Housing
Jan. 31 Sam Adams Memo (full text)
A Jan. 31 memo penned by mayoral aide Sam Adams proposed, among other things, to build large-scale homeless encampments in Portland staffed by Oregon National Guard and others. The full memo, first reported by Willamette Week, is below in PDF format. Jan. 31 Sam Adams memo.pdf
Vendor Profiles
Street Roots vendor profile | ‘Street Roots feels like home’
The artwork Wendy contributes to the Street Roots office is “made with love,” she said. She began creating chalkboard art because of conversations she had with Helen Hill, an artist and veteran Street Roots volunteer. “Helen is the best!” Wendy said. “She would sit and talk with me as I was sketching. We’d talk about…
Opinion
Opinion | It’s tough to be old and poor
It’s tough to be old, poor and in poor health. My mental health issues have become supplemented by physical constraints — wobbly legs, vision issues, extreme clumsiness, pain everywhere. Worst of all, although I am drowning in media stimulation, I need human company. This drew my doctor to conclude I need daily help with tasks…
Kaia Sand | Mayor’s emergency order displaces unhoused people
Mayor Ted Wheeler invoked an emergency declaration to prohibit people from living along many major streets where people camp often seeking visibility as a form of safety. It’s one thing to read “any state or federal highway in Portland’ or any “High Crash Network Streets and Intersections” as an abstraction, and it’s another to look…
Opinion | ‘Why Scribes?’ The long, ancestral journey that led me to change my name
It is, and forever will be, one of the greatest questions that spans the sun, moon and planet, for all who’ve become parents, the question: “what do we call this child?” Before first cradled in my mom’s arms, this great debate had already, in part, been decided by tongues long past my parents’ mouths. The…
News
End of the road for Sisters?
Bronwyn Jones Carver is a member of Street Roots’ MoJo program. MoJo is composed of vendors learning about journalism, covering life on the streets and writing about issues important to our community. A downtown Portland institution for people on the streets recently closed, though it may not be permanent. Sisters of the Road cafe has served…
Why is it so hard to unionize? Because the rules favor employers
When asked “why now” — why this moment for people to come together, to brave the risk of getting fired, the strain of psychological warfare in the workplace, to face the basic perils of union organizing — Kate Suisman posits it’s the result of a slow, steady decline. Over time, working conditions worsened until they…
Reflecting on his own youth, Talilo Marfil wants to give back to the next generation
Talilo Marfil started his musical journey making beats at the Apple store in downtown Portland when he was just 16 years old — as a houseless teenager, this became his means of survival. Now, a renowned local rap artist, Marfil used his platform in 2017 to connect with kids in Klamath Falls who were struggling…
