Important read covering the broken funding model that leaves service providers underfunded and the workers doing some of the hardest work in our community underpaid.

With its vote last night to criminalize people left to sleep outside for doing so during the day, Portland has redefined the homeless crisis. What was a crisis of our inhumanity that we cannot provide a home for everyone has become a new crisis - our inhumanity is too visible.

Pdx is investing in Community Solutions/Built for Zero and listening to their advice to end our homeless crisis. Community Solutions condemns the punitive politics of homelessness while Pdx is criminalizing homeless camping. Feels like we are listening selectively at best.

As is often the case, real life imitates Seinfeld.

Salary commission is proposing 15% raises for electeds to attract more diverse candidates and so they can thrive. Meanwhile the City Budget provides a 5% COLA for human service contractors, who are not funded to pay living wages to a majority Black and Brown workforce!

Worth remembering that other cruel policies like Japanese Internment, the Death Penalty and Corporal Punishment also enjoyed broad public support. Opinion polls are not a good way to make policy decisions - especially those that disparately impact the most disenfranchised.

While OR is not California, the findings here on what is causing homelessness and who experiences it should inform our solutions. @MKushel and her team found that high housing cost, job loss were key causes and that Black and Brown people experience it disproportionately.

Good work all

I could have done w/o the toxic "Save Portland" rhetoric, but appreciated the thoughtful telling of Anthony's tragic story. Let's face our challenges Portland and do better by our people. #HousethePeople nytimes.com/2023/07/29/us/…

Thank you Alex Zielinski for this great reporting on the origins of Oregon's homeless crisis. If you think homelessness in Oregon is just an outgrowth of our opioid crisis and that housing is not our most urgent solution, take a read. opb.org/article/2023/1…

WV has higher rates of overdose and addiction than OR but far lower rates of homelessness and the lowest rents in the country. Everyone who wants it should have access to treatment. But we won't solve homelessness without solving for housing. bitly.ws/Xdbh

If your main source of news is our local big-City newspaper - the Oregonian - you would have no idea there is a global crisis in Israel or an historic leadership vacancy in Congress - but you would know where to find Pumpkin spice mead in Portland.

Sometimes sports are just great because . . . what an interception!

Kennedy School Theater - The Power of Place Roadshow - McMenamins. Come join @Ourjustfuture for this special screening and panel discussion that asks Portland the urgent question: Where we goin'? mcmenamins.com/event.aspx?id=…