• Percentage of low-income Oregon families who pay more than half their income on housing: 80
• Percentage of Oregon children living in poverty in 2011: 25
• School children in Oregon who were homeless in 2013: 20,000
• Hours per week a worker earning minimum wage has to work to afford a two-bedroom apartment in Oregon: 70
• Percentage of inmates in jails and prisons who are classified as severely mentally ill: 16
• Youth experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County who were under age 18 on one given night in 2013: 749
• Percentage of those homeless youth that were under the age of 5: 26
• Minimum number of migrant laborers working in Sochi preparing for the 2014 Olympic Games who were not paid: 700
• Percentage of people in Portland living below the poverty level 2008-2012: 17.2
• Percentage of people in the United States living below the poverty level in 2012: 15.9
• Percentage of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes: 97
• Portland Public Schools graduation rate: 62 percent
• Percentage of households in the U.S. that own at least one dog: 47
• Cost to build the Fisht Olympic Stadium in Sochi, the setting of the opening and closing Olympic ceremonies: between $519.9 million and $703.4 million
• Average annual cost of tuition and fees at a public college for a state resident: $8,893
• Number of pages in “I Am Not a Poet” poetry anthology: 198
• Number of vendor poets represented in the anthology: 106
• Number of poems chosen for the anthology: 160 out of 982
Sources: Oregon Housing Alliance; National Alliance for the Mentally; Portland Housing Bureau; Multnomah County; Memorial’s Migration and Law Network; U.S. Census Bureau; Centre for Research on Globalization; PPS auditor; American Pet Products Association; The Anti-Corruption Foundation; College Board; Street Roots’ “I Am Not a Poet”
This article appears in 2014-02-28.