“We’ve just gotta do what we need to do to protect the lives of everyone in Roseburg. That’s what this election really comes down to. Do we want to be a city of neighbors, or do we want to be a city of death? We have to choose life.”
In just six years, more than 50 of our homeless neighbors are dead. My friend Marc is one of them. He died a little over a month ago. He was homeless and living at Deer Creek Park in Roseburg. Another beloved friend of many, Richard, who also happened to be deaf, just died about a week ago. These are not permissible or natural deaths. These are people dying while fighting to survive the challenges of living outside because they cannot afford a home.
The people who rule this city right now don’t treat their neighbors like Marc and Richard as fellow humans. Property is more important to them than human life, and people are only valuable to them if they can exploit them. People are made homeless when they are exploited into deep poverty. And when everything has been sucked out of them and they have nothing left, exploiters will throw them out in the streets to rot. Now Roseburg’s rulers want all our neighbors living outside to hurry up and die so they can “take the parks back.” It is so far from the principle of loving one’s neighbor that Roseburg has been made a real hell on earth.
When somebody kills somebody else, we call it murder of course. But what do we call it when the killers aren’t there? What do we call it when people are driven into poverty, disability, and homelessness? What do we call it when a person’s life is shortened because of the conditions they’re forced to live in? What do we call it when a government abandons its residents and the rich hope the poor will die faster? There’s actually a word for this. It’s social murder. This is what we have in Roseburg.
I’ve talked a lot with people about the dangers of ALPR (Flock) cameras and mass surveillance, but they don’t just come out of nowhere. When those things quietly get put up in cities like ours, that’s a sign that we’ve already been living in a police state. We’re already living under tyranny and terror. I’ve even met a few police officers who are disturbed by some things they’re expected to do. Some officers join the force because they want to do heroic work, and being ordered to arrest poor people in wheelchairs is not exactly the job they thought they were signing up for. The way this city has been ruled and manipulated for the benefit of the few has really dehumanized everyone.
Roseburg needs a life-first agenda, starting with housing first and getting our homeless neighbors off the streets:
END THE SWEEPS
The police sweeps of the parks to evict our homeless neighbors have to end. City Council should reverse its camping ordinance so we can actually start to help people living outside instead of making their conditions worse.
SAFE GROUND NOW
Instead of building a prison camp in some “discrete” location on the outskirts of the city, we need Safe Ground urban villages within Roseburg near transit routes and the resources people need, including access to City Hall. Urban villages should provide basic amenities like bathrooms, electricity, clean water, storage, and tiny homes where residents can have a secure place to be to reintegrate and get any other aid they might need like medical care.
WE NEED MUNICIPAL HOUSING
Some people keep saying that “public housing always fails.” Well sure, when the government is being run by people like real estate developers who WANT it to fail. Public housing is a widely used and effective way of reducing homelessness. It can also take different forms. Apartments, single-family homes, multi-family homes, and villages could all be part of a public housing program. In many parts of the world, local councils maintain public housing. We could partner with HADCO here in town to develop new public housing options. We could also take a look at abandoned properties in Roseburg to fix up and hold in a community land trust specifically for something like housing cooperatives jointly controlled by residents and the municipality.
None of this is reinventing the wheel. We’ve just gotta do what we need to do to protect the lives of everyone in Roseburg. That’s what this election really comes down to. Do we want to be a city of neighbors, or do we want to be a city of death? I don’t think we should tolerate a city government that abandons its people to die. We have to choose life.
