Street Roots • April 17-23, 2015
Page 3
Editorial
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A group o f women left homeless in 2014 after being released from women's winter shelter. “M y experience has been hell, "one o f the women told
Street Roots. “I do n ’t have all the answers, but 1 do know that no one in their right m in d would let hundreds o f women sleep on the streets.
Where's the leadership in this city?”
Staff
Executive D irecto r Israel Bayer
israd@streetroots.org
Managing Editor Joanne Z u hl
Let's work on making things right on housing
This year both the City of Portland and Multnomah
County launched Home For Everyone, a new plan to
address housing and homelessness in our community.
Mayor Charlie Hales and Gity housing commissioner,
Dan Saltzman, along with Multnomah County Chair
Deborah Kafoury and commissioner Jules Bailey helped
launch the process that brought together the
community to oversee an array of complex services to
deliver the best outcomes for ending individual and
family homelessness in our region.
The group recommended an additional investment of
about $33 million over two years - some of which are
m
m
one-time allocations and some will
be ongoing. The goal is to provide
hundreds of people experiencing
— homelessness a safe and stable
place to call home, while helping
prevent thousands more from becoming homeless.
The recommendations, as outlined in StreetRoots in
the March 26 edition, call for increasing women’s and
family shelter beds along with a menu of other options
for elected leaders to consider - including increasing
short and long-term rent assistance, Section 8 vouchers,
creating more mobile outreach teams and $20 million
for affordable housing development. The
recommendations also include allocating resources
toward income opportunities to help stabilize people
experiencing poverty.
Low-income Portlanders need access to stable
housing in a variety of forms, and creating affordable
housing requirements last month in South Waterfront
and investing money in a'East Portland affordable
housing strategy with Home First Developement and
the Portland Habilitation Center (PHC) are steps in the
right direction. Infact, Street Roots would argue that
we need to be budding more stable affordable housing
in E ast Portland - considering how many school
children and families already live in extreme poverty.
Saying that, there’s a storm lurking on the horizon.
The Portland Housing Bureau’s budget is projected to
decline by million of dollars in the next five years. This
comes on top of an already burdened system that’s not
producing even close to the affordable housing units
needed to address the ongoing housing crisis. The
newly formed Welcome Home Coalition, which Street
Roots helped found, estimates that we will need an
additional $50 million annually to actually tackle the
problem.
We have hard choices to make Portland, and Street
Roots believes individuals and families should have
access to a safe place to call home, especially women
and children. It’s that simple.
The City of Portland and Multnonah County should
m eet in the middle. That m eans investing an additional
$8 million a piece for the next two years to achieve the
initial investments needed for the Home For Everyone
plan. That’s phase one.
Phase two should be indentifying a long-term local
resource that will generate at least $20 million annually
and look at costs associated with a variety of housing
models to build new affordable housing.
Street Roots understands the hard realities the city
and county have to make when it comes to budget
priorities. We also know that nothing should take
priority over saving people’s lives on the streets. Why
bring the community together to create a plan if you
don’t plan on funding it?
We’ve been here before, and it isn’t pretty. We have a
moral obligation as a community to give people
experiencing poverty safe and stable places to call
home, especially knowing that education and health
care systems, along with the business sector, will all
benenfit from these smart investments. If not, it’s a
vicious cycle that will continue to plague our city until
< we have the leadership to make things right. Street
Roots believes there is no better time than the present
to do so. Let’s make things right.
joanne@streefroots.org
Vendor Coordinator Cole Merkel
cole@streetFOOts.org
Operations Director Sarah Beecroft
Program Assistant Grace Badik, Jesuit
Volunteer, grace@streeiroots.org
Development Director Sarah Cloud
Development Assistant Ann-Derrick
Galliot
Reporters Emily Green, Sue Zaiokar,
Christen McCurdy, Sarah Hansell, Sam
Bouman, Jacques Von Lunen, Jared Paben
Photographers Diego Diaz, Joe Glode
Canvasser Desmond Hardison
Board of Directors
Chairman Bruce Anderson
Vice-Chairman Brad Taylor
Treasurer Heather Stadick
Secretary Amber Bielman
Directors Rich Rodgers, Michael Anderson,
Leo Rhodes, Mora Coon, Darren Alexander,
Eddie Barbosa, Rachel Langford
Volunteers
Jan Bayer, Rob Shyrock, Stacey Heath, John
Barker, Sarah Hansell, Aaron Von Reyn, Chere
Cobb, Audrey Cerchiara, Jade Maniscalco,
Anjali Rathore, Eliese Baker, Doug Spangle,
Susannah Kamala, Susan Gallagher, Tom Ray,
Lee Ko, Dan Jones, Lisa Waldo, James Yu, Sam
Bouman, Cherie Vedal
If you are interested in volunteering w ith
Street Roots, please submit a volunteer
application at streetroots.org/vofunteer. Or
■ call Volunteer Coordinator Grace Badik for
more information at 503-228-5657,