In this episode of The Detour, we talk with Eli Saslow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, who has written heartbreaking, beautiful, deeply researched, and deeply empathetic stories about the challenges Portland and many other cities have been facing. And about some of the people living these challenges and trying in difficult circumstances to overcome them.
Show Notes
Eli Saslow is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and current New York Times writer. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Read more about Eli and his work.
Transcript
Welcome to The Detour. I'm Adam Davis. Cities, and especially downtowns, have always had rough edges. Over the last several years, and especially since COVID, these edges in many cities have gotten rougher and larger. Not too long ago, Portland seemed to many people across the country like a kind of exception, a place without rough edges.
A leafy, quirky, benign place where young people went to retire. This was, of course, a caricature. Portland, like all cities, has always had its rough edges, has always been tough on and for some of the people who live here. And it turns out that over the last five years, that benign caricature was quickly and oversimplistically replaced by a different picture of Portland, as a city on fire, a city that simply cannot take care of, or isn't exactly a home for, too many of the people who live here.
In this episode of The Detour, we talk with Eli Saslow, a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist, who has written heartbreaking, beautiful, deeply researched, and deeply empathetic stories about the challenges Portland and many other cities have been facing. And about some of the people living these challenges and trying in difficult circumstances to overcome them.
Eli doesn't only write about Portland. He also lives here himself and is raising a family here. In this conversation, and in the long form stories he writes, Eli calls on an exceptional combination of knowledge, relationships and experience to help us more deeply understand the people hard-timing it in Portland streets and some of the forces shaping these most difficult lives as well as how so many people in Portland and other cities are trying in small and large ways to make their lives and places better.
Eli also suggests that all of us are in some sense living in and working in these streets, and that the crisis in our cities is a crisis for all of us, no matter where we lay down to sleep. We talked with Eli at the Alberta Rose Theatre in Northeast Portland in May 2024 as part of Oregon Humanities’ “Consider This” series on the theme fear and belonging.
Here's Eli now. A few months ago you wrote a story based in Portland and following one man who I actually was just lucky to meet and that's Michael Bach. And I want to ask you, this may be funny to ask with Michael here, but I want to ask you, who is Michael Bach and why in thinking about a story about Portland did you write a story following Michael very closely for a time?
Eli Saslow: Sure. Apologies in advance for maybe a long, step-down answer, but first off, thanks so much for being here and doing this. Thank you to all of you for coming. I know that all of us except for one person don't necessarily have all the solutions.
But I do think that one first major step towards solutions in any community is engaging. And deciding that you want to think about it, be proactive about it, be a part of, invest yourself in helping people, and embed it in the place where you live, and, I think coming to things like this is a part of that, so, thanks for giving us some of your time, and, thanks.
I guess the long step-down to Michael, who's here, so I can't lie. My main work is I'm a journalist. I write these longer stories now for the New York Times. And what I write about is how the major pressure points in the country, the big issues that we're facing in the United States–how they impact people's lives. There's no way to do that job and do it well in the last three or four years since the pandemic without writing about what's happened to many American cities, not just Portland, but cities all over the country. And I would say particularly west of the Mississippi many of them are struggling from some of the same endemic issues.
You know, it's a rise in unsheltered homelessness, more people who are not only homeless, but who are not living in shelters or staying in extended-stay motels, but instead are out on the street. It is also like extremely high vacancy rates in downtowns. It's kind of like a vacuum in a lot of downtowns.
- what's filled into that vacuum are people in huge states of distress. Rising mental health crises and reduced capacity for cities to respond to them. [These crises arise] particularly because fentanyl, the worst opioid that we have seen in a series of horrific opioids, has become the major driver of so much disaster in Portland and a lot of other places.
And in Portland, as all of us know in some ways, these crises I would say, [or it’s] a wide ranging mental health crisis that was exacerbated by the pandemic, and a lack of affordable housing as housing prices have continued to skyrocket. [And] fentanyl, which sells on the street often for 50 cents for a blue pill.
These problems have sort of broken some of the basic civic structures of Portland and many other cities. In Portland, in our worst moments, our 911 call volume is at historic highs. The wait times have increased by drastic amounts. We still have now, I think, fewer than 300 patrol officers–police officers who are patrolling the city and responding, trying to respond to this record number of 911 calls and we don't have enough ambulances so that there are hundreds of calls every month to 911 where there is no ambulance available to respond. Firefighters have essentially stopped being able to fight fires all the time because they are fighting the overdose epidemic. Fire Station #1 in downtown Portland, in one month last summer, responded to 300 overdoses. That is what they do. That's their job. That's the major part of what they do during their days. And we also have, in downtown in particular, a lot of small businesses that feel like all of these problems have have arrived at their doorstep and they don't quite know what to do because when they call 911 they're on hold or they're routed to a non-emergency line where sometimes your wait time might be 4, 5, 6 hours.
All of these businesses, and all of these institutions around cities are looking for solutions. And one of those major solutions, and it is an imperfect solution for sure, is a massive growth in private security companies. If you're a coffee shop in downtown Portland at this point, you almost definitely have at least one private security contract and often two.
The number of private security officers working every day in downtown Portland outnumbers police officers or law enforcement by about a rate of eight to one. That's typical of a lot of cities in the West. One of the challenges with this is that private security guards, no matter how much they want to do, are necessarily limited by the law, and sometimes also don't know how to provide the solutions that are needed, right?
Private security guards writ large. [They] require much less training than police officers or firefighters. They are not allowed to make arrests if they don't witness a crime. There are many things that they can't do. Nonetheless, in Portland now, in many cases, the first responders to overdoses, to people in crisis, to people in any kind of distress, are private security guards.
That's what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about what it meant for America's cities that this industry has grown so much. I also wanted to write about the people who are doing those jobs. And so I began talking to a lot of people in Portland, to a lot of different private security companies.
There are more than a hundred, many more than a hundred that do private security in downtown Portland on any given day. Some of them are sort of maybe the way we would think of private security. They're almost, as Michael who's here told me, sort of function more as scarecrows. It's companies that hire somebody to stand at the door, [and] don't interact with people. Essentially, businesses that are hoping by having somebody here, maybe less bad things will happen.
There are other companies, like the one that Michael works for, called Echelon, that have a much more proactive model, where they have patrols around the city every night, They have neighborhood districts. So, for instance, in the Pearl District, there might be 40 businesses that pool together their money and say, we need 24 hour security and we want to support in many ways this sort of private police force that is going to come and tend to our needs.
The city is not capable of tending to our needs. And by the way, the city of Portland also knows that it's not capable of tending to these needs because the city of Portland itself hires tons of private security guards. This is what I wanted to write about. I learned that Echelon was a company that was very proactive.
I started spending time with a lot of people in that company, trying to build trust, learning about what they do. I met a bunch of people who do this work for them, who drive around the city all day and all night responding to businesses’ and people's concerns. But I would say most of the time responding to people who are in distress and whose distress is causing first and foremost massive health issues for them, but also issues for all of the people around them.
I rode around with a lot of these security guards. On one of those days I rode around with Michael, and I think the truth of why I wanted to write about Michael is that I think we're at a moment in this city and maybe in this country, where one of the things I worry about a lot is that we are running into the ends of our empathy. And that's a really dangerous and awful thing.
We talk about these things in Portland, in particular, sometimes as problems and not about them as people. People who are in huge degrees of distress. Michael, despite seeing this distress every single day, and responding to one overdose after the other, it was apparent being with him in his car that he feels– it hurts him. He stops to pray, to gather himself. He connects with people on a personal level. I was with him day after day in his minivan that became his patrol truck– his family minivan. I don't know how many days I rode with him. I hope he didn't keep exact count. I hope it wasn't that terrible for him.
But I was probably with him for seven or eight days and I would guess that every day Michael teared up, a half dozen times because of what he was seeing in the city. That is what so many of us now are missing, and I think that's what a lot of us need. And that's what made me want to be with him.
Adam Davis: So there was so much in that response.
Eli Saslow: Are we done?
Adam Davis: Well, I mean, the step-down is really helpful. And I think actually the way, when I think about the stories you've written about Portland, San Diego, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, often what it seems like you're doing is you're trying to help us, your readers, understand forces that most of us are dimly aware of, but can't really track.
Organizations who are working, often at cross purposes, through one or a few individuals, and the lives they're having for those days. So I think I want to ask about the individuals for a minute, and you've just talked a little bit about Michael, and you know, during the story you wrote about Michael's work, Michael interacts with some other people who, every one of those people also, the stories there and the way the systems and the forces interact feel just almost overwhelming.
So I want to ask about that focus on individuals again, and maybe you could say a little bit about one or two of the…., whether it's Phoenix or San Diego, how you know this is the person and are you trying to illustrate forces or are you really identifying the person first? What's the thinking there?
Eli Saslow: Yeah, thanks for a really great, generous question. I hope I'm trying to do both, right? I think I'm trying to write about the major forces, but for me anyway, as a reader of books, novels, stories, journalism if I'm just reading about problems, and not reading about people, those aren't things that live in my mind and certainly not in my heart for very long.
I think it's better for all of us when we think about people and what the major structural problems in our country mean for people's lives. So the kind of journalism I do means that I'm always trying to follow these problems out to a particular person in a particular place at a particular time.
Like most reporters I'm calling and talking to tons of people. When I'm doing the story in Portland, I'm talking to people who work at all different levels of city services,you know, departments in the city and other other security companies, people at firehouses. I'm having all of these conversations but also what I'm doing is I'm trying to spend enough time with the people that I write about so that they can start living their lives around me. Instead of just asking them things I can listen. I can see things. I can watch them navigate the difficult issues that they're dealing with every day. Whether that means ‘you following Michael,’ not just for one day or talking to him just one time, but being in his minivan with him for 80 hours over the course of a week and a half to actually get to see all of these crises, all of these things play out.
And to be there for long enough that I feel like I actually understand them, and hopefully better yet, feel them. Because if I don't feel them, how can I ever hope that I'm gonna write a story that's gonna make somebody who's never met Michael, or who's never been in a part of this city and feel it.
You know, I have to feel it. That's part of my job–particularly on city issues, and I'd say unsheltered homelessness and fentanyl. That's been a lot of what I've done over the last year, and that has a lot of different manifestations in terms of the people who have become the center of those stories.
Those all end up being people that I feel deeply for and have these very complicated, but very intimate relationships with, right? I'm not in their life as an advocate and I'm there to observe honestly what's going on. And then to write about it honestly. Not from a place of judgment, but hopefully from a place of understanding.
I'm trying to understand why they feel the things they do, why they think the things they do. One story last year I was writing about the staggering humanitarian tragedy of how many people die homeless on our streets and major cities. In Portland that number has escalated by more than 400 percent in the last four years.
So I think last year more than 300 people in Multnomah County died unsheltered. That's a lot of fentanyl overdoses. That's also cold exposure, heat exposure, a staggering number of people who get hit by cars because they're outside and in unsafe situations. In San Diego, it used to be fairly typical that about 60 people who were homeless would die unsheltered in a given year. Last year, the number was over 900. I went to San Diego to write about that and ended up writing about somebody named Abdul Curry, who has lived on the streets of San Diego for the last 6 years and in the months before I was there with him, his wife had died of a fentanyl overdose. He'd lost 20 people, 20 friends that he knew in the last months from overdoses and he himself had overdosed on fentanyl and survived six times. So I'm there in that situation and I'm spending night after night, day after day with Abdul, with the people who also are huddled inside this parking garage where one Tesla after another in downtown San Diego is going past, and who are trying to figure out how to survive from one day to the next at that very basic level.
Phoenix[is] another city that is wracked right now with many of these same crises. I was writing about, basically, how all of these issues are impacting small businesses and how they're trying to navigate them. And so, eventually, I ended up writing about this little mom and pop Subway Shop–Joe and Debbie's subway shop that they had been running together for 40 years, very close to the state capitol in Phoenix and now, in the last three years, surrounded by an encampment that's known in Phoenix is The Zone.
It's about a thousand people within six square blocks living unsheltered in downtown Phoenix. And this had become the only thing that mattered every day in this little Subway Shop restaurant. And while I was there, Joe felt like, you know, our whole family savings are in this tiny little sub shop. We can't leave.
We can't sell. We can't give up. And his wife, Debbie, who is experiencing PTSD going into work every day because of everything that they dealt with, was saying, I can't do this anymore. Every day in that case I'm with them in the sandwich shop. And then I'm across the street with the people who I'm also getting to know well, who are living and trying to survive across from that sandwich shop.
Adam Davis: So it's interesting that in all of these cases, you're talking about cities. You're talking about people in cities and that these challenges are, they're showing up in smaller places, but there's something about the bigger cities where the scale, the numbers you've given us already are staggering. And as I've been reading and rereading the pieces you've written, it's made me wonder about cities and what we can expect from them.
Eli Saslow: Yeah. Great question. Thank you. I think many of the things that maybe we expect from them, we're not getting at this moment, is what my own reporting would indicate to me. I think cities are also a little unique because we have cities that were built on, uh, built in ways that we don't function anymore.
And we have massive amounts of vacant office space and downtowns that are in the process of changing dramatically. And yet we also have housing prices that have escalated in ways that have totally changed what's affordable and what's livable for a huge number of people, right? So you put those two things together and it creates this really difficult recipe for how to make places work. Housing affordability is a huge part of the unsheltered puzzle in a lot of these places.
Our capacity to house people, to even our capacity for everything is vastly below where it needs to be to get people well. In Portland I would say in my reporting experience, that first step is people who are addicted to fentanyl. Do you mind if I take a moment to just describe what that's like?
Adam Davis: I think we have to, yeah.
Eli Saslow: Okay. You know, I've spent a lot of time, uh, maybe not quite as much time as Michael, but probably more time than most of us here, spending day after day with people who are addicted to fentanyl. And that drug is so powerful and so, corrosive, it's almost hard for me to get my head around.
I mean, the average fentanyl user in Portland, this is based on data, but also just me being there every day, they're using fentanyl on average nine to 10 times a day. It's a drug that's very, very fast acting. It sort of obliterates you, right? You feel like a lot of opioids, it makes you feel nothing, which is very appealing if you're living a life of constant physical and emotional distress. um, The high wears off very quickly, and then you go into withdrawal faster than any other drug that we've known, right? So oftentimes if you haven't used for three or four hours and you're a frequent fentanyl user, you're already experiencing serious symptoms of withdrawal.
So people who are addicted to fentanyl oftentimes are buying drugs. These transactions are happening a half dozen times a day for people, right? They're getting a little bit of money, buying a little bit of drugs, getting a little bit of money, buying a little bit of drugs. And also, fentanyl rewires your brain.
It gets harder and harder to get clean if as a fentanyl addict living on a street of a city, you decide, I don't want to do this anymore. Somehow you have the clarity, in that moment and the desire to do all the hard things that it's going to take to get clean.
In Portland, the answer is there are two, at the moment, two walk-in detox facilities. Two places where, allegedly, you're supposed to be able to go. Both of them do great work. Both of them have a lot of trouble finding staffing. There are huge staffing shortages, and both of them don't have enough beds.
So, you know, for instance, Fora Health, which is in East Portland, and where I've spent some time, and has amazing doctors and staff, but they don't have enough. And what they do have is people.
In order to get in– you've woken up on the street of downtown Portland. You've decided, I don't want to do this anymore. You get on a bus at 5:30 in the morning, because you have to be in line at this place at 7:00 AM in order to have a good chance of getting a bed. Many of the times you make that journey and there's no space. You still don't get in. Right. And you have to go back and try again and again for the chance to go through a withdrawal that even with medical assistance, is basically, doctors have told me it's like going through a pretty difficult waiver. And so this is the thing you are trying to get into and sign up for and we don't have the capacity and services to make it happen right away. And if you do get in, if you're lucky enough to get one of those beds, you have two days inside and then because we don't have enough transitional beds and we don't have enough long term beds, for the most part, you're discharged back to the street with a bus pass and you're going back to a tent in a place where your life is brutal and everyone around you is using fentanyl and it's selling for 50 cents.
So we're not setting anybody up for success in that situation unless the resources are there. And in most cities, not just Portland, every city, every city that I've been in, the resources are not there to get people well, to assist them in taking care of themselves and to get them in any kind of long-term setup that's going to work.
Adam Davis: So to say you're not setting people up for success is a colossal understatement.
Eli Saslow: Yeah. A generous way to say it. And we're, we're failing them.
Adam Davis: And the we and the them, and that sentence are both interesting. I think the ‘them,’ there, means the people that are suffering most, the people that are living on the street, the people that may be battling addiction, the people on the bottom end of the socioeconomic scale.
And so I want to go back to this question about cities, but I want to ask it with a little bit more force. And I'm thinking about, especially your story about Josh Askins and Chris Drake in Oklahoma City, where I feel like what you're asking in that story is a question about responsibility. Yeah. Who's responsible for not only the conditions that we've inherited, but how we're going to get out of it, even down to who's responsible for Jade Wilder's health and future?
Eli Saslow: We all are, right? I mean, that's the only answer. I think when problems are this difficult for unsheltered homelessness, the opioid epidemic, but it's true I think of every big intractable problem in our country– you know, the border, immigration, we like to believe that solutions are simple.
Oh, you just have to do this. The truth is, these problems are difficult to solve because they're remarkably nuanced and they require all of us to hold multiple truths at the same time, which unfortunately, in my own opinion, in the United States, we've gotten worse at that, right? We want to be sure about everything and we want to have a firm opinion about it.
We don't want to embrace nuance. And I think solving these problems requires going from a place of simplification to a place of complication. For instance,in cities, who's suffering, right? So I think a lot of people would say, ‘Joe and Debbie's sandwich shop? Who cares?’
Like the real distress is on the other side of the street. The real people who are suffering are the ones who are outside and have nowhere to go and who are overdosing. Or in Phoenix, dying of heat deaths, which happens 700 times a year in Phoenix, at insane rates. That's true. Of course, the real, the absolute suffering, the worst of what a human being can experience in many ways, is happening outside the sandwich shop.
It's also true that for Joe and Debbie, the fact that this little business that they've built and cared for and has formed the basis for their lives, the fact that that's caving in and that customers don't go there anymore and are afraid to go there, and that there are gunshots happening across the street all the time, and that mostly what Joe does is arrive at work early now to clean human feces from this entire part of the city, that's also a disaster for Joe and Debbie, right?
It's also a disaster for Phoenix as a whole. It has an entire part of the city now that people don't want to go to where they can't fill occupancy. These problems begin to exacerbate each other. So I think rather than pointing to one thing and saying, this is the victim, this is the solution, we're all in it together. These issues impact all of us in different ways. Those impacts for all of us are real. They might not be proportional, but they're real and it's true. Then I think that means we all have to invest ourselves in solving.
Adam Davis: You're listening to The Detour with Eli Saslow.
So I want to go back to the theme of the series for a minute, which is Fear and Belonging. It feels to me like you're making an argument and your stories are doing more than making an argument. They're getting us to feel especially the belonging side of things. But I think the daily experience as I hear people talking around Portland focuses a little more on fear and on Joe and Debbie's experience.
Eli Saslow: Yep. I think that's right. And that's also a little bit what I mean when I talk about one of the things that I love about Michael is his compassion, because if we lose that, which we've lost in a lot of ways, if that disappears from the fabric of our city or any city, we're in massive trouble, right?
If we start dehumanizing people who are suffering and talking about their issues, just as livability, livability issues and things that impact us, That’s just a disaster for all of us, I think. Maybe it's worth telling a little story about my time with Michael that I think might, when you talk about fear and what's happening in a city and holding multiple truths at the same time, it was probably the most, illustrative thing I saw during our time together.
- of the days that I was with Michael,a call came in from one of the parking garages where they provide security. There had been an attempted kidnapping of a seven-year old child. A woman in [crisis]-- experiencing delusions, drug induced or otherwise, from her mental health issues had seen a mother and daughter. This mother and daughter had driven in to go shopping for new shoes.
They'd come out of a Nike store and this woman, Jade was her name, convinced that this seven-year old was hers, tried to take this kid away from his mother and run away with him. And [in]this chase, the mother, Jade, and the child all ended up in a parking garage. They called 911, 911 was backed up, nobody was coming.
They also called this private security company, Echelon, and so I got to this garage with Michael. Michael, because of the limitations of being a private security guard, could not detain Jade. He couldn't make an arrest. All he could do was kind of try to hold this really fragile situation together until police got there.
In the east precinct of Portland on this particular day, and this is fairly typical, there were eight officers on patrol. It's a massive area, dealing with a lot of things, a lot of 911 calls, there were eight officers dealing with them. So Michael and another Echelon security guard who was there responding, are trying to keep Jade in the garage, keep the mother and the child still in the garage, even though the child is traumatized, crying, saying he wants to go home.
The mother does not particularly want to be standing there next to the woman who just tried to kidnap her son. Jade is looking at the ceiling, talking about things that are coming through the ceiling. Michael is offering her a cigarette to calm down. He's sitting with her. He's saying, tell me what's, tell me what's going on.
Hey, let's sit down. Let's talk. He's trying to hold them all in place until police get there. One 911 call, two 911 calls, three 911 calls. Nobody's coming. Nobody's coming. Michael's calling again. Any update? Nobody's coming. And finally, Michael just says, you know what? I'm calling the dispatch officer and asking him what's going on.
And the dispatch officer answers and says, we're doing the best we can. We have to respond to calls in terms of priority and at this point, in this moment, this attempted kidnapping of the seven year old is not rising to the priority to get somebody there. So, eventually, understandably, this seven-year old's father arrives.
In the time that it's taken anybody to come to this garage, other than Michael and his partner, this seven-year old's father has driven in from the outer suburbs of Clackamas County, and has gotten into downtown Portland, and gets there and is irate, right? He's like, what is happening?
How is there nobody here? His kid's crying, his kid wants to leave. And eventually, they're like, we're leaving the garage. Also at the same time, Jade, she's having all kinds of delusions, she's freaking out. She starts running out of the garage. And so, Michael and his partner, at a very safe distance, are telling her, don't run, don't hurt yourself.
They start following behind, narrating this slow-moving sort of walking chase through the city to 911 to try to get somebody there. In part because maybe there should be consequences for Jade, but also because she is in a massive state of experiencing delusions and who knows what's going to happen next.
She's going to harm herself. She's going to harm somebody else. Finally, after an hour and twenty two minutes, and a sort of chase that goes through most of the city, Michael and his partner follow Jade as she runs into Pioneer Courthouse Square, where there's a fountain. It's sort of the base of the square.
- finally arrive, and Jade jumps into the fountain. She's screaming, she says, there's blood all over, all over the city, there's blood all over all of our hands. She's suffering, suffering in huge ways. And Michael stands back with me and we sort of watch and Michael, you know, I'll never forget, felt incredible relief in that moment. Like, okay, they got here.
Something is going to happen. Something is going to be solved. After consulting with the other two police officers who were there on the scene, because of their own staffing issues, eventually the police officer comes over to Michael and says, ‘Look, we think that our presence here is escalating the situation. She's very dialed up. She's screaming. We're worried that she's going to climb on this ledge and she might do something. We also don't have the manpower at this moment to put a hold on her.’ That's really how a lot of these problems temporarily get solved, is that somebody is put on a mental health hold, which usually lasts 24, 48, or 72 hours, depending.
The only people in Portland who can put a mental health hold on somebody are police officers. The police officers basically say, ‘We have so many things happening in this city. There are just a very small number of us trying to deal with it. It is her direct words where it is not worth our time to try to put her on a mental health hold and get her somewhere.’
I think, afterwards, as I wrote down everything that I saw, as I got the body camera footage from Michael and his partner, as I spent a ton of time tracking down Jade's mother, who herself has been coming to Portland again and again, and basically screaming at the top of her lungs, ‘Somebody pay attention. Somebody help my daughter. Somebody, please.’ She's called the police on her daughter. She's done all these other things to try to help her kid get well. And I think, as I process that, trying to think about who is this bad for, who are the victims here, it is an unbelievably complicated question. The fact that episode resulted in nothing, literally nothing, to me feels like a disaster for Jade, who is in, huge distress, who is a danger to herself and everyone else around her, and yet she goes back to a tent, an abusive relationship, meth during the night to stay awake so she doesn't get abused, fentanyl during the day, and whatever the next delusion is going to be.
It's a disaster for her family that's trying to get her help. It's a disaster for Michael and his partner who have invested energy into trying to do something to make her or parts of the city safer. And it's a disaster potentially for the next seven-year old who happens to be shopping downtown, right?
It's a multilayered mess. It's not one simple thing or one person, one aspect of us that is suffering. It's suffering that impacts all of us.
Adam Davis:So I think I'm hearing in the silence of the room, something that I'm feeling and something that you must fight all the time, which is a sense that these forces are overwhelming. The impacts on our communities and our people are overwhelming and it's hard to know first, how to make sense of it. Second, what the hell to do. I think I want to ask you maybe take a deep breath for a sec, because I want to ask you, a kind of step back question. And that is, as you're talking about the condition of modern American cities, and it feels increasingly overwhelming, It's making me think back. It sounds like ancient Greece. It sounds like the kind of tragedy that is, uh, so large that, for example, Michael's actions rise to the level of the heroic. It would take something heroic from Jade. To get out of the situation she's in even to show up at seven would require some kind of personal heroism. So in a way, I want to ask you maybe not now as a reporter, but as a person, ‘What's your sense of how did this become where we are?’
Eli Saslow: Wow. I need to take like six breaths. I think the answers for how we got here are…. we've touched on some of this right? It's the pandemic. It's… we could spend six hours talking about the opioid epidemic and how doctors were taught and conditioned to prescribe for pain for generations in our country and what that's led to and all these other things.
I think for me, maybe the easier and slightly more hopeful thing to talk about because you guys deserve that at this point is what are the things that make me feel some possibility of improvement or feel better? And the remarkable gift of my job is that in a country that is increasingly polarized in so many ways by our politics, by urban/rural divides, by socioeconomics, by still very much by race, my job is almost like a passport to travel and spend time with people whose experience in the country is very different from my own. And it's also probably worth saying that as a journalist, I can offer them nothing, right?
Nobody I write about ever gets paid for me writing about them. Sorry, Michael. Nobody that I write about ever gets to see the story that I'm writing until it's published. Because if I were to write that story about Michael, and then I sent it to him and said, Hey man, what do you think? I would be empowering him to be the editor of his own story.
None of us, of course, are the most fair and thoughtful editors of our own stories. So, instead, all I can say to people, when I go to them, when I want to write about their lives, when I want to be with them in really difficult moments, is, ‘I think this matters.’ I think that maybe if I can understand this, if I can see what this is like, I might be able to make other people feel what it's like.
And maybe in some way, that will change the way they walk through the world. The most inspiring and best part of my job is one on one. No matter who you are, the individual capacity to trust and to build relationships and to care about each other is still there, right? Like when we invest time in each other, relationships and trust can build really quickly.
That's my whole job. I see it all the time in my job. And so I think a lot of us have a tendency to look away. It's less painful, it's easier. We “other” each other, right? That's fear, in many ways. It's easier that way. But I think if we invest time in really actually seeing and being present with people, in being present with these issues and demonstrating through what we say, but also through our listening, through our willingness to hear and be there and be present, that can build relationships that are meaningful really quickly. Those relationships are the foundation of everything.
Adam Davis:So let me, let me ask you about Portland specifically because you live here. And you live here with family. And the Portland we've talked about, the Portland you've been helping us see more clearly, I think, feels like a place that would be very difficult to live, to raise family, and I think for many of us here, it's also only part of Portland of course. What is it like for– is your relationship to Portland and to people here different because you live here than it is other cities you report on?
- Saslow: What a great question. Writing this story..before I worked at the New York Times, I worked for the Washington Post and I've lived in Portland for a decade. I have had this very fortunate, privileged journalism job where I do these long stories. I spend a month on every piece. I've written two stories on Portland in the last decade. I think some of that is because it's more painful, right? It's more personal. That makes it more painful.
Certainly like being in Michael's minivan every day revealed a version of Portland to me that I thought I understood, but I didn't understand fully. That stuck with me. Like it changes the way I move through the world. It changes how I think about the people around me.
It changes how I want to parent my kids, but these things are all really complicated to navigate. This is a personal and small little anecdote, but it’s like the kind of conversations and things, debates that we have all the time.
We have three kids, they're 8, and my 12 year old is a good runner. She likes to run with me, and we run a lot together on the Springwater Corridor. I think probably in part because I believe so much in empathy, and in trying to connect with people, when we're on the trail and somebody comes up to us, and is potentially in distress or whatever else, my instinct is [to] see them, connect, be kind. That, in my own experience, often works.
My wife, also, totally rightly, is like, you can't teach our 12 year-old daughter to stop and be kind every time somebody in distress comes up to them while they're running on the Springwater Trail. That's not good, right? That doesn't work. And that's also very true. So I think this stuff for all of us informs how we walk through the city all the time and how we try to be thoughtful about it. Of course when I'm seeing things that are painful here in the place where I live and the place where I choose to live, again and again in a city that I love, that impacts me differently than when it's in San Diego and eventually I get on a plane and come on home.
Adam Davis: I know you started to go towards things that in a way bring you some sense of hope. I was thinking about your follow up story you wrote about Joe and Debbie. You did a kind of short update to a story that was again, a really hard story about their business, their lives, the people living in The Zone, and then just recently it sounded like there were some changes to legislation in Phoenix. The Zone had kind of gone away. I didn't get a full sense of the story of what that meant for people that were living there and that sort of thing but what it made me want to ask about was where can you point to a couple specific instances where you see meaningful progress against these forces that can sometimes feel….
Eli Saslow: Totally. I think there's meaningful progress underway in our city too, right? Like one of the things we're doing is we're investing a lot of resources and trying to help people and solve these problems.
And that's a first and very necessary step. I think also a lot of us are waiting for those resources to bear fruit in the ways that we hope and expect that they will. But Portland just announced it's going to open again a 24 hour sobering center. We're trying to increase our bed capacity.
These solutions aren't instant and in Portland over the last five years, the city has sort of reversed some of its thinking on many things, right, whether that's, legalizing individual use of drugs or whether that's how we feel about how many police officers we want.
And in the last two or three years, the city has been pretty clear about the fact that we're trying to hire more police officers and that takes time, and training them takes time, and there are issues there too. So I think the solutions are also underway here. But the biggest thing is for there to be solutions, there has to be capacity for the people you're trying to help.
In Phoenix for a long time, Phoenix legally could not remove this encampment because it didn't have a place for people to go. And that's a very basic thing. It's like a Supreme Court decision that I think is absolutely right and ethical, it can't be illegal to be homeless. If somebody doesn't have a place to live, they don't have a place to live.
We can't just criminalize that again and again, unless we have meaningful solutions to offer them, right? [applause] So the big issue in a lot of cities. Thank you. That's nice. The big issue in a lot of cities is that we're not there. We're not even close to being there, including in Multnomah County. We don't have nearly…there are more than 10,000 people now who are homeless in Multnomah County, half of them unsheltered and living outside, we don't have nearly that many beds for them. So until you get to that point, you are, I think rightfully handicapped in how you go about solving it, right?
You have to scale up that capacity and that's hard because it's housing people who haven't been housed for a long time, who are used to living outside, who might feel safer with the people that they're living with, who have underlying mental health issues and addiction issues.
Coexisting at the same time. That's a really complicated group of people to help. That's not like, ‘hey, here's an apartment, good luck,’ right? It requires resources, tending to management all the time and deep empathy constantly. It's challenging. And so that's also investing in a workforce that can do those things.
Adam Davis: That's another way that I think Portland is trying to improve, and hopefully over time it will get better. So you talked earlier about the challenge of editing your own story because you're biased in your own case, or you're going to see it differently. I'm thinking about all the different interests.
- can sound like a negative word, but I don't mean it negatively. I mean all the different groups of people that have very strong feelings about the stuff you're writing about. I assume every one of us has an opinion about Portland and we all kind of think we know and some of us really do, [‘tho] I don't put myself in that camp. But some people in here I know work very hard on this stuff and I wonder about how that feeling of ‘I know what needs to be done’ or ‘I see what's wrong’ sits alongside what I think is the kind of empathy and connection that you're trying with your stories to build.
That is, how do you see those two things going together?
Eli Saslow: I mean, to me, I guess in my own work, it's necessary to have both of those things. I don't think that I could come up with ideas for solutions for fixes to problems without having empathy for the people that are being affected by them, right? When we talk about reflexive judgment and feeling like we know everything and oftentimes if you suddenly pivot your perspective, if you're able to think about it outside of yourself and spend time, you know, instead of in the subway shop, with the people across the street or instead of with the people across the street, with the young up and coming person in a political office who's trying to solve it. When you switch the perspective and you're able to empathize with different people in those situations, it changes and complicates how you see the problem, which I think actually makes your solutions more difficult, but also more true and better. I think we all learn and sort of move through the world in different ways. For me personally, empathy and connection are central to all of it.
Without that, for me, I have trouble understanding things about anything. Like the thing that I connect to first is people, what they're experiencing, how they're seeing things. That's what teaches me the most.
Adam Davis: Fear is the thing that interrupts empathy for the most part.
Eli Saslow: Totally. Fear is a big part of it. It's also that we live now in a society where we exist in our own separate bubbles in a lot of different ways, right? And that's like the news we read, the things that we consume, the fact that we curate our own news feeds through Facebook pages that are all confirmational and that give us the same ideas that we already have.
That is also a thing that keeps us from, from empathizing and connecting with other people, right? So it's, that's an intentional act. You have to work hard to try to learn about what it's like to walk through the world as somebody who's not like you. There are a lot of ways to do that. Like going and spending time in places where you volunteer, the people that you meet, the people that you try to have conversations with. And also the things that you read, the novels that you're drawn to, the documentaries that you want to watch that allow you in some small way to sort of inhabit somebody else's perspective of what this vast and complicated country is like.
Adam Davis: I think doing all of those things is like a very necessary democratic act. I kind of want to bump you off your professional spot for just a minute. Might be hard. Might be hard. You feel like Portland's getting better?
Eli Saslow:Not the Blazers. Um, yeah. I do feel like Portland's getting better. I think it's slow. I think that it's nowhere near where I would like it to be. And probably where most of us would like it to be. But I do see signs of progress. That can be neighborhood to neighborhood. It can be like, you know, for me I get to see some of the progress 'cause I go and I spend time with a few people who get into the beds at a place like Fora and see what personal individual progress looks like too.
I guess as a resident of the city, I do take some comfort in the fact that we are not alone. I was in San Francisco yesterday. I have a job that has me traveling a lot to a lot of different places. Oklahoma City, where I did a story last year., they have the same issues that we do in a place that's very different.
And by the way, in a place where the solutions are essentially the polar opposite to the solutions that we've come up with, Oklahoma City, I was writing about the fact that there, what they've done, in a way that I think is highly problematic is they've decided to go after the fentanyl issues is they work very hard to press murder charges on anybody who not only distributes fentanyl, but shares fentanyl with somebody who overdoses.
So I was writing about a homeless fentanyl addict named Josh Askins. Him and his buddy had come up with $15, bought fentanyl they'd used together and his friend had suffered an overdose. Josh tried to revive him, drove to a gas station, screamed for help, called the police, the police came, his friend died, and they arrested Josh and tried him with first degree murder.
This is when you talk about the vast range of the problems everywhere, the solutions that we're attempting have that big of a range, right? Like, decriminalizing the use of fentanyl versus charging many unsheltered, homeless fentanyl addicts with murder for trying to save friends who die, which that's a disaster.
Yeah, that shouldn't happen.
Adam Davis: It is some strange consolation to say I feel a little better because the problems aren't only here.
Eli Saslow: Totally. It's, I mean, it's not strange to me. I also feel consoled by that.
Adam Davis: Now, early in that comment, you talked about signs of success and then you quickly named individuals who seem to be responding well. But I want to ask you because you have a national perspective that few of us have. What are signs of success? How do you know in Phoenix or San Diego or Oklahoma City or Portland? Okay, things are getting better, but what are you looking at that helps you see that?
Eli Saslow: I guess I think there are a lot of answers to that question. One for me is looking at the number of people who are unsheltered and dying on the street feels to me like a very basic thing that if that's not better things aren't better.
It is not okay to live in a city or in a country where people whose lives are meaningful, and have people that care about them and begun from a place of possibility…. [To have]So many of those lives end in deaths with so little dignity, and deaths where it often feels like nobody cares.
Right. And with Michael. I was with him as we came upon overdose deaths in Portland and that is the daily business of what happens in our city. Michael was broken by it and moved by it. But the other people who were there–essentially in talking to them, it was like Tuesday morning downtown, you know, that's what's going on.
And so I think until that, if you want to just say one data point, that feels like a very basic one. People, we should be invested in the business of keeping people alive. That's phase one. Are there other subtler signs to you that you recognize when you go to a place, you start getting involved?
Are there other very obvious measures that you want to remind us of? Yeah, sure. I mean, I would say, one of the reasons that we all feel these issues so much in Portland is because particularly our number of unsheltered people who are homeless is so high. That didn't used to be what American cities looked like, right?
Homelessness has been endemic in the United States for a long time. We're at a particularly bad moment for it now, especially in the region of the country where we live, but the big thing that's changed is that it used to be that 80 to 85 percent of people who are homeless in the United States were indoors somewhere. They were in a shelter. They were in some kind of long-term supportive housing. Now in many cities over 50 percent of people are living outside where it's obviously much worse for them. It's much more dangerous. They're dying at greater rates. And to be honest, it's also much worse for us, right?
All of these. All of these issues that have become foundational in what we're dealing with in Portland are in part because of so much unsheltered homelessness. So, you know, when I go to cities where there's less of that, that to me does feel like a positive sign. Like if, if you're seeing less, it's not that the problem isn't there.
Somebody being homeless and being sheltered is still something that we should work very hard to fix and deal with. But the first step oftentimes is getting people somewhere that's more safe for them and for everyone around them.
Adam Davis: Thanks. I think this is the last question I'm going to ask. And it's not, it's really a question about a question you might have. And that is, as you're doing this work, I wonder what are you most wondering about? What's a question that won't go away for you?
Eli Saslow: Oh boy. A question that won't go away. I mean, I think this is going to be a sideways answer, but what I think about a lot in my work and I hope what every story that I write is about is a reflection on the privilege of my job. I get to spend time honestly observing people's lives, oftentimes in moments of crisis, right?
That’s for all of you who are doing the good important work of trying to improve people's lives and make the city better. Being in proximity to trauma, to hard situations, to people in distress is— that can be difficult and that can be taxing, right?
And, you know, for Michael, I would see for him what a toll that would take. And I know from my own work that that can be taxing and that can be hard. And so I think about for myself, like, how do I balance that, right? How do I balance that? Watch an NBA game, how to go for a trail run, hang out with my family, things that just make me feel happier.
The much more true thing that I think about all the time is that as a journalist, one of the great gifts of my job is that the story ends. I leave Jade and she's still there in that tent dealing with what she's dealing with. I leave Abdul and more of his friends are overdosing.
The true trauma, the true hardship is always on the other side. It's not mine, right? I'm so always trying to center the people that I'm writing about in whatever story that I write or whenever I talk about the work that I do. And the last thing, I'd say the greatest truth for me that I'm always reminding myself in my head with my work, and I hope it's true for some of you, is that, as taxing as it can sometimes be and as much as it can occasionally take out of me, doing this work gives me so much more than it ever takes away.
I have the chance to go and be in places that feel meaningful and important to me. To be with people in ways that maybe I can help them be seen.
Eli Saslow is a Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times writer. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
You can find more of Eli's work in our show notes at OregonHumanities. org.
The Detour is produced by Kieran Bond. Kyle Gilmer is our editor. Ben Waterhouse, Karina Briski, and Alexandra Sylvester are our assistant producers.