News
21st century tent city: a photo feature
Tent cities — organized and run by people experiencing homelessness — are becoming de facto living options in times of limited shelter and low-income housing. Seattle, which like Portland has a history in the tent city movement, recently agreed to allow additional tent communities. Here is a look inside the Seattle community of Tent City…
Power in the printed word: ‘Housekeys not handcuffs’
Paul Boden’s “House Keys Not Handcuffs,” a dramatic and disconcerting book on homeless organizing, art and policy in San Francisco and elsewhere, begins with a personal quotation that puts homelessness in the compelling human perspective it demands: “Holy shit, it is time to go home, and I got nowhere to go.” Millions of women, men…
DEQ resurfacing in Oregon
Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) grabbed the lifeline it sorely needed when legislators approved a $1.5 million package to restore its wastewater permitting functions in June as part of the water quality program’s $63.2 million budget for 2015-17 — a $5.5 million increase over the previous biennium. In addition to restoring six positions and…
City, county looking for landlords to house homeless veterans
With approximately 360 Portland-area veterans still in need of housing, city and county officials are pleading with landlords to consider taking homeless veterans as tenants in order to reach local and federal goals of housing all veterans by the end of 2015. “Maybe these veterans don’t have the best credit history or rental history, but…
Working to cut poverty in half
Reducing poverty by 50 percent sounds like a bleeding heart liberal’s dream. Saying that people should work more sounds like the canned response of a free-market capitalist. But David Riemer thinks such a dramatic reduction in poverty is possible — with the help of America’s free-market economy. Riemer is a senior fellow at the Community…
Opinion
Living with death: Book Review: 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty
If you’re going to put somebody to death for a crime, you’d want to be sure they’d committed it, right? Yet prisoners, guards, chaplains, lawyers and others who are acquainted with death row estimate that a sizable percentage of people there — perhaps 7 percent — never committed the crime for which they are convicted.…
Beck: A letter to my younger self
Pop star Beck contributes to a celebrity series of letters to younger versions of themselves for street papers worldwide. Beck talks about the “insanity” of public life, the hard times of his teenage years — and a life-changing trip to London. When I was 16 my family was going through hard times. There was a…
Vendor Profiles
Street Roots vendor profile: Katie Amberson
Katie Amberson is slowly getting her life on track. She moved here from Phoenix, Ariz., a few years ago with her mother to help take care of her grand-aunt. Since then, her aunt has died, but Katie stayed here. She decided to become a vendor about four weeks ago. Apart from offering her a sense…
