Looking for Someone to Blame
27th May 2025
Oregon housing prices are “soaring.” Homelessness is increasing. Not having anything else to do, homeless people turn to drugs, aided by city and county programs giving them free syringes and other paraphernalia.
This leads to conflicts as people who actually have homes find their neighborhoods invaded by homeless people and their tents (given to them by the county government), drug dealers, and associated problems. This has Progressives looking around for someone to blame for all this other than themselves.
The latest scapegoat is the Oregon bottle bill. Passed in 1971 to help control litter, the bottle bill requires a 10 cent deposit on all beverage cans or bottles. As a result, up to 80 percent of Oregon cans and bottles are returned for recycling, as opposed to around a third in states with no bottle bills. Environmentalists and libertarians both support the bottle bill as an incentive-based solution to the problem of littering and pollution.
Yet now the bottle bill is come under attack for “dragging down Portland” because homeless people pick up discarded bottles and take them to redemption centers, which then become centers for drug trafficking. This has led the legislature to amend the bottle bill to make it more difficult to return bottles for a refund.