House Bill 2215 would end criminalization of sleeping while homeless, support basic human rights Homelessness is hell. Sleep deprivation. Verbal taunts. Physical violence. Surviving in the cold and wet. Being displaced by law enforcement on a routine basi ...
2 Mar 2017 - Israel Bayer
Those who have the least are being displaced and forced to downsize – to discard the possessions they hold dear “I can only carry so many backpacks on my back at the same time with my precious items,” Barbara told me. She was tired, upset, exhausted. Stan ...
16 Feb 2018 - Kaia Sand
An emphasis on sweeps is an emphasis on making life more difficult for our neighbors who live outside Mark jotted a letter on a sheet of amber-green colored paper that he tucked into a Street Roots newspaper. He did this over and over, writing letters to ...
9 Mar 2018 - Kaia Sand
Policing the poor just means there’s so much more work to do Now we know: More than half of the people arrested in Portland last year were homeless. Rebecca Woolington and Melissa Lewis reported in The Oregonian on June 27 that unhoused people comprised ...
6 Jul 2018 - Kaia Sand
City receives hundreds of camp complaints weekly, we should send demands for compassion instead Sometimes it feels like we’ve been given different maps to the same city. When your map has no residence that you rent or own, your city looks dystopian, one w ...
13 Jul 2018 - Kaia Sand
Portland needs to be all-in as a national leader Calling a city a cesspool certainly grabs attention. That’s how Portland Police Association President Daryl Turner started his public Facebook statement on July 16, decrying the new Independent Police Revi ...
20 Jul 2018 - Kaia Sand
DIRECTOR’S DESK | Criminalizing people for being homeless is cruel and inhumane, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled A lot gets written in a day, and on Tuesday, Sept. 4, Donald Trump managed to punch out 16 wild and furious tweets. But among this frenzy, it’s ...
7 Sep 2018 - Kaia Sand
Two Street Roots vendors had been living in the camp for months without hassle On Wednesday, Jan. 10, David Samson called the Street Roots office for his fiancé, Bettyjo Griffiths. His message: Come quickly, their camp was being swept. Before Bettyjo left ...
11 Jan 2019 - Kaia Sand
DIRECTOR’S DESK | Proposed portable toilets would shift funds used to clean up homeless camps toward facilities that foster dignity and public health If you soon see plaid- and PDX-carpet patterned portable toilets around the city, see, too, the promise o ...
17 May 2019 - Kaia Sand
DIRECTOR’S DESK | It’s only appropriate that the people who have a key stake in the new Portland Street Response are asked to participate in the process of designing it Clipboards in hand, the teams dispatched to survey people on the streets about their e ...
26 Jul 2019 - Kaia Sand