What Portland needs is real leadership on the homeless and housing front to develop a permanent funding source to give people a safe place to call home. Many of us working in the trenches are working to make that dream a reality and looking at a variety o ...
10 Jul 2013 - Israel Bayer
The past two weeks have been chock full of tragic events, bad press and anxiety on the streets, specifically downtown. A group of kids, presumably homeless, attacked a 70-year old employee of the Portland Outdoor Store downtown. He was hospitalized after ...
21 Jul 2013 - Israel Bayer
I’ve been a fan of NBA basketball for a long, long time. I’ve also worked with people experiencing homelessness for more than 15 years on the streets of Portland and Seattle. When I read that Terrence Jones, Portland native and NBA player alledgedly stomp ...
31 Jul 2013 - Israel Bayer
The past month we have seen a media frenzy surrounding homelessness. That’s why I cringed a little bit when I read the Willamette Week’s cover story on homelessness titled, “The Real World: Portland.” The author interviewed ten people living on the street ...
5 Sep 2013 - Israel Bayer
Imagine for a moment that you were faced with the experience of being homeless and had nowhere else to turn. Where should I go? You find a local shelter, but a woman half your age at the counter lets you know that the shelter tonight is full. She takes yo ...
28 Nov 2013 - Israel Bayer
Last week, on my way home to grab a bite to eat before an event, I noticed 15 or so older women bedding down together in Old Town. Their presence stopped me in my tracks. One elderly woman, homeless for less than a year, only received $700 from Social Sec ...
1 May 2014 - Israel Bayer
Street Roots vendors work hard in the summer. It’s not easy. Being homeless in the summertime isn’t any fun. Longer periods of daylight are a welcome sign for many Portlanders, but for many people on the streets it can mean going long stretches of time wi ...
10 Jul 2014 - Israel Bayer
BikePortland Publisher and Editor Jonathan Maus has been reporting on a growing concern that some homeless camps in Portland have become “chop shops” for stolen bicycles. One recent headline stated, “ Police search suspected Springwater chop shop, find st ...
9 Jan 2015 - Israel Bayer
A lot people in the housing community, for better or worse, are worked up over Anna Griffin’s ongoing series on homelessness in The Oregonian. Get used to it. A new story will come out every Friday for the next six weeks. Wait, does this mean I’m promotin ...
23 Jan 2015 - Israel Bayer
A common misnomer in many communities, including Portland, is that when you offer services to people experiencing homelessness and poverty, you attract more people experiencing homelessness. We call it the magnet myth. The reality is this kind of thinking ...
30 Jan 2015 - Israel Bayer