Street of Dreams
Wasterville in Utopia
On a hot August afternoon in Portland, Oregon, a Latin American couple wheels a blue cooler down the street, hawking homemade tamales, six for five dollars. A handsome blond guy with filthy feet is panhandling on the corner of SE Hawthorne and 36th. He stops them and demands “I need a tamale, but I don’t have any money. Give me a tamale.” All at once, two stereotypes collide: hard working immigrants, meet entitled Millennial street kid.
If you lived here, you’d be home by now
In the early 1990s, Portland was an affordable West Coast city where students and artists could live comfortably on a small amount of money. For $200 a month each, three friends and I rented a creaky four bedroom house with a living room big enough for serious dance parties. In the late 1990s, Portland was “discovered” as a livable city, and Californication jacked up the cost of living. Today in Portland, “it would take 71 work hours a week for a minimum wage earner to afford even a studio apartment.”
So many people live on Portland’s streets in cars and tents now, and it depresses me how numb I’ve become to the sight of makeshift dwellings. Recently I’ve noticed a lot more young people asleep on the sidewalk, and that’s impossible to ignore. It’s shocking to see people in their prime at their most vulnerable, crashed out at the feet of passing strangers. I’ve been photographing the street sleepers, which sounds creepy, but the pictures remind me they are human beings with dreams, and I have more empathy for them asleep than when they’re awake and harassing me for money.
#Vanlife
The image of #vanlife has stumbled beyond the golden glow of endless summer, idealized on Instagram by attractive people living the carefree life, smugly striking yoga poses on the beach, supported by careful product placement and paid posts. On the streets of Portland, #vanlife looks more like an exhausted vehicle from the 1990s with a cardboard covered broken window or a flat tire, loaded down with bicycles, spilling dirty socks, the stink of weed, and empty chips bags into the street. The people who live inside look tired and dirty, or wild eyed and scabby. It’s anything but sexy and carefree, and it’s probably not fulfilling anyone’s dream.
#WTF
Millennials have higher student debt and fewer post-college opportunities than previous generations. They can work harder to get somewhere, or they can give up and blame society for their lack of options. Other factors tearing apart families and diminishing opportunities include the rate of incarceration, which has tripled since the 1980s, as well as the opioid epidemic. Substance abuse is a chronic disease, and the pharmaceutical industry’s contribution of cheap and addictive painkillers isn’t helping with a cure.
Regardless of the reasons, it’s disturbing to see seemingly able bodied young people sleeping on the sidewalk, “begpacking” and displaying a shameless lack of self-respect oddly coupled with an entitled arrogance. Even more disturbing is how our alleged first world country doesn’t seem to care about finding productive and sustainable ways to help people get off the street.
Photography by Aixe Djelal in Portland, Oregon, Summer 2017.
