“Kotek and Blumenauer Tell Local Officials: Fix Rampant Drug Use on Portland Streets, Now”:

“The frustration comes at a time when the Joint Office of Homeless Services budget for 2024 is $279 million—not counting $50.3 million in unanticipated receipts that the regional government Metro will soon pass along—and the city has untapped Medicaid funding available to help pay for Portland Street Response to address mental health crises.”

“Blumenauer says he left the May meeting about Portland’s streets with a clear understanding. ‘The consensus of all these experts we brought together is that money is not the problem,’ he says. ‘The question is how we mobilize and utilize the resources we’ve got.’”

The whole article is an interesting read: It hangs the narrative on a closed sobering center and the woeful effort to create a new one. The thing that runs just under the surface, as with almost all these stories, is the system that doles out social services in this county: Government’s role is essentially a giant procurement operation, services are provided by non-profits, and the starvation wages those non-profits can afford means nobody wants the work. I know senior non-profit managers who have lost employees to fast food jobs. Few of the non-profits can make the contracts work.

Assessed as a complete system, it’s a disaster. It reflects the neoliberal mania for privatization, but its design inherently mandates redundant layers of administration and management as dollars pass through the county procurement layer and its army of contract managers, consultants, and the management staff needed to oversee all that; then trickle into the non-profits, who have their own grant writers, development directors, executive directors, administrative staff, management, and actual direct services people.

The ecosystem of non-profits exists in a kind of market: They’re all competing for government dollars, so they exist in a state of year-to-year precarity, all eyeing how much of their addressable market they can capture in their narrow lanes, struggling to balance their capacity to actually help people in need with feeding the administrative machines they depend on to go out and bring the money in.

The disconnect between wages for county employees — the people running the procurement processes — and the people in the non-profits is grotesque. A line manager running a couple of teams in the county’s Joint Office for Homeless Services — a total span of maybe seven or eight people who primarily manage invoicing — makes a little more than a senior director in a mental health non-profit who has a span of seven directors managing whole clinics, and upwards of 50 or 60 people in their organization. It goes downhill from there, with the front-line workers in this system — the people actually delivering services — making fast food wages in unbelievably bad working conditions. It’s a rarity when someone in the non-profit world speaks up about this, because they’re utterly dependent on being in the good graces of the county to get the contracts. And it’s well understood among people doing social work that your best bet is to do your time in the non-profits, build your network, and wait for it to come through with a county job, because that’s where you can get a living wage and decent benefits. The non-profits you’re at in the mean time can’t guarantee that the program covering your wage will survive from year-to-year.

It’s important to understand this whole system, because it helps explain the rise of things like Urban Alchemy, which has contracted with the city to run managed homeless encampments:

“How Urban Alchemy Turns Homelessness Into Gold”:

“Like many other cities, San Francisco deals with visible homelessness by ‘sweeping’—in other words, dismantling tent encampments and forcing unhoused residents to move to another area. There’s a shortage of shelter beds across the region, and it is illegal in West Coast states to sweep anyone for whom no bed is available. The Coalition on Homelessness sued San Francisco over this, and a judge temporarily banned sweeps. Still, unhoused people say they are routinely coerced into moving by city officials, police, and Urban Alchemy ambassadors, and they tell us that sweeps remain the main technique that the city uses to manage its unsheltered population. In 2018, after Leilani Farha, the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, visited San Francisco, she determined that this approach constituted ‘cruel and inhuman treatment’ that violated multiple human rights.

“It’s no wonder, then, that civic leaders in San Francisco and elsewhere are looking for new ways to confront—or at least to appear like they’re confronting—the homelessness crisis. UA skeptics like Kaitlyn Dey, a Portland-based homelessness researcher, argue that politicians use nonprofits to keep their promises to reduce interactions between police and homeless people without substantially changing the system. And to the average liberal city dweller, having a nonprofit administer the sweeps makes that work appear more humane than when armed cops do it. Working with groups like UA also reduces transparency—internal UA e-mails, for instance, are not subject to FOIA requests—insulating local officials should problems arise.”

UA is on the scene in Portland because attempts to deliver managed camping using local providers with a less para-police bent failed: Nobody would take the work. Urban Alchemy’s formula, depending on former convicts, lets them get costs down enough to thrive in an environment where dollars are peanut-buttered through the county procurement bureaucracy before getting into the hands of non-profits, who have to use some of those dollars to maintain their own management and fund-raising staff to remain viable.

My one criticism of the Nation article is its focus on failures to defund the police as the problem:

There is a huge amount of money in the system in our county, approved by voters. The county procurement bureaucracy left over $40 million of it on the table this year, because for all its scale and influence, the Joint Office for Homeless Services utterly failed to scale to accommodate the influx of funds, even as it insures the providers it works with keep wages for their workers low. Local journalists have let us all down on their coverage of that organization.

Maybe that’s the worst part of all of this: We’ve torn the safety net to ribbons, our capacity to help people is radically diminished, and all we’re left with is this absurd, wasteful, abusive system. If you’re a good liberal or progressive type who wants to see vulnerable people helped, you’re trapped between that system and people who don’t even want that to exist. Of course you’re gonna pick a side. But you’ve been forced into a terrible, false choice that guarantees nobody is going to speak up to hold the architects of this mess accountable: They’re all we have, which, now that I think of it, summarizes the state of American politics at all levels pretty neatly.

Today I learned about Charmstone, an alternate task-switcher for macOS. I’m still using the free version, so I’m missing a few features, but even the free version is interesting. You press your two trigger keys (ctrl opt by default) and move the mouse/cursor a little and it pops open a floating app switcher with four options next to the cursor. Besides plain old apps, you can include folders or scripts.

It looks like this:

I didn’t get “why do you need to do the little bit of mouse motion” for a couple of seconds, then realized “oh, it’d be bad if you were just trying to do a keyboard operation with those two keys.” Then after a few repetitions I realized that you also begin to remember where in the floating selector your apps are, so the actual gesture is “press your two trigger keys as you begin to move in the direction of the target app.” It, uh, sort of suggests this in the part of the marketing copy that reads “Use spatial memory to put your desired app in focus more quickly.”

Anyhow, I am going to keep using it for a while longer. I haven’t been using it for long and it isn’t baked in yet. It’s interesting just because it makes me rethink an operation I don’t think twice about anymore (task switching) in that way where you begin to realize you’ve perhaps internalized needless motion, or at least motion that could be more economical.

The same developer is one of those kinda cool cottage software houses who’s got a Thing They’re Focused On, and their thing is UI. In addition to Charmstone, they’ve got a window management tool, an interesting keyboard-oriented UI search tool that takes cues from things like Vimari without being devoted to vim everywhere, and a bunch of other stuff similar to the little enhancements and “haxies” that have long existed in the Mac ecosystem, but with a really pleasant visual design and consistent sensibility that isn’t always there.

I haven’t tried his window manager, but I’ve been using Sizeup for years and I think they are pretty similar. His is open source and free.

Small update

I’ve been using Charmstone all day and really appreciate its Launch active apps setting, which gives you a new window if you switch to an app with none (e.g. you cmd w’d the last active window and get nothing when you use the normal cmd tab switcher to get to it.) Mailmate is one of those apps that just sits there and does nothing, so checking mail every so often has been a great reinforcer as I remember I’d have saved a step if I’d just used Charmstone.

In the neighborhood

The hideous, sewage-leaking, decrepit duplexes described in this article are in my neighborhood. I live in Lents, and these houses are right off the Springwater near the Foster Floodplain Natural Area, on the other side of 205 from us.

Al and I walk by them every several days on our way to the Floodplain, and they’ve inspired a lot of speculation. We remember when they were just this odd little colony that appeared to have folks renting them. We remember when they started being boarded up. We remember when the gate collapsed, and was then replaced with something makeshift, and then when it was obvious squatters were living there.

Al has worked in homeless policy and services for several years now, so she’s got a working library of landlord patterns that found an easy match in this case: Absentee landlord who doesn’t particularly care; tenants holding on despite backed up sewage because there’s not a next rung down, just an abyss.

The area around those duplexes was home to a small colony of RVs and vans, but about the time the police cleared out the squatters in the duplexes, there was also a general sweep of that area. Several of the RV owners found their way to our neighborhood. That’s part of the pattern every year once the weather starts warming up. We’ll have three or four waves before it gets cold again at the end of the year. Each wave is four or five RVs parked along the block and around the corner. In between the big waves individuals we’ve come to recognize over the years leave to avoid the new crowd, then orbit back through when it quiets down again. Each time we make an effort to get to know them. Al’s better at it than I am, and is more helpful anyhow: She helps them understand where to start in the social services labyrinth, saving them a few steps. But she also takes them food and water, and sometimes just listens to what they have to say.

I have a little distance from the problem. It’s not my work or career. I’ve thought (and felt) through how I feel when a new wave comes through. It took a few years of experiencing a particular cognitive dissonance about the matter to finally put my finger on what I was feeling and realize this is one topic where I’m not any of “liberal,” “progressive,” “moderate,” or “conservative.” Few combinations of political program and cultural leaning I’ve come across work for me here, which makes it easy to listen to pretty much nobody on the matter.

Al, on the other hand, doesn’t ever get distance. It is her job. And when she comes home at night, it’s parked across the street. It wakes her up at night with 3 a.m. screaming matches. When families roll through, it’s a thing to think about because she’s a mandatory reporter. She has friends in county and metro policy circles, so happy hour with them is … that. When she comes downstairs and says “I need to take some food boxes over there” it is not because her selflessness knows no bounds, but because her capacity to live with what’s going on around her is close to exhausted.

We’ve become a political party of two on the matter, one of us who just lives with it 24/7, and the other with just enough distance to say “so you’re telling me you were briefly considering whether or not to take yet another stupid opinion on the matter personally?”

vim keybindings and the shell

I’ve gotten so used to Evil mode in Emacs, and so comfortable with stuff like Vimari elsewhere, that I figured I’d give oh-my-zsh’s vim mode a try. That didn’t go well. jeffreytse/zsh-vi-mode promises to make it all better, so I’m giving it a try.

I can’t even explain what wasn’t working about the original plugin I was trying. I just know it was confusing, but that it feels even worse to go back to Emacs/readline keybindings, so I’m just going to give this a try.

YNAB plug

For years I was a Microsoft Money person, even if it meant running Windows in a VM to use it. During our paycheck-to-paycheck years Money’s cash flow forecast tool was like some sort of oracle I could consult about the eventual downstream impact of emergency expenses. I knew it wasn’t the right answer, but it was one of those “bad answer is better than worse alternatives” things that sort of reinforced a bad status quo.

I don’t know how long its been since Money was even a thing – Wikipedia says they killed it in 2009, so okay – but I jumped to Quicken for Mac, which had a similar tool that wasn’t nearly as good, but that was okay, too: Money’s version seemed to take your actuals into account, whereas Quicken’s was a straight “here are your budgeted inflows, here are your budgeted outflows, here’s the difference over time,” with the added ability to sort of amortize a pre-determined monthly variance for unbudgeted expenses.

It was worse because it was less accurate than Money, but it was better because it nudged me in the direction of “oh, maybe I ought to be budgeting for these things instead of guessing them.”

When Mac Quicken 2007 was finally retired and replaced by Quicken for Mac, the tool got even less helpful – they took away the ability to add a variance, which meant that if you didn’t budget it the cash flow forecast tool wasn’t going to consider it. My little hack around that was to go to “allowance” accounts, but all that did was isolate personal and less predictable expenses from the more predictable monthly bills and payments.

Basically, I refused to learn the real lesson of that feature, which was that it wasn’t a proper substitute for real budgeting.

You Need A Budget uses envelope budgeting:

Typically, the person will write the name and average cost per month of a bill on the front of an envelope. Then, either once a month or when the person gets paid, they will put the amount for that bill in cash in the envelope. When the bill is due, the money is taken out to pay for that bill.

This prevents the person from spending the money out of their pocket or bank account, because it is already allocated to the bill.

… it just does it with software: You tell it your budget and what you have in the bank, and then record the draw on each “envelope” as you move through the month.

It has been around for a while, first as a standalone app, then in its newest incarnation as a web app. I tried it in its earlier days, when the developers refused to support downloading transactions to force you to do the work of tracking where your money was going, but there was no way I was going to do that data entry, and I was also pretty hooked on some kind of cash flow forecasting tool.

Last year, though, I decided to give it another spin. They’ve softened up their position on automated transactions because, I imagine, in most households the “envelopes” are now completely metaphorical. My physical currency on hand goes up during camping season, because that’s how you buy firewood at the state parks, but otherwise?

Like any tool built around a particular mindset, the YNAB social experience – its subreddit, support forums, assorted online enclaves – can feel more like a spiritual movement or ideological tendency than a way to budget. I tune all that out. I have enough needless rigor in my life reading Metafilter comments.

The “just enough rigor” part to me comes down to the fact that it makes the envelope metaphor work. The iOS app comes with a little widget that tells you how much money is left in key envelopes. “Can we do this thing?” Well, check the widget: Says there’s $x in the envelope for that kind of thing, which would ordinarily mean “no,” but I see there’s $y in this envelope over here – so is that tradeoff okay? And from that follows an easier time sticking to your goals.

The closest it comes to a forecasting tool is the ability to take anything you already have in the bank, or that is left over in the budget at the end of the month, and pre-budget it in the months ahead.

That’s not to say cash flow forecasting doesn’t have its place.

When I knew a layoff was coming, it was simply not possible to reconcile the YNAB mindset with something that meant a lot to me, which was the ability to go still for a few months and not worry about anything once I finished up. It was important to me as I dealt with the emotional stuff you deal with when you both know you are done somewhere but have committed to going out on a professional note, and then it became critical once I realized I had a health thing to address.

On the other hand, YNAB does such a good job of recording budget information and making it exportable that it was trivial to take my carefully considered envelopes, export them to a spreadsheet, and make a very simple forecasting tool I could build scenarios around. It meant I could calm down a little, come up with a plan, and do the whole “mind like water” thing once I had that plan. At the same time, it wasn’t something I could imagine maintaining because it was a spreadsheet and I am not one of those people.

I’m glad I adopted more rigorous budgeting when I didn’t need to, removing my dependency on a forecasting tool. And I’m glad that the careful work I did making that change made it easier to build something I would not want to maintain daily, but was able to use to look 3, 6, 9 or 12 months ahead given my situation.

This is a weird thing to write about.

Years ago a friend of mine shared some personal stuff around money. I don’t think they meant to share as much as they did, and then after doing so felt circumspect about it, trying to sort out whether they’d done a TMI thing, or maybe revealed a defect they shouldn’t have, or had opened themselves up to judgment. I mean, not from me. All due respect to my fellow veterans, I was not one of the ones who woke up in an army barracks one morning because of his great life choices.

And because even since then – even after a crash course in making the best of a bad decision – I had the good/bad fortune of not having to figure this stuff out for a long while: A life privileged and easy enough that I got to concentrate on other life skills. I think since getting laid off that I have said of the experience “I guess my luck finally ran out” exactly once, and it was a self-evidently foolish thing to say the second it escaped my lips. My political commitments preclude much belief in luck, and my spiritual commitments do not include it in their reckoning.

But still … it’s a weird thing to write about. An uncomfortable thing. US culture is messed up about money and deeply infused with an ideological commitment to the moral virtues of precarity. Even the kindest, least judgmental people vibrate around this topic, because most of us live an existence of gauging whether there are yet rungs below us – a duplex with overflowing sewage owned by an indifferent slum lord from some other state – or just the abyss.

You would hope, in a society that has so thoroughly ravaged its own safety net, that we’d recognize that deep unease and transcend our alienation and atomization, even if not to try to put some of it back right now after due consideration of the horrors we see just stepping out onto a downtown sidewalk. Even if only to say to each other, “we are collectively worthy of more kindness and care than we are choosing to extend to ourselves,” whether that’s on a civilizational scale – where our actual priorities include taking away tents and tarps on the coldest week of the year, or simply being the bluest state with the worst mental health services – or a personal scale, where friends apologize to each other for bringing up money because everybody’s so anxious about it.

So, one of the aspirations I have for my writing is to be helpful. YNAB helped me understand how to budget and plan, and while I would not say it is for everybody, or that everybody needs it, it is definitely for me and I definitely did need it. If you’re uneasy about money, or not sure you’re doing it right, their content marketing is pretty top notch: Even if you don’t buy their product, they do a great job of articulating a particular approach to money and budgeting that might be helpful.

You’ve just woken up in your tent down on the Springwater Trail.

You climbed into a sleeping bag the night before. The temperature was headed down to the low 40s. You’re sleeping in a tent among dozens of others in a similar situation. The small ad hoc community around you has all sorts, including  people who seem angry all the time, and young men who are dressed much more nicely than everyone around them. They don’t spend the night: They just make a few deals and then head home for the evening.  If you’re a woman, there’s a better than even chance you were assaulted within 72 hours of beginning your life outdoors. Since it’s April in Portland, it’s muddy and wet. You might have gone to sleep to the sounds of people fighting or yelling at each other. You probably woke up because it’s really goddamn cold, or because your children woke up with the light, the way little kids do. 

So, about the time you’re unzipping your tent, grateful that nothing happened to it or you or maybe your family the night before, a pair of people on expensive bicycles, all kitted out, ride by. They look around at all the tents, and one looks to the other and says “Jesus Christ, this is fucking disgusting.  Who the fuck are these people?”

Well, friend, they’re my neighbors. I ride by them every morning on my way to work, and again on my way home each evening. I’ve got a pretty simple protocol for making my way through the little community that has sprung up on the Springwater near 82nd. I’ll list some of its key elements:

• I slow down. There are a lot of people down there, including families with small children. Nowhere I need to be is more important than any of those people. 
• I don't gawk or comment if I'm with someone. I wouldn't want to be gawked at if I had to live in a tent along a trail. I wouldn't want someone to loudly wonder "who the fuck" I was, or comment on my "fucking shithole" accomodations. 
• I say "good morning" or "good afternoon" to the people I do make eye contact with.  That's my practice with just about everyone I pass on the trail. 

I’d really like to believe that the “Jesus Christs” and “who the fuck are these peoples” are coming from a sense of deep moral outrage that we live in a country where families with little children, the working poor or anyone else for that matter has to live in a tent in the mud along a trail on the edge of town. Because I read nextdoor.com and the Facebook groups for my neighborhood, I know that’s not always the case. At least sometimes they’re also coming from a place of deep revulsion with the people in those circumstances themselves, and from a deep desire to erase them from awareness … to push them out of view with no regard for where that might be or what it might mean for them. It comes from a place of rationalizing the existence of that kind of misery that comes from ones own precarity (though maybe that’s not so true of the people on the nice bikes out for a pre-work ride). 

Wherever it’s coming from, I’d really appreciate it if you’d keep it to yourself next time. Those people are my neighbors and I want you to be kind to them.