The rumor was that someone scooped a frozen hummingbird, hoping they could resuscitate it, but they were only met with the strange stillness of a usually fluttering bird. It was the coldest day of the year thus far, below 20 degrees, and the tiny nectar-seeking bird just couldn’t survive.
The Street Roots vendor community commonly practices that sort of care. Vendor Joseph “White Cloud” Smits cradles Gabriel, a small dog with long brown ears, swaddled in a blanket. I was handed a small cat named Ghost while I stood talking outside to K. Rambo about the new issue. I recently found a photo of me several years ago holding a rabbit that lived in the woods with its human companion who sold Street Roots. I was rabbit-sitting while the man sold his papers.
Some dogs protect their humans with deep barks. Many cats drape around people’s shoulders like furry stoles. There are tiny dogs bundled in sweaters and coats, pushed around in baby strollers. Street Roots vendors can rapidly list the names of the various dogs and cats.
That urge to nurture runs strong among some people who aren’t taken care of by society each day, unable to afford four walls and a locked door for safety. It’s almost like they refuse to let creatures be as forsaken as they are. Because truly, in this and other prosperous cities, housing itself is simply out of reach for many poor people.
In fact, urban prosperity pairs with homelessness, as Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern demonstrate in “Homelessness is a Housing Problem.” While many factors push people into homelessness — or pin them there — it’s the unaffordability of housing that drives it.
“People with a variety of health and economic vulnerabilities live in every city and country in our sample,” Colburn and Aldern write, while “the difference is the local context in which they live. High rental costs and low vacancy rates create a challenging market for many residents in a city, and those challenges are compounded for people with low incomes and/or physical or mental health concerns.”
So while Mississippi and Alabama have higher poverty rates, and West Virginia and Tennessee have higher rates of fatal overdoses, these states have lower homelessness rates from coastal states as well as affluent inland areas.
It’s hard to be poor in a region priced for the rich. Your survival is not accounted for by the housing market.
I never saw the hummingbird that the men tried to revive and — after they discovered the tiny heart stopped — resurrect. So I didn’t know what kind of hummingbird it was. I’ve seen hummingbirds in the winter before — one that tried to suckle a holiday light, red and shining on a string hooked above a porch, but I wondered about this bird that seemed to be in a region too cold for its survival. I began to read up on hummingbird migration: while it’s more common for hummingbirds to return from Central America and Mexico in February, some come back in December, seeking winter wildflowers. Others never leave, year-long dwellers of the western coast of the United States.
But this December day was far below freezing, not the more commonly temperate Portland winter day. It was an inhospitable place for this tiny bird, cared for by several men who, faced with that inhospitableness every day, lavished kindness on an impossible situation.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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