July 31, 2026

Welcome to Potland

What a family vacation is teaching me about acceptance, accountability, and what we owe each other.

A few weeks ago, my family and I visited Portland, Oregon. Beautiful city. And what the heck happened to it?

Before anyone mistakes this for a “my city is better than yours” post, let me say up front that it isn’t. I’m not writing a hit piece on Portland. I’m not suggesting Austin has figured out problems Portland hasn’t. In fact, one reason the experience bothered me so much is that I fear Austin may be moving in the same direction.

Portland is where my family and I saw it most recently and most vividly. But this is bigger than Portland.

It’s about what happens when cities learn to tolerate conditions no compassionate society should accept. It’s about what happens when our understandable desire to avoid judging people becomes a refusal to intervene in their destruction. Most of all, it’s about the difficult relationship between acceptance and accountability.

I’ve lived in Austin for the past twenty years. Before that, the San Francisco Bay Area. Before San Francisco, ten years in Boston. I was born and raised in New York, about thirty miles outside the city.

I mention that because I’m not unfamiliar with cities, poverty, homelessness, addiction, mental illness, or public disorder. I’ve spent most of my life in or around major metropolitan areas. I’ve seen people sleeping on sidewalks. I’ve walked through struggling neighborhoods. I’ve witnessed drug use and the desperation that often comes with it.

But I wasn’t prepared for what my family and I saw in Portland.

The tents. The garbage. The people slumped over or wandering around in what appeared to be a drug-induced fog. The open drug use. The smell. The disorder. The sense that parts of a beautiful city had simply surrendered to it.

My wife saw it. My daughter saw it. My son saw it.

We weren’t reading about it from a distance or watching carefully selected clips on television. We were walking through it together. We watched people using drugs openly. We passed human beings who looked barely conscious. We saw tents and makeshift living spaces in areas that should have belonged to the entire community.

I was disgusted.

That’s an uncomfortable word, especially when people are involved, but it’s the honest one.

I was disgusted by the filth. I was disgusted watching people openly destroy themselves. I was disgusted that this destruction had apparently become part of everyday life. People walked past it. Cars drove around it. Businesses operated beside it. The city carried on while human beings used drugs, slept, deteriorated, and slowly disappeared in public.

The Christian in me also felt pity and sorrow.

I knew every person we passed was someone’s son or daughter. Some were almost certainly battling severe mental illness. Some had probably suffered trauma I couldn’t begin to understand. Some may have been abused, abandoned, injured, or broken in ways that weren’t visible to us. Addiction had likely taken control of people who once had homes, jobs, friends, dreams, plans, and families who loved them.

I knew all of that.

But if I’m being honest, the pity and sorrow took a back seat to my anger.

I was angry at the people who appeared to be choosing to live that way. I was equally angry, maybe more angry, at the people and institutions that had allowed them to live that way.

I kept wondering how a city reaches the point where visible human destruction becomes part of the scenery.

Why is this accepted?

At one point during the trip, I met a waiter in his early to mid-thirties who had moved from Austin to Portland about fifteen years ago. Nice enough guy. He told me how much he loved Portland and that leaving Austin had been one of the best decisions he’d ever made. He took a few shots at Austin while he was at it.

I didn’t engage him. Maybe I should have.

Part of me wanted to ask how he reconciled his enthusiasm for Portland with what was happening around us. How could he talk about the city with such affection while seemingly overlooking the tents, the drugs, the garbage, the suffering? Had he stopped seeing it? Had he accepted it as normal? Did he believe acknowledging it would somehow betray the city he loved?

I don’t think he was dishonest. I don’t even think he was wrong to love Portland. People love complicated places. I love Austin, which has its own serious problems.

But loving a place shouldn’t require pretending its failures are acceptable either.

The waiter wasn’t the problem. He simply represented something that troubled me throughout the trip. People appeared to have learned how to live around what was happening.

That may be one of the most dangerous stages of any civic decline. The problem doesn’t disappear. It simply becomes familiar.

Sidewalks become bedrooms. Tents become permanent residences. Public drug use becomes something people step around. Businesses adjust. Residents avert their eyes. Visitors are told the situation is complicated.

Meanwhile, the person on the sidewalk remains on the sidewalk.

My daughter and I talked about what we were seeing as we walked around Portland.

I told her I couldn’t understand why people would choose to live that way. I also couldn’t understand why the people in charge would allow it to continue.

She said something simple.

“People just want to be accepted. Acceptance is very important.”

She was right.

At fifteen, nearly sixteen, she understood something my anger was pushing aside.

Human beings want to be accepted. We want to know that we belong, that we matter, that we haven’t been discarded. A person living on a sidewalk has the same fundamental dignity as the person stepping over him. Addiction doesn’t erase someone’s humanity. Mental illness doesn’t make someone disposable. Poverty doesn’t make someone less worthy of love.

Her comment stayed with me.

But it also caused me to ask a harder question.

Are we sacrificing accountability for acceptance?

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have confused accepting a person with accepting everything that person does. We’ve begun to treat boundaries as cruelty, consequences as judgment, intervention as intolerance.

They aren’t the same thing.

We can accept a person without accepting the conditions destroying that person. We can recognize someone’s dignity without pretending every decision is healthy or harmless. We can show compassion while still expecting something from people. We can love someone enough to say, “You can’t continue living this way, and we’re not going to help you pretend that you can.”

In fact, expecting nothing from someone may be its own form of rejection.

Accountability is sometimes the clearest evidence that we still believe a person is capable of more.

David Yeager is a psychologist whose research focuses on motivating people. His work points to something simple. People do best when the adults around them communicate two things at once: very high expectations and deep, unwavering support. Set high expectations without support and people feel overwhelmed. Offer support without expectations and people never push themselves. It’s the combination that drives growth.

The idea is that people don’t need you to lower the bar to be kind to them. They don’t need pressure without a hand to hold. They need both at once.

Parents understand this.

Loving our children doesn’t mean permitting them to do whatever they want. We set boundaries because we care about who they’re becoming. We enforce consequences because their decisions matter. We intervene because allowing destructive behavior to continue may be easier in the moment, but it’s far more damaging in the long run.

Friends and families of people struggling with addiction understand it too.

You can love someone and refuse to fund the addiction. You can care about someone and refuse to lie for them. You can accept the person while confronting the behavior. Anyone who’s watched addiction consume someone knows that unconditional approval isn’t the same as unconditional love.

The same principle applies in schools, churches, businesses, families, and communities.

Accountability says your choices matter because you matter.

Why would public compassion require us to abandon that principle?

Why would the most humane response to someone visibly destroying himself be to leave him alone?

Have we confused refusing to judge a person with refusing to intervene in that person’s destruction?

That may be the question at the center of all of this.

We don’t want to criminalize poverty. We don’t want people with mental illness or addiction treated as disposable. We don’t want police officers expected to solve every medical and social problem. We don’t want cruelty masquerading as toughness.

Those are legitimate concerns.

But legitimate concerns can produce institutional paralysis when they become absolute.

Leaders become so afraid of imposing consequences that they tolerate conditions no compassionate society should tolerate. Advocates become so focused on protecting people from judgment that they sometimes protect the circumstances keeping them trapped. Citizens become so accustomed to disorder that they stop noticing it.

Years of policy choices and cultural hesitation can create an environment where intervention becomes increasingly difficult. Once expectations disappear, restoring them is far harder than maintaining them would have been.

That appears to be at least part of what Portland is now confronting.

In 2020, Oregon voters decriminalized possession of small amounts of drugs and redirected cannabis tax revenue toward treatment. Good intentions. State lawmakers reversed most of it in 2024. The city has flip-flopped on enforcing its public camping rules too, revising, pausing, then resuming over the past two years. Meanwhile Portland State counted 12,034 people experiencing homelessness across three counties in January 2025, 61 percent more than two years earlier. A single count is a snapshot, not a full accounting. But a 61 percent jump isn’t a rounding error.

None of that means Portland’s leaders are indifferent. It means the earlier approach didn’t produce the results it promised, and the city is now trying to find its way back to something that works.

Homelessness has no single cause. Housing costs, mental illness, addiction, trauma, family breakdown, they all play a role, and no visitor passing through for a few days can diagnose it.

But complexity can’t become an excuse for paralysis.

Good intentions can still produce devastating outcomes. A policy can be compassionate in theory and destructive in practice. A system can be designed to protect dignity while unintentionally leaving people to deteriorate on sidewalks.

Intentions matter.

Results matter too.

Watching all of this, I found myself asking a provocative question.

Is it by design?

I don’t mean that some secret group sat in a room and intentionally designed cities where people live in tents and use drugs in public. That explanation is too easy and probably too conspiratorial.

But systems still produce what they tolerate, reward, fund, discourage, and refuse to confront.

A city doesn’t need to consciously design disorder to create the conditions that let it spread. It can arrive through a series of decisions that each sound reasonable on their own.

Don’t criminalize addiction.

Don’t displace people who have nowhere else to go.

Don’t force treatment.

Don’t clear an encampment without permanent housing immediately available.

Don’t impose consequences that could fall disproportionately on vulnerable people.

Each concern contains a measure of truth. Put them together without corresponding expectations, sufficient treatment capacity, shelter, enforcement, or urgency, and the system can become incapable of intervening at all.

Nobody may have designed the final outcome.

But the outcome is still the product of choices.

That’s why accountability must apply to more than the people living on the streets. It also has to apply to elected officials, agencies, nonprofits, advocates, treatment providers, law enforcement, businesses, voters, and taxpayers.

What were the goals? What was promised? What was funded? What worked? What failed? How many people entered treatment? How many remained housed? How much money was spent, and what changed as a result?

Compassion without measurement can become sentiment. Policy without accountability can become ideology. Spending without results can become an industry built around managing misery rather than ending it.

My concern didn’t end when I left Oregon.

I fear Austin, and other cities like it, are moving in the same direction. That’s why this can’t become a contest over which city is better. Austin is my home. I love it. I also know that love can make people defensive. Criticism of a city can feel like criticism of everyone who lives there.

But genuine love should make us more willing to confront decline, not less.

I hope Austin, and maybe your city too, learns from cities that let hesitation, ideology, bureaucracy, and misplaced compassion make intervention more difficult. I don’t want us to wait until conditions become unbearable before rediscovering the importance of boundaries.

It’s possible to help people and protect public spaces.

It’s possible to provide shelter and enforce laws.

It’s possible to treat addiction as an illness while recognizing that addiction produces behavior that can’t be accepted everywhere.

It’s possible to acknowledge structural causes while still recognizing personal agency.

It’s possible to be compassionate without becoming passive.

Those things require competence, resources, persistence, political courage, and a willingness to withstand criticism from people who believe any consequence is cruelty.

The dangerous version of acceptance begins with a noble instinct.

We don’t want to judge people whose lives we don’t understand. We don’t want to add shame to suffering. We don’t want someone who’s already broken to be broken further.

But acceptance becomes distorted when it asks nothing of anyone.

We tell ourselves we’re respecting autonomy while addiction strips away a person’s ability to make rational choices. We tell ourselves we’re honoring dignity while leaving people to sleep beside garbage. We tell ourselves we’re being compassionate while people deteriorate in public because intervention would be difficult, expensive, controversial, or politically dangerous.

The people suffering remain exactly where they are.

Only now their situation has been renamed tolerance.

At some point, refusing to intervene in someone’s destruction stops being mercy.

Acceptance without accountability eventually becomes abandonment.

That’s the thought I brought home from Portland.

Of course, the opposite is also true.

Accountability without compassion becomes punishment.

Sweeping people from one block to another doesn’t solve homelessness. Arresting someone without a realistic path to treatment doesn’t heal addiction. Removing a tent without creating shelter simply relocates the suffering. Rules without resources can become an exercise in making desperate people less visible.

A humane society has to hold both truths at once.

People need shelter. They need treatment. They need mental health care. They need recovery programs, transitional housing, job support, community, and people willing to walk with them for longer than a news cycle.

Cities need enough shelter and treatment capacity to offer meaningful alternatives.

They also need boundaries.

Public spaces belong to the public. Open drug use can’t become an accepted feature of city life. Sidewalks can’t become permanent residences. Encampments that endanger the people living in them, and the surrounding community, can’t be allowed to grow indefinitely.

Treatment may sometimes need to be required rather than merely suggested. Shelter may need to come with expectations. Refusing every available offer of assistance can’t always create an indefinite right to remain in a destructive situation.

That isn’t hatred.

It isn’t a failure of empathy.

It’s the belief that people are still capable of something better.

My anger in Portland was real.

Some of it may have been righteous. Some of it may have been too easy.

Anger simplifies people. It divides the world into those behaving badly and those permitting it. It doesn’t always leave enough room for mental illness, addiction, trauma, housing shortages, bureaucratic failure, inadequate treatment capacity, or the many people working every day to help.

I have to acknowledge that.

The Christian in me has to acknowledge something else too.

It’s much easier to feel disgust than responsibility.

Disgust creates distance. It lets me see someone as the problem. Compassion requires me to see the person without pretending the problem isn’t real.

Christian love doesn’t ask us to romanticize suffering. It doesn’t require us to approve of self-destruction. It asks us to recognize the image of God in people whose condition may make that image hard to see.

But love also tells the truth.

Love intervenes.

Love sets boundaries.

Love refuses to give up on people even when they’ve given up on themselves.

That’s why accountability and compassion belong together.

I don’t want my disgust to make me cruel. I also don’t want compassion to become a polite way of looking away.

My daughter was right.

People want to be accepted.

The question is what genuine acceptance asks of us.

Does it ask us to leave people alone while they destroy themselves?

Does it ask the rest of the community to accept any behavior because enforcing standards might feel unkind?

Does it ask us to describe suffering in gentler language while doing little to end it?

Or does acceptance carry obligations?

Maybe accepting someone means refusing to discard that person, even when helping requires confrontation. Maybe compassion means offering care while establishing expectations. Maybe accountability is something we insist upon because a person’s life still has enormous value.

It’s about what we owe people who are suffering, and what we owe the communities we share.

It’s about whether we have the courage to help without enabling, enforce without dehumanizing, and love without lying.

My family and I saw something in Portland none of us will easily forget.

My daughter reminded me that people want to be accepted.

Portland made me wonder whether we still understand what acceptance requires.

Because acceptance without accountability eventually becomes abandonment.

And no one should mistake abandonment for compassion.