In Portland, the commons include streets and sidewalks, parks, libraries, transit vehicles, shelters, public restrooms, community gardens, tool libraries and shared neighborhood spaces. Public space is where an unhoused Portlander sleeps, washes, keeps warm and dry, stores what he owns and is found by an outreach worker if he is found at all. It is also where the rest of us walk to work, take our children to a park, library or school, wait for a bus and is critical to the success of businesses.

The financial cost to taxpayers of a deteriorated commons is significant. Portland Voice conservatively estimates the annual public cost of homelessness in Multnomah County at $838 million. Other researchers, such as ECOnorthwest, have come up with lower figures in the range of $500 million but only measure direct services to the homeless rather than the full public cost. An accurate accounting should include excess costs attributable to homelessness for behavioral health, emergency room visits and hospitalization, police and fire department services, and private sector costs such as increased need for security guards, replacing broken windows, car break-ins, empty office buildings, and the negative impact on business.

One can argue about different methodologies measuring the impact on Multnomah County residents of homelessness, but under any analysis, it is huge amount of money that instead could be directed toward education, mental health and medical care, for all residents of the County. This is at a time when the number of people experiencing homelessness increased 29% in fifteen months between January 2025 and March 2026.
This all makes the fifth of our Five Principles the hardest to define. Protecting the commons gets framed as a contest between compassion for homeless people and order for everyone else. It is not a contest, and the people who suffer most from a degraded commons are the people who live in it.