, my thinking was, we're not treating this like an emergency. An emergency would be if we had an earthquake or if we had a cyclone. Hurricane or a hurricane. And you know what? If we had an earthquake.
And if FEMA had to move in, they could house 5000 people in a flash.
[00:32:08] Speaker A: Oh, easily.
[00:32:09] Speaker B: Their job would have to house 100,000 people, which FEMA could do too. If we were trying to really consider our homeless crisis to be a true crisis, we would be designing a FEMA like response for it. And that's what we're not doing, in part because of all this dissonance between these government entities that cannot get on the same page.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's why I like to call it an urban refugee crisis, because to me, that's what it feels like. It feels like a third of the people on the street are mentally ill or drug addicted and they need help right now. They don't have time to wait. These people are going to over. We have the highest per capita overdose in America. Now.
Portland, Oregon does the highest per capita overdose. And so. Yeah, okay, well, let's let another thousand people die. That's the plan. And we're going to build housing. These people need treatment. They need real doctors, real nurses, they need detox facilities, and they need places where they can stay where they're not gonna be threatened by guns or knives to go steal a bike. Because you purchased two blues yesterday and three whites.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: Well, I cannot help but think that that circumstance in Portland is not exacerbated by two things. First, measure 110, which decriminalizes possession of small amounts of those drugs.
And here's why. You know, in the past, pre measure 110, the police did not arrest and confine people who possessed minor amounts of drugs.
They held arrest and jail as a hammer to encourage them to go into treatment.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: Yeah, these golden handcuff programs, I mean.
[00:33:57] Speaker B: Treatment'S hard, and jail was perceived as harder. And so when given the choice between jail and treatment, the people in their custody would elect treatment. Okay, now what's the choice? Now, the choice is treatment, which is hard, or keep doing what you've been doing and ignore the citation because you can. Well, I think it's just human nature that people will choose the path of least resistance, which is just keeping doing what you're doing. So that's number one. That's the, that's first problem. Second problem is we have a lot of people whose job security is now focused around harm reduction. They are permanently employed to render harm reduction. And I view harm reduction as a code word for enabling.
[00:34:52] Speaker A: Yeah, break that down. So giving someone a piece of foil and a straw so they can safely and cleanly use drugs and they're not having to share that would be considered harm reduction.
[00:35:04] Speaker B: That's considered by them to be harm reduction. I consider it to be enabling, making it easier to overdose on drugs.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: You're minimizing the possibility of a lesser harm for the greater probability of a greater harm, which is an overdose of death.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: What it also does is, I think it becomes an attractive nuisance. It lets people know that this is a jurisdiction that is not going to enforce drug laws. It's going to allow you to do whatever you want to do, whether that behavior be lawless or not, and they're going to give you the supplies to do it.
That makes no sense.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: So I don't want people to think that we're just being completely negative about the governments that were around. There are a lot of great programs out there that are funded by the city and the county.
What I'm interested in hearing is John de Lorenzo's wish list. If you could have a giant suggestion box and you could put your suggestions in there for what the city should do. Give me a couple of those.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: Well, look, I'm sorry for the focus, first of all, on what's wrong.
I only sue over what's wrong. You never sue anybody over what's right.
[00:36:17] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:36:17] Speaker B: Okay. He is an attorney, so that's kind of my focus. All right, to begin with. But as far as a wish list goes, number one, get the county and the city on the same page because we are wasting incredible amounts of money going up the down escalator.
[00:36:37] Speaker A: There needs to be one team, one shared vision, goals. Shared goals, all that.
[00:36:40] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Number two, we should de emphasize this whole idea of permanent housing first. We want permanent housing ultimately.
[00:36:53] Speaker A: Yeah, of course.
[00:36:54] Speaker B: It should be permanent housing ultimately, not permanent housing first. What we want, first of all, is safety, getting people out of the elements, treating their drug addictions or their mental illness. Transitional housing.
Permanent housing ultimately, but not permanent housing first. So if we could do that and be on the same page and stop wasting. That's right, the money we're wasting, I think we're going to be in better shape. You know, this has happened in the past before.
One of my great fans in history is Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was the senator from New York. He worked in both the Nixon and the Johnson administrations. He was a critic over the model cities program. And he once quipped, he said, you know, we're paying millions of dollars to sociologists to study poverty. If we took the money we were paying them to study poverty and gave them to poor people, we might not have poor people anymore.
His point was that we were feeding lots of hay to the horses so they could distribute morsels to the sparrows. Very inefficient. That's what's happening here today. Our program is very inefficient. We are not using the resources properly. We're wasting them.
[00:38:26] Speaker A: And, you know, I have two wish lists.
[00:38:29] Speaker B: Go ahead.
[00:38:30] Speaker A: And I'm curious of your feedback on these. Number one, I think that, you know, law enforcement in Oregon and in most states have the ability to take someone into custody in order to make sure that they're not a harm to themselves and others. And Oregon, this is called a police officer hold. When a doctor does it, it's called a physician hold. Right. I think that, that there needs to be legislation that transfers that ability to people that are in the firehouse, the emts and firefighters who are more medically and better trained to see drug induced psychoses, mental health psychoses. They're taking the majority of these calls anyway. And I think that that needs to be something that, that happens. Right. Second thing is, and I talk about this, and I'm, you'll hear it on every single episode of the ride along, we got to get rid of this filled up dreams model. You know, the movie where they build.
[00:39:24] Speaker B: The build and they will come. Yeah, well, that's what we've done, and they have come. Right.
[00:39:29] Speaker A: Well, but on a, on the macro level, yes, but on a micro level, we spend all this money for people to sit in offices, and then we tell the people on the street, hey, when you're ready to get clean, just gather up enough self worth. Gather up enough self agency. Abandon your tent, go Steal a Shopping cart, go back to your tent, put all your items in a stolen Shopping cart, push it across town for an hour in the rain, and then wait in Line for 5 hours with a 50 50 chance that you might get shelter that night.
That's the system that we built today.
[00:40:05] Speaker B: Yeah. It's not designed to feature the path of least resistance, is it?
[00:40:09] Speaker A: No, it's not. In fact, I think it's disempowering. What I view as empowerment is when someone who has power over another, instead of forcing them to come to you, you go to them and you humble yourself and you become their servant. And through that humbling process and serving them, that power dynamic is shifting. And you're literally empowering them with the power that you have by serving them, which builds worth and agency. And then you're meeting them where they are, and you're saying, I can help you and do it right here. I can do all your paperwork with you. I'm here on the street where you live and then I'm going to get you into a shelter today.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: But see, Alex, what you're doing here is you're addressing this incredible bureaucracy we have now built around homeless services. And you're suggesting that we inject a degree of common sense.
[00:41:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Meeting people where they are.
[00:41:06] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Is this possible? Is this just going to be forever?
[00:41:11] Speaker B: I think so. I think we'll get a handle on it, you know, and I'll keep doing what I'm doing. I'll keep taking impact cases to try to get some results. I think we've got some good results so far. Clearing our sidewalks.
People with disabilities can now get around getting reports, at least in the downtown core. Now we have to expand it. You know, the city is obligated to provide us quarterly reports. Their first one's going to be due pretty soon. And if we don't think they're abiding by our settlement agreement, the federal district court has retained five years worth of supervision and we can always seek aid from the federal court if we need to further enforce the agreement. So I'm hopeful that the city will start also enforcing its camping ban. But to do that, they have to get with it and start getting their alternative facilities built. You know, again, we need it for people to treating this like one that warrants a FEMA like response.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: Yeah. They should be treating this the way that we treated Syria when the refugees were fleeing Syria in a civil war and we just started putting them anywhere we could.
[00:42:25] Speaker B: We don't have to worry about Syria. Let's talk about a flood or a hurricane. Just a simple hurricane. Let's treat the response that way. We should be able to find shelter for the five to 6000 people who are languishing on the streets.
[00:42:41] Speaker A: Yeah, we have a five year old and a seven year old living with their father in old Town in a tent right now. Anyway. Okay, we can talk about all the sad stories. But John, I'm glad you came on today. I want, I want people to understand just how nuanced these situations are when you're talking about government relations and poking the government bear in order to get the bear to do a better job and what that looks like and, and just what that dynamic involves. And you know, you're one of the people that do it better than anyone else. I know you're doing it in DC and here and I'm really glad you came on.
[00:43:20] Speaker B: Well, flattery will get you everywhere with me. And as you know, I will always talk to whoever will listen. So thanks a lot for having me on your show.
[00:43:29] Speaker A: I appreciate it. We're not done in studio. I mean, we're done in the studio, but we're not done today. We're actually going to go ride with Bach. You know Bach? Everyone knows him. We do a ride along with him very often and we're going to follow him on his patrol and we're going to see just what the city of Portland looks like today. So catch you on the streets.
