Life, the universe, and everything, through both the telescope and the microscope.
Nuclear bombs keep going off over the horizon of Asteroid City (population 87). “Another atom bomb test,” the characters declare, with some combination of intrigue and boredom. They trot out of the diner to look at the tiny mushroom cloud, snap a few pictures, and go back inside for more coffee. It’s 1955. This isn’t unusual anymore.
Living in the shadow of the bombs is what Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is about — literal bombs, and also a host of other life-shattering things like loss, and existential dread, and a world changing so fast it’s hard to hang on to it. Real things, in other words, the kind everyone has to deal with. The emotions we can’t outrun, but we try to anyhow.
That Anderson set Asteroid City in 1955 is a bit of trickery, a degree of separation between the characters’ reality and our own. We live in (dare I say) uniquely frightening times, but so do these people, for whom the Cold War and a rapidly changing social order is their psychic wallpaper. Much of the movie is specifically set in September 1955, a month bookended by two events: the United States’ decision to embark on Project Vanguard, which would try unsuccessfully to beat the Soviets at putting a satellite into space; and the tragic car accident that took the life of James Dean, the iconic actor who embodied the rising rebellion of the youth. (I don’t think it’s an accident that a cop car in hot pursuit of a careening vehicle keeps rushing through the town’s one intersection.)
“If you wanted to live a nice, quiet, peaceful life, you picked the wrong time to get born,” General Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) exhorts a crowd of teenagers and their parents, assembled in Asteroid City to celebrate the landing of a meteorite there thousands of years earlier. The children have entered their wildly advanced science experiments in a contest, which the military plans to snap up; the space race is in their eyes. Later, when things go south, youths are interrogated in a manner suspiciously reminiscent of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Grown men fight, and others try to calm them down by reminding them, “We’re not in Guadalcanal anymore.”
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Focus Features
It feels reminiscent of something real, but this is also all fiction — as the movie’s narrator puts it, “an apocryphal fabrication.” Fiction puts a layer between us and real history, a way of looking at the past through different eyes. It has another function, too: Through fiction, we process our emotions by proxy, whether we’re the artists or the audience.
That’s the subject of Asteroid City, which nests fiction inside of fiction inside of fiction. (I promise it’s easier to watch than it sounds.) Here is the most succinct description of the levels of its made-up-ness: It is a scripted movie that pretends to be a TV show in which actors stage a fictionalized version of the making of a play telling the fictional story of a place that doesn’t exist. We also see the play, but it is shot like a movie. (I am Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole.)
The central, in-color plot of the film centers on the group gathered in Asteroid City for a three-day meteorite celebration when their lives are upended by a, shall we say, unexpected visitor. But Asteroid City actually introduces itself to us as an old-school anthology TV show, shot in black and white, hosted by a sonorous host (Bryan Cranston). What we’re about to see, he gravely tells us, is the story behind the making of a play called Asteroid City, about a place that doesn’t exist. It’s both an apocryphal fabrication and an “authentic look into the work of a theatrical production.”
What follows intercuts the color story — which turns out to be kind of a hyperreal version of the “play,” which we see shot as a film — and black-and-white scenes, often staged like little mini-plays, about various moments during Asteroid City’s production. (The play, not the movie we’re watching. If you need a walk or a stiff drink right now, that’s fine.)
This all means that in this movie Scarlett Johansson, for instance, plays an actress who plays an actress playing an actress. Similarly, Jason Schwartzman — the closest to a lead this absurdly stacked cast has — plays an actor who is desperate to figure out the motivations of his character, a war photographer who burns his hand on a sandwich iron. (Schwartzman is styled to reference several famous actors, perhaps most significantly a very famous photo of James Dean.)
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Focus Features
Piling on these layers, each with its own combination of artifice and “authenticity,” is where Anderson shows what he’s doing. He’s interested in those piles. The impossible pursuit of authentic emotion through making art that can never really be all that “real” is one of Asteroid City’s themes; a fair amount of the film dwells on an acting class and its students, who are trying, in the style of The Actors Studio and “the method,” to find ways to give authentic performances in the very contrived medium of the theater.
But there’s an added layer to what Anderson’s after. Humans have always processed their feelings through art, but modernity adds a wrench to the whole existence thing. There’s an aspect of alienation — of feeling as if the machines and inventions we build, which are terrifying enough to be able to wipe us out (like the bomb) or seemingly to take over our world altogether (like, say, generative AI), are estranging us from one another and even from ourselves. Art has always been the counterbalance to this, which is in part why groups like The Actors Studio sprung up in the early part of the 20th century. If you are working at a desk all day clacking on a typewriter, or operating a machine, or building a bureaucracy that might work like a machine, then going to the theater is supposed to jolt you back to remembering that you, at least, are not a machine.
It’s tantamount to either a confession or an explanation from someone like Anderson, whose work employs considerable artifice in its pursuit of authenticity. I confess that I don’t really like Anderson’s style, and have not loved most of his movies. It took me two viewings to really figure out Asteroid City. But I do admire that he’s an artist whose aesthetic is so firmly defined that even non-cinephiles can make poor imitations of his work using AI; in fact, it’s those replicas’ inability to actually latch onto the emotion that powers his work (the melancholy, the grief, the impishness) that make me appreciate him more.
That’s what I came to appreciate about this movie, and the more I think about it, the more wise I think it is. In Asteroid City, Anderson builds several worlds mediated by layers of performance, artifice, and technology, in which nonetheless real humans grieve, long for one another, fall in love, get hurt, and feel wonder. The layers they’ve put between themselves and their emotions crack and crumble. Their worlds are rocked, which leaves them thinking about things like the meaning of life, the existence of God, and whether they’re as alone as they feel like they are. The answer, he suggests, is found by sinking into the apocryphal fabrications of the artist’s imagination. “You can’t wake up,” the characters chant near the end of the movie, “if you don’t fall asleep.”
Asteroid City opens in limited theaters on June 16 and wide on June 23.
Turns out, shopping when you’re trying to boycott everything is hard.
If you are a conservative consumer in America right now, shopping is getting weird. You’re not supposed to drink Bud Light or shop at Target or eat at Chick-fil-A or watch Fox News. It’s Pride month, meaning all the companies have gone gay again, despite you trying to make clear that you’d really rather they not. Maybe you’ve signed up for alerts to start getting warnings about allegedly “woke” businesses, and the list of brands there is getting long — Nike, Adidas, Speedo, Lululemon, the LA Dodgers. The alerts also say Bank of America is bad, and some guy on Twitter has included Citi in a list of companies you’re supposed to avoid for the month of June, meaning you need to … I guess change your bank account?
Boycotting companies that don’t align with your politics is exhausting, which is why most people don’t, at least not for a sustained amount of time. It’s hard enough to exist in the world without worrying whether every purchase you make matches up with your personal views and values. But in recent months, the push for conservative consumers to vote with their dollars — or, rather, downvote by withholding their dollars — has been rampant.
“The number of boycotts is vast, and we’re talking about inconveniencing people at a level that doesn’t make any sense,” said Maurice Schweitzer, a Wharton professor who focuses on behavioral decision research, emotion, and negotiations.
If you do want to avoid certain companies, or, in the current context, a lot of companies, it can also be tough to find alternatives. Say you did give up Bud Light. You might not realize the beer you swapped for is also owned by Anheuser-Busch, or you picked up some Miller Lite, which you might be upset to learn is also now a no-no.
All that said, there is money to be made on being anti-woke, or some people believe there is.
There’s a reason right-wing media outlets and commentators are seizing on trans issues and Pride month — it generates outrage, which generates traffic and subscriptions, which, these outfits hope, generates money. There are plenty of niche businesses out there that tout conservative bona fides, from coffee to investment products. There are what appear to be somewhat sincere efforts that offer right-wing options for banking and e-commerce, which have seen varying degrees of success. Among all the offerings, there are some common themes: American-made, small business, traditional values.
“There are a lot of companies that are making products that are geared toward conservative consumers. It’s becoming a whole market,” said Howard Polskin, president and chief curator at TheRighting, a website that aggregates stories from right-wing media. “Now, how big is that? I have no idea. Is this a fad, or is this a business? That’s the question.”
The cynical view here is that a handful of people are trying to capitalize on conservative outrage to try to make a quick buck. A less cynical view is that this is an earnest effort to create a sort of shopping safe space for conservatives. If the latter is the case — and that’s a big if — setting up an entire parallel economy might be, you know, a little hard.
A six-pack of beer should not cost $30 no matter how mad you are at Bud Light
Assuming you’ve heard about the Bud Light thing (it sent some beers to a trans influencer in April and conservatives had a bit of a meltdown), you have perhaps heard of “Ultra Right” beer. Being marketed as “100% Woke-Free American Beer” by a guy who goes by Conservative Dad, this beer is expensive. It’s $19.99 for a six-pack plus shipping, which, in my case when I ordered it on June 1, amounted to $31.55. I imagine I will get this beer eventually, but I’m going to have to wait because it won’t ship for about 30 days. Ultra Right has had a hard time getting up and running, it appears, and was dropped from its first brewery.
Conservative Dad, whose actual name is Seth Weathers, is probably making money off of this endeavor — once you click to buy the $20 beer, his website also prompts you to buy other stuff, like a T-shirt and a cup. But it’s hard to look at this and think this is a serious operation. What beer drinker wants to spend $30 on a six-pack that they can get in the mail in a month?
When reached by Vox for comment about this story, Weathers responded, “I see our beer has angered the commies. Thoughts and prayers!”
There are all sorts of examples of anti-woke businesses and products. Some of them appear to be little more than an (often overpriced) ploy to separate hyped-up right-leaning consumers from their money, from coffee brands to dating apps to chocolate bars that cost $25 for a pack of four.
“They’re novelty items,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, a media watchdog group. “You can probably sell some products, but that’s not changing the industry.”
In the investment realm, where conservatives have been irked by the rise of ESG — meaning investments that consider environmental, social, and governance factors — there are options that try to give those people a place to go. You’ve got exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, which are basically baskets of stocks, that are supposed to appeal to the right, such as the God Bless America ETF (YALL), the American Conservative Values ETF (ACVF), and ETFs from Strive, a firm co-founded by now-presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
They’ve all got their own sort of shtick. YALL says it screens out companies that “have emphasized politically left and/or liberal political activism and social agendas at the expense of maximizing shareholder returns.” It’s got about 40 holdings, the largest being Tesla, Charles Schwab, and Nvidia.
ACVF says it excludes companies “perceived to be most hostile to conservative values” and has upward of 300 holdings; its performance largely mirrors that of the overall market. It made noise amid the Target Pride backlash after it announced it was adding the company to its “refuse to buy” list of stocks. Strive is a little different — it basically says it will only focus on shareholder value when casting shareholder votes for the companies its ETFs invests in, no environmental or social funny stuff.
These ETFs perform decent-ish, said Eric Balchunas, a Bloomberg analyst who covers ETFs. But they’re expensive compared to non-anti-woke products, which may explain why they’ve only managed to garner a middling amount of assets under management. “This is a tough area because generally, people, when they invest, they leave their politics at the door and just want to make money. This is going to appeal to a niche audience,” he said. “None of these anti-woke ones are really low-cost at all.”
Anti-woke in finance is a little tough. Just look at GloriFi, a bank backed by big names such as Ken Griffin and Peter Thiel, which was supposed to be an answer to an overly liberal Wall Street. The operation turned out to be a disaster, and the bank quickly shut down.
An alternative to Target: Possible? But very hard.
One of the issues with boycotting is that it can be hard to figure out where else to go. Some close competitors may get a boost when a corporation sticks its neck out and gets pushback — Coors Light and Miller Lite have benefited from the Bud Light debacle. But those companies aren’t specifically anti-woke, they’re just companies. Setting up an anti-woke alternative is not easy. Take Target, which conservatives have taken aim at over its annual LGBTQ Pride month collection, causing the company to pull some items and, in certain cases, move Pride merchandise to the back of stores.
“It depends on what the product is and whether there’s an obvious alternative to that product,” said Kyle Williams, a historian and the author of the upcoming book Taming the Octopus: The Century-Long Battle over the Soul of the Corporation. “You’re not going to be able to pop up overnight and create an alternative Target company.”
That doesn’t mean there aren’t efforts underway. Enter PublicSq, an online marketplace for “freedom-loving Americans” that’s about to become part of a public company through a SPAC deal with a company called Colombier Acquisition Corp. (SPACs are a type of investment vehicle that were really hot a couple of years ago — Vox has an explainer on them here. They haven’t generally fared so well.) PublicSq says it has seen a lot of user growth recently, including in the wake of the Target backlash. “Any time Target pulls a Target, it’s kind of a reminder for our consumers of, ‘Hey, there’s maybe some other options out there that we should pursue,’” PublicSq CEO Michael Seifert recently told Axios.
It’s not clear how much of that user growth is translating to sales — you can’t actually buy much on the site right now, it just directs you to each seller’s website. (PublicSq says it will release an e-commerce platform later this year.) The web platform and app are clunky, and the product offering leaves much to be desired. About 10 products are listed in its “Ditch Target 2.0” section, including “smelly proof” reusable sandwich bags, a set of forks and spoons for toddlers, and earth-friendly “Bumroll” toilet paper.
Could PublicSq wind up being Amazon for the GOP? I mean, sure. It’s still early days, and building a giant e-commerce operation takes time. It could also go the way of MyStore, set up by the MyPillow guy, which doesn’t appear to be a runaway success. It also has competitors in the space who are doing … something, such as Mammoth Nation, which lets you pay to be a member to then “shop your values” and says it donates that money somewhere. There are books that tell conservatives where it’s safe to buy and invest, too.
It probably pays to be Mad and Loud Online
Perhaps the real winners here are in the attention economy.
It’s not entirely clear where, if anywhere, conservative consumers are able to turn for the majority of their commerce needs amid the current Pride month-induced boycott mania or at any time, really. For their content needs, they are able to turn to right-wing influencers and outlets, which are fighting for readers and listeners and, likely, making some money off of all of the rage.
The Bud Light drama did gangbusters traffic in right-wing media, according to a recent report from Memo, a media tracking and insights company. Nearly seven times as many readers of right-leaning outlets read content about the controversy compared to readers of left-leaning outlets, and right-leaning outlets have continued to lean in. “Those publishers are getting tremendous traffic from this,” said Eddie Kim, Memo’s CEO and founder. “When a story lands and you see it working, there’s an inclination to write more of those stories because you have a lot of domain authority and SEO value. That drives readership, and that fuels the story.” Kim is also on the board of directors at Colombier, the firm trying to merge with PublicSq.
Carusone, from Media Matters, said that conservative media is in the midst of a bit of a land grab over eyeballs in the wake of radio commentator Rush Limbaugh’s death and Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s firing. So if the anti-woke, anti-Pride stuff gets clicks, that’s an incentive.
The Daily Wire, a media company founded by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing, is really the “tip of the spear” here, he said, “because they have the mechanics in place to commercialize this faster.” They’ve launched gimmicky products, such as chocolate bars and razors, but they also say they’re putting together a $100 million fund for children’s programming to try to offer a counter to Disney over its opposition to Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill. The Daily Wire didn’t respond to requests for comment from Vox.
The Daily Wire is also streaming What is a Woman?, a film about the “logic behind a gender ideology movement that has taken aim at women and children.” It stars Matt Walsh, an influential anti-trans commentator who podcasts and blogs for the platform. Walsh has also been vocal in the right’s boycott strategy, advising his fellow conservatives to “pick a few strategic targets” and “make them pay dearly.”
That’s not what’s happening; the right appears to be in boycott-everything mode. With it being Pride month and the way corporations are about Pride, conservatives have a rainbow to freak out about at every corner. Maybe that’s a bit of the point, at least on the part of the people stoking the flames.
“The current monetization strategy is conversions, it’s getting all these monthly subscriptions, so the way you do that is having these breakout moments in the best way you can,” Carusone said. “There’s basically a race for subscriptions, and the way you get subscriptions in this model is through these types of high-valence, emotionally charged calls to action that you can then dominate.”
From the anger come the clicks and, eventually, the dollars.
We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.
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Have ideas for a future column or thoughts on this one? Email emily.stewart@vox.com.
Homelessness nearly lost her the election. Now she’s trying to fix it.
The challenges of homelessness and a lack of affordable housing are particularly acute in Oregon.
The state has seen a 63 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness over the last six years. While roughly 18,000 people are currently unhoused in the state, there are only about 5,200 year-round shelter beds to serve them. One cause of homelessness nationwide is that, for years, the US has been building fewer homes than necessary to house a growing population. Oregon has among the largest housing supply gaps: statewide, 140,000 housing units are needed, and, without serious action, there’s a projected shortage of 443,556 units in the next 20 years.
Voters, in turn, have grown upset. Frustrations around homelessness played a pivotal role in the 2022 election. Tina Kotek, a Democrat who had served as Oregon’s House speaker for the previous nine years, eked out a win in the gubernatorial election, but her tight margins (she earned 47 percent in a three-way race) spoke volumes in a state that’s typically safely blue.
Kotek, in turn, has made housing and homelessness among her top priorities in her first six months in office — issues that leaders don’t often stake their capital on.
Since taking office, she has declared a state of emergency on homelessness, directed state agencies to prioritize reducing unsheltered homelessness, and established a statewide housing production target of 36,000 new homes per year. She also lobbied for and signed a $200 million legislative package to help address Oregon’s housing and homelessness crisis.
Her plans though, hinge on other community leaders taking action, and it’s too soon to say whether her ideas and policy prescriptions will succeed.
I talked with Gov. Kotek about making housing policy the center of her agenda, about dealing with NIMBYs, and lessons other states might learn from Oregon. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Rachel Cohen
Oregon’s governorship almost flipped red last year for the first time in more than three decades, and voter surveys indicate frustration with homelessness was one of the top reasons why. What has changed about homelessness, in your view, to make it rise to become a such salient political issue?
Gov. Tina Kotek
That’s a great question because I’ve been doing public policy for 20+ years and the public has long perceived housing and homelessness as this second-tier issue. The change is really related to the pandemic, when we had to move people out of shelters because you couldn’t have the crowding. And people came out on the streets in tents, and then were there for more than two years. So in that sense, the most extreme example of our housing crisis — experiencing unsheltered homelessness— is just in everybody’s face now on a daily basis in a way that we didn’t have before.
You have both an empathy, because people don’t want to see folks living like that, and a frustration, because they want their communities back to what they were, which includes not having tents on the streets.
Rachel Cohen
Beyond Covid-19, what do you see as the root cause of Oregon’s high levels of unsheltered homelessness?
Gov. Kotek
From the housing side of this, I definitely go back to the Great Recession, when housing construction literally stopped. But people continued to move to Oregon. So we’ve been behind with housing construction and keeping up with the influx of folks going on 15 years now. This has really driven the affordability issues. And what had been getting built since the Great Recession was very high-end housing, not what I would call workforce or affordable housing.
Then for homelessness, you have a lot of different populations who are out there who’ve lost their housing. And because they’re on the street they start to develop significant illnesses. Maybe you started your unsheltered homelessness because you lost your job, and you’re traumatized by this experience. So you’re starting to develop a mental health issue, you’re probably medicating with a substance to stay awake — for example, meth. Then you develop a substance issue. It’s this accumulation of illness that comes with being on the street that has led to the level of chronic unsheltered homelessness. It’s not the start of the issue, but the length of the issue that we’re now dealing with, and the depth of the illness on the street because of that.
Rachel Cohen
How do you plan to measure the success of your housing initiatives over time?
Gov. Kotek
We’ve been very specific that by the end of the calendar year, we want to have a minimum of 600 new shelter beds, 1,200 people rehoused, and a minimum of 3,600 people being supported through rental assistance that we’re preventing from becoming homeless.
So the key there is making sure that the problem doesn’t get any worse. And we wanted to be very clear with local communities: You get state money based on a plan to hit your portion of that target. The public really needs us to show that the money is connected to outcomes.
Rachel Cohen
Elected officials in other states have been reticent to tackle housing and homelessness. What’s your case for why they should anyway?
Gov. Kotek
It’s certainly daunting, right? It’s easier to pick something less complex when you’re in elected office. But what I like to tell people is that housing is the core problem. If you don’t have stable housing, you’re going to be unhealthy, and those are health care costs. If you’re trying to recruit people to your community and there’s literally no workforce housing, that’s an economic issue. It’s a safety issue because when people are stable in their housing it reduces crime and disruption. And it matters for educational outcomes — when a child moves school districts within the same year, they fall months behind.
I think things are particularly severe in Oregon for a whole variety of reasons, but everybody has the same issue. We just haven’t built enough housing. Every governor has to take up housing, you cannot ignore it.
Rachel Cohen
How do you deal with NIMBYism in Oregon? There’s also a lot of cynicism about the power of individuals to block needed housing production.
Gov. Kotek
There’s a lot of fear when people see that their world is changing. In the 2019 legislative session, we had House Bill 2001, which was the “middle housing” bill. It was a reset of how we approached what it means to have a home, meaning they don’t have to be big apartments or single-family housing. And there was a lot of fear from people that we were going to change the aesthetics, the feel, the nature of their neighborhoods. And I said, “No, we’re going to make them more livable so people can stay in the communities they want. So they can have the ADU or the duplex or the townhome that in some places was actually not allowed to be built.” There was pushback, and now everyone’s accepting it because they understand that we have to have different types of housing options.
I always go back to personal stories with folks. They tend to help people understand that we can all have prosperity if we just let go of our fears that change is going to hurt us. And it takes a lot of conversations to do that.
I think you also have to involve the people who are doing the work early on. For example, my Housing Production Advisory Council — it would have been easier if I said, “This is the stuff we’re going to do.” But I wanted to make sure that the folks who are doing the work have buy-in to the solutions, and are willing to push for those solutions. It takes longer, but you’re going to have more success when everyone’s bought in.
Rachel Cohen
I recently wrote about how the Ninth Circuit’s Martin v. Boise decision — which says people can’t be punished for sleeping outside on public property if there are no alternatives available — is shaping cities’ response to tent encampments.
Oregon is no exception, and earlier this year I know you raised concerns that Portland’s plan for unsheltered homelessness might amount to just shuffling people around. I wanted to ask you about some of the proposed solutions — like sanctioned encampment sites. What do you think about these as interim measures, and the fact that some advocates worry they’ll become more permanent fixtures?
Gov. Kotek
We have to be okay with some level of transitional shelter until we build more housing.
After the Boise decision, I helped pass legislation here to be very clear with our local governments of what they needed to do to be in compliance with that court ruling. It’s not enough to say you can’t criminalize people who are living outside, you have to also provide them a pathway to permanent housing.
And it’s also important to set some parameters about where people can be. I think it’s appropriate to have time, place, and manner guidelines for where people can camp, particularly in places that are very unsafe, like on the sides of highways and things like that.
My frustration has been that while that’s something cities have to do, they also have to provide the resources. In Portland, when their daytime camping ban takes effect in July, they have to be serious about providing more daytime shelters for people who can no longer camp on the streets during 8 am to 8 pm. We can do both, we just have to plan for it.
I’ve learned a lot in this process by listening to people who were actually on the streets. We need to lean into new ideas like Project Turnkey, which enables someone experiencing homelessness to walk into a converted hotel or motel, where they can then have a room with a locked door, services on site. And little villages, where people have their pod and their safety but they’re also living in community. Those things take a bit longer to set up but they are much more effective than what we’ve done in the past, where you just say here’s a big building with a bunch of beds in it. And you wonder why people don’t want to do that.
Rachel Cohen
I want to turn back to the 2019 “middle housing” law you helped pass, which ordered larger cities and the Portland metro area to legalize duplexes on all residential lots, and fourplexes, triplexes, townhomes, and cottage clusters on more than half of lots.
This was the first law of its kind in the nation, and as the Sightline Institute put it, “proved that it’s possible for state legislatures to take groundbreaking action against local bans on lower-cost housing types.”
You are credited with playing a major role in getting the bill passed, and on a bipartisan basis. Can you talk about any lessons you learned from that?
Gov. Kotek
My general take from the beginning was that legalizing these housing types needed to be statewide and it’s important for everybody to do it. I think other states have approached it as something you can opt into, or just for certain locales, and I really recommend against that.
The success came from building the right coalition of folks. Everyone from the land-use folks, to AARP, the real estate community, the development community, the climate activists. That level of support helped us push back on the NIMBYs.
Rachel Cohen
I want to zoom out for the last question. I’ve been writing about housing and homelessness for a long time, and it’s clear that many people see these issues as separate. I know your administration sees housing and homelessness as connected, and I wondered, why do you think there is this disconnect in people’s minds? And how do we fight that misperception?
Gov. Kotek
I think it’s important for folks who work on these issues to not get rigid in either space. You will have some advocates who work for the unsheltered who think it’s all about housing — like if we just had more housing, then everything would be fine. That’s missing the point of the acuity of the individuals on the streets.
And then you go to the other extreme where people say, “We don’t have a housing supply problem, this is a personal responsibility issue. These are folks who are just on drugs, they have mental health issues.” And that perspective — which puts the blame on them — is also wrong. Because even if those folks got all the resources they need to be healthy today, there aren’t enough places for them to live.
We had an issue recently out in Clackamas County, which is one of our metro area counties, where they had approved a hotel to convert to a homeless shelter. I was told this was one of the best assets they had ever seen for one of these conversions, it was in a good location, good shape. And then around two weeks later they reversed approval for it because they thought it didn’t focus enough on people’s mental health and drug addiction issues. This is very short-sighted.
So I like to tell people, both are true. It’s true there are individuals who have significant health issues that are helping to keep them on the streets, and it’s true they have nowhere to live. So for us, it’s the short term of helping people get into transitional shelter, continue to get people rehoused, and keep them there. We’re also trying to say we have to provide some level of ongoing rent assistance for a time, so people can stay stable and still get services. Nothing is worse than spending money and having someone come back on the streets. It’s bad for them. It’s not cost-effective.
My message to everyone is, see the entire spectrum of the issue. Deal with the complexities and have a short-term and a long-term plan. But we have to help people right now who are suffering. So every day, it’s just like, gotta do both. You gotta do it all and they are interrelated.
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