Why Marion+Polk First’s “treatment first” approach is a bad deal for Salem

Salem is facing real challenges. A strained budget, rising housing costs, and a homelessness crisis shaped by forces far beyond city limits. What Salem doesn’t need right now is a costly ideological experiment dressed up as tough love.

Enter the Marion+Polk First slate. Their pitch is seductively simple to some: make treatment a condition of receiving shelter. Sounds reasonable until you ask a few obvious questions, like: treatment paid for by whom? Administered by whom? And what happens to people who can’t comply, won’t comply, or are in no condition to comply? The treatment-first model doesn’t actually answer those questions. It just implies that whatever happens next is the person’s own fault.

That’s not a policy. That’s a shrug with a price tag attached. It’s classism with a clipboard.

The treatment-first framework rests on a flattering assumption: that homelessness is primarily a behavioral problem, solved when individuals make better choices. This conveniently ignores that along with the rest of the country, Salem is experiencing a housing affordability crisis that is grinding working families into poverty. Rents are up. Wages aren’t. Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in America. People are one job loss, one illness, one bad month away from losing everything. Demanding they complete a treatment program before they’re allowed inside is punishing people for being poor in a system that manufactured their poverty.

Here’s what the Marion+Polk First slate isn’t talking about: Salem already has programs that are producing results. The Homeless Services Team (HST) pairs law enforcement with behavioral health outreach workers, connecting people to services without criminalization. The REACH Team does direct street outreach, meeting people where they are. These are not feel-good experiments. They’re evidence-based approaches that reduce street homelessness, build trust, and move people toward stability. Now the Marion+Polk First slate wants to torch the philosophy behind them in favor of a punitive gatekeeper model.

Someone is going to need to explain, slowly and with citations, what problem they are actually solving.

Salem has faced significant budget shortfalls. Against that backdrop, the Marion+Polk First candidates are proposing… a sprawling, mandate-heavy system that would require the City to assess, route, monitor, and enforce treatment compliance for an entire population of unhoused residents — many of whom have serious, chronic conditions that don’t resolve on a municipal timeline or a campaign promise. All while the Salem Police Department is understaffed, city staff are stretched thin, and the budget is only starting its recovery.

Who’s paying for the treatment capacity? Who’s funding the compliance infrastructure? What happens when someone is discharged from treatment and has nowhere to go, again? These are not gotcha questions. They are the bare minimum a responsible city council candidate should be able to answer before asking Salem to blow up what is actually working. The Marion+Polk First slate does not have answers. They have vibes.

Treatment-first policies have a long political history, and it is not a flattering one. They emerged as a way to appear compassionate while maintaining the ability to exclude, punish, and disappear people experiencing homelessness from public view. The “treatment” framing softens what is functionally a punishment model: comply or lose access to shelter, which in an Oregon winter, is not an abstract consequence. It is a potentially fatal one.

Salem deserves candidates who understand that housing is the intervention. That stability enables recovery. That punishing people for the failures of an economic system they didn’t design isn’t tough love — it’s just expensive cruelty with better branding.

The Marion+Polk First slate is offering Salem a more costly, less effective, and considerably crueler approach. They are asking voters to pay more for worse outcomes, dressed up in the language of accountability. We can do better.