Opinion
Opportunity, support keys to end homelessness
Homelessness is a problem that cannot be fixed just by throwing money at it. You can throw money at a fire all day long, and it will never put out the fire. Only helping people to get the things that they missed — i.e. education, job training, and such — will change homelessness. Others just…
Climate-policy leadership begins with Portland
California has one year of water left and is in a drought cycle with no end in sight. Let that sink in. Climate change is happening, and the effects are already terrifying. The pace and intensity of change are only expected to increase the longer we wait to take decisive action. As drought continues to…
Streets are for everyone – car or no car
It’s one of the most famous images in modern urban planning: three simple photos showing how much city space 80 people take up when they get around by bike, by bus and by car. The poster was made in Muenster, Germany, in 1991. Here in Portland and around the world, it’s been used to show…
Ghosts in the Machine
The nebulous Internet collective called Anonymous is a many-headed hydra. From its anarchic early days as an outgrowth of the notorious image-posting site 4chan to its evolution into a prominent force for online as well as real-world activism, Anonymous has always seemed designed to be a cultural shape-shifter. Democratic, decentralized and without a consistent philosophical…
Portland City Council stands firm in URA housing vote
It was as if some long-lost, housing-positive energy descended upon City Hall this past Wednesday. It was the vote – or rather a series of votes – that reminded onlookers that housing for all once was — and should be again — a priority for our civic leaders, developers and neighborhoods. It was a City…
Director’s Desk: Let’s not lose our funk, Portland
Gentrification has been slowly eating away at our city for the past 20 years. Although during the past five years, with massive rental increases and the gap between the rich and the poor widening, doesn’t it feel like we are on the verge of completely losing all of our funk? By that, I mean our…
News
Grateful for the gift of gardening
“I think my favorite plant to grow is lettuce. Lettuce is very energetic, germinates quickly, and adds so much to the harvest with very few inputs,” Tom Lichatowich muses. This is how Lichatowich talks: garden vegetables have character, like people do, and his language is sprinkled with terms he learned in decades of a career…
The fabric of war
A group of Portland-area veterans is preparing to dismantle the uniforms its members wore while serving in the military – first, by shredding the fabric with scissors and box cutters, and then by beating the strips of cloth into an unrecognizable pulp. But they aren’t trying to desecrate their uniforms. They’re reclaiming them. Coping with…
