As municipalities across the country grapple with how to manage homelessness and public safety, the debate has taken center stage in this year’s Portland, Oregon, mayoral race, where the two issues dominate public discourse both locally and nationally. Portland residents heading to the polls on Nov. 5 are likely to choose between two leading candidates, Commissioner Carmen Rubio and Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, who are promising two seemingly disparate approaches to tackling these issues.

Rubio, a former executive director of the Latino Network, is calling for more affordable housing and increasing “community-based policing.” Gonzalez, meanwhile, is running a campaign seemingly straight out of a MAGA playbook, calling for tougher penalties on graffiti vandals and proposing up to 30 days of jail time for unsheltered people as a solution to homelessness.  

This disparity in approach is not unique to Portland, political science professor Chris Shortell, of Portland State University, told Prism. 

“Portland is facing the same choices that many cities all over the country are facing,” Shortell said. “The goals may differ to some degree—in some communities, removing visible homelessness is the priority, while in others, more emphasis may be given to addressing the underlying roots.” 

The race in Portland mirrors debates over how to tackle the issues of crime and homelessness that are playing out in cities across the country, including Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and others as housing costs soar, homeless encampments grow, and governments turn to harder positions in many cases. In LA, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was photographed clearing out the belongings of people living in an encampment. In New York City, despite a drop in most violent crimes, the police budget for the last fiscal year was $10.8 billion. 

The contrast between the two Portland candidates is stark. Gonzalez’s social media feed on X is chock-full of alarmist half-truths, lies of omission, and logical fallacies. 

In January, he called 911 to report an assault on Portland’s MAX train, claiming he was accosted by a woman criticizing his homelessness policies and called for extra security on the train. When a video of the incident was released, and it was unclear if the woman he accused even touched him, he deleted his posts. 

Gonzalez’s latest copaganda techniques include calling the nonprofit grassroots organization Portland Copwatch “extreme” for wanting basic background checks for Portland Police rehires. In June, he called to limit or ban antipolice public comments during City Council meetings.

As commissioner of public safety, Gonzalez has hampered basic harm reduction strategies. Portland Street Response, a group designed to combat mental health emergencies and homelessness through an unarmed presence, has seen its role shift under Gonzalez. He instituted a hiring freeze, ordered the group to take part in homeless encampment sweeps, and forbade its staff from passing out life-saving materials such as tarps and tents. 

Gonzalez’s campaign did not respond to Prism’s requests for comment.

On the other side of the city commission board is Rubio. 

“Carmen believes we need to have the right first responders in every role; an entire public safety system isn’t just armed officers,” Jillian Schoene, Rubio’s chief of staff, told Prism. Rubio has also been a big proponent of hiring Public Safety Support Specialists who, along with Portland Street Response, would provide an unarmed community presence for situations where an armed responder would be inappropriate, Schoene said. 

Along with increasing alternatives to armed responders, to boost affordable housing, Carmen Rubio “is going to put in place a 90-day fast pass for any housing development to the city with full financing in hand,” Schoene said. As Commissioner, Rubio has been responsible for centralizing the city’s permitting division and bringing it all under one roof, and she wants to continue increasing city efficiency when it comes to essential infrastructure, Shoene said.  

The race between Rubio and Gonzalez represents more than an ideological battle. The role of mayor is significantly changing, transitioning this year and then permanently in 2025 toward a mayor-council form of governance. This brings all the administrative authority across all city departments under the mayor’s purview. The mayor then appoints a city administrator responsible for setting and implementing city budgets. 

It is difficult to say who is ahead in this race. However, the focus on homelessness and street crime has pushed other issues affecting Portland proper to the sidelines. 

When Gonzalez and other political candidates focus on visible low-level crime, it distracts and distorts from the larger issues driving public safety. For instance, Gonzalez bemoans the high vacancy in downtown Portland, blaming it on homeless encampments and street crime, yet offers no solutions outside of incarceration that combat poverty. 

In these referendums on crime, rarely is corporate malpractice mentioned, such as the strip-mining of local businesses by predatory holding companies and the displacement of large swaths of service industry workers. Gonzalez does not lambast corporations that do not pay building code violation liens and default on their financial obligations, thus creating the blighted environments he despises. He never posts on social media about sexual assault in the corporate workplace, the terrible conditions inside the county jail, including officer assault and corruption, or businesses that do not pay their taxes.

While Rubio “does believe we need more officers, given the size of Portland today,” Schoen told Prism, “every crime category is going down right now, except one, and that is shoplifting.” Her solution is “community-based policing” or instilling more beat cops assigned to specific neighborhoods as a deterrent for these low-level offenses. Community-based policing is a concept also criticized by abolitionists, as it continues to provide resources and legitimacy to a harmful institution.

“There is definitely a difference that voters can expect between the candidates,” Shortell said, “although the gaps are not as large as they may at first appear.”

For 50 years, the punishment bureaucracy in the United States has criminalized poverty and has actively exacerbated the problems of unemployment and homelessness. In modern politics, this focus on addressing the symptoms of a problem rather than its roots can be traced back to the late 1960s, when President Lyndon B. Johnson commissioned the Kerner Report in response to the 1967 riots during the civil rights movement. 

The findings of that report identified institutional racism as the chief culprit of inequality and inequity. It recommended the creation of 2 million jobs for low-income Americans and the immediate construction of 600,000 housing units, along with a guaranteed minimum income. It urged urban police forces to focus on major crimes, not petty ones. 

However, the most vital policy recommendation from the Kerner Report, outlined in Elizabeth Hinton’s “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America,” was this: “If police officers were to increasingly perform social service functions and partner with equal opportunity and self-help programs as part of the national fight against poverty, incentives within (police) departments would need to shift accordingly.”

Fearing that the report’s recommendations of significant government expenditures on social welfare programs and the refashioning of police into social service agents would be too liberal of an agenda, President Johnson ignored it, welcoming America’s age of Mass Incarceration.

The United States has the largest incarcerated population of any nation on Earth. Oregon, for all of its progressive aura as a liberal bastion, has an incarceration rate of 494 per 100,000 people, which is higher than almost any democratic country on Earth. It is also an incarceration rate in the top half of states across the United States. Gonzalez does not think Portland incarcerates enough people; Rubio argues Portland needs to police appropriately to its size while making investments into structural solutions that get at the roots of problems.

The choice facing city residents is a microcosm of the split seen across the country, between promises that either seek to tackle the root of key issues or to mass incarcerate the symptoms.