Bullshit.
I'm one of the most vocal voices about this issue on here (coming from the uppity asshole side who wants to see our streets cleaned up). I have absolutely zero issue with the city spending money on people who need help, and I want (as much as any bleeding heart SJW) to see people off our streets.
The problem is that we are already spending copious amounts of money, and we are getting very little impact because those funds are being spend very very stupidly.
We built the Budd Clark Commons for a cost of about 5x per square foot compared to all the Pearl luxury condos just a few blocks away, and than the city complains we don't have enough facilities and beds for the homeless.
We spend $28k on a shipping container (they can be bought from the yards for about $4k) for homeless people to put their stuff into... and pay $138k per year to have it staffed a mere 3 hours a day. In another thread, I detailed how the costs outlined by the city are simply fucking absurd for the amount of service paid for.
We don't have a top to bottom accounting of everything Portland spends, but we can look south to San Francisco. By their own count, SF has aproximately 6000 chronic homeless folks on the street, and by their own accounting, San Francisco is spending roughly $220,000,0000 on programs to combat homelessness per year. So SF is spending over $30,0000 per homeless person - more than enough money to put up basic shelters and feed these folks - but none of that is happening, and SF's homeless problem gets worse and worse every year.
The problem is not that we have homeless people - the problem is that we are absurdly unable to do anything about it, despite the fact that Portland is spending tens of millions of dollars a year in direct costs, and probably just as much in indirect costs.
The citizens of Portland should be incensed, no matter which side of the homeless issue you are on, but the most incensed should be those with the most compassion for the homeless - the money they advocate so hard to get spend, is winding up in feeding troughs, and disbursed with such poor cost control or efficacy management, that all their effort to pry it out of the taxpayers are useless.