I’m writing in response to a recent letter about a Florida couple’s Portland experience (“Letter to the editor: It felt unsafe to visit Portland,” Oct. 7).

While acknowledging that homelessness is “no crime,” the writer somehow felt “unsafe” because of “the saturation of … (non-criminal) unsheltered individuals.” Indeed, the number of times he “perceived” these feelings on a modest walk “was alarming” to him.

Like Vero Beach, Portland’s a very large city within its county. Like Indian River County, Florida, which a homeless services organization there reports has experienced a 14% increase in adult homelessness, a 31% increase in child homelessness and a self-reported 43% increase in veteran homeless between early 2022 and early 2023, Cumberland County has also experienced a large jump in unhoused folks.

As Cumberland County is nearly twice the population of Indian River County, maybe the effects are more visible. With bona fides of an “entire career” in government, maybe the Floridian letter writer could have proffered some prescriptive ideas on the issue versus surrendering to a compulsion to alert others that “Portland has become a place … to be avoided,” in a Portland paper, no less.

Despite the writer’s assertion “that nothing (he) shared comes as a surprise,” it did surprise this reader, who travels among many of Portland’s residents, housed and unhoused, every weekday, feeling perfectly safe but more than a bit inept because of not having a solution at hand for the most basic of human needs of our unhoused, who can’t simply “avoid Portland.”

Mike Del Tergo
Falmouth

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