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Portland's homeless crisis is actually a regional disaster that has spread down the major highways elsewhere in the state. Police along the Oregon coast had to shoot a man last year who had wandered into traffic along a major highway and was threatening a schoolbus full of kids with a hammer. It turned out that he was a deranged homeless man from Portland who had been previously arrested by Portland police numerous times, but simply released "back into the wild" despite his extreme mental and behavioral deficiencies.

That's not "compassion;" it's actually a form of sadism. And Portland's homeless have become much more aggressive and hostile due to the lack of enforcement against them. Not only the stabbings, but casual day-to-day harassment of (especially) younger women, which typically never even results in an arrest, let alone prosecution or treatment.

Normal people seem to be responding by carrying weapons themselves. Concealed-carry permits are way up in Multnomah County (where most of Portland is located) over the past 18 months, and there have already been a few incidents of aggressive homeless being shot by private citizens in incidents later ruled to have been justified.

It's shameful, and is largely a function of ineffective and feckless city leadership. Many of the laws necessary to involuntarily commit the deranged and to make Portland much less appealing to traveling homeless people are in place, but simply aren't being used.

And a "housing first" model is fine if your homeless population is relatively small (like Salt Lake City). But once you're dealing with tens of thousands of people, that's not even remotely realistic, especially in an environment where housing generally is sharply appreciating in price.