Join Street Roots for an open house on March 24!

Readers and supporters: You are invited to come celebrate 10-years of Street Roots!

Come meet readers, vendors, volunteers and staff and hear about the organizations mission at the Street Roots office at 211 NW Davis on Tuesday March 24 from 4-6PM.

Throughout the 2009 Street Roots will be having different events to celebrate 10-years of publishing the newspaper and putting money directly into the hands of people experiencing homelessness and poverty.

For more information contact Israel Bayer at 503.228.5657 or e-mail us at streetroots@hotmail.com. You can also RSVP through the comment section!

We hope to see you there!

Sincerely,

Street Roots family

Alien boy trailer is out

According to filmmakers (and many Portlanders), “In September 2006 James Chasse was tackled by three law officers on a downtown street corner before a dozen eyewitnesses. James was not suspected of a crime, he had not committed a crime.

The officers beat him, kicked him, broke 17 ribs and his shoulder. They used a Taser on him repeatedly. He screamed for mercy. The officers thought James was a drug dealer, a homeless person, a non-person, a ghost. They were wrong. James was a poet, a musician, he had a family which loved him, friends, neighbors, dreams and hopes. He was an artist; a small, shy, gentle person. And he was a person with schizophrenia.

James was sent by paramedics to jail. Jail nurses refused to admit him. He died en route to a hospital in a police car driven by the same officers who had earlier beaten him. A grand jury refused to indict those officers. The City and County refused to terminate or discipline them. Alien Boy is a feature length documentary film about the life and death of James Chasse.”

Street Roots did a feature piece on the first stages of making Alien Boy in May of 2008. The trailer is out. 

Portland handed down additional funding by the Feds

According to staff with the Bureau of Housing and Community Development, the HUD Continuum of Care awards were announced late last week. Portland is one of 23 communities in the country to receive funds for a “Rapid Re-Housing for Families Demonstration Program.”

The BHCD also received funds for two new permanent housing programs for chronically homeless persons with disabilities. Read the press release. (Read the complete breakdown of the funds in the next issue on March 6.) 

Due to the lack of planning other communities weren’t so lucky. 

Posted by Israel Bayer

Homelessness Marathon today on KBOO!

The Homelessness Marathon will be on KBOO today on 90.7 starting at 4P.M. and running until 6A.M. tomorrow morning. The annual 14-hour radio broadcast features the voices and stories of homeless people from around the United States.

The Homelessness Marathon features live call-ins all night long via a national toll-free number. The Homelessness Marathon is available for free to all non-commercial radio stations.

The show is live from Mississippi this year. The show this year has some great scheduled guests.  Check out the schedule. Note schedule is Eastern times.

Open houses scheduled to consider the fate of Fareless Square

This your chance to chime in on the Fareless Square debate.  It’s become an annual affair to have TriMet attempt to do away or curtail the idea of free bus travel through the city’s central corridor. It’s never happened, in part because of the vital service the fareless area provides for not only individuals traveling, but businesses who rely on the mobile economy downtown.

Here’s the meetings notice from TriMet:

TriMet is currently seeking public comments on several important transit issues, including proposed service cuts and possible changes to Fareless Square. We are holding a series of open houses throughout the metro area in late February and early March 2009. If you can’t attend, you can learn more about the proposed changes below and send us your comments by email, phone or mail.

Wednesday, Feb. 25, 4-7 p.m., Portland Building, Room C, 1120 SW 5th Ave.
Portland, OR 97204, Thursday, Feb. 26, 4-7 p.m.

Clackamas Town Center (vacant store formerly The Icing, near Sears on the 1st floor of Mall) 12000 SE 82nd Ave., Happy Valley, OR 97086

Friday, Feb. 27, 11 a.m.-2 p.m., Portland State Office Building, Room 1E (Lloyd District)
800 NE Oregon St., Portland, OR 97232

Tuesday, March 3, 4-7 p.m., Beaverton City Hall/Council Chambers, 4755 SW Griffith Dr. Beaverton, OR 97005

Communication aids: If you require a sign-language interpreter or other communication aids at a meeting, please call 503-802-8200 (select option 4) or TTY 503-802-8058 (7:30 a.m. to 5:30
p.m. weekdays) at least 48 hours in advance of the meeting.

Before implementing any of the proposed changes, we will review all feedback and schedule formal public hearings later in the spring.

In the meantime call and send an e-mail telling TriMet to keep Fareless Square!

Extra! Extra!

Holy Moly! Street Roots turns 10! And we want to celebrate with you! Step one: Pick up a copy of the new edition of Street Roots and read all about our development over the years, and opportunities for getting involved and supporting the Roots. It all starts with that great vendor on the corner. Here’s what to look forward to in the latest edition:

Positive Negatives: Women in Portland’s sex industry document the world around them in a new photo exhibit. Rebecca Robinson reports.

Border crossings: A reflection on a life in containment. Mark Turner of Denver rights about his life spent living in the confined Palestinian city of Nablus.

Bad times for Bonzo: Reagan revisited: A review of the new book, “The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street.

One economic stimulus plan for two Americas: Paul Boden with the Western Regional Advocacy Project writes on how the administration’s plan could truly stimulate change – get behind the real housing movement.

And much more awaits you in the new edition of Street Roots – hot off the press Friday morning!

Act Now! Tell TriMet that removing Fareless Square is not an option!

TriMet is once again considering taking away Fareless Square. TriMet along with the Portland Business Alliance are working on proposals that would range from dramatically overhauling Fareless Square geographically to charging $1 to ride downtown and to Lloyd Center.

The police, business alliance and TriMet have alluded to Fareless Square creating an atmosphere of lawlessness. They also point to the loss of revenue for TriMet, an estimated $800,000. We think the proposed changes are about greed and intolerance.

The proposed changes strike at the heart of what makes Portland unique. Portland’s downtown is not a lawless urban environment regardless of how many lobbyists the Portland Business Alliance hires to say so. And we think the loss of revenue that small and large businesses will incur with no Fareless Square will far outweigh the $800,000 in revenue for TriMet.

The Fareless Square system is a model that brings people together. Regardless of your class or culture, together we are able to move around the city’s core in a way that promotes and celebrates what we have in common, not our differences. Fareless Square must stay.

What you can do: Call (503.962.4910) or email (pr@trimet.org) TriMet Public Relations office and tell them you want to Fareless Square to remain the same – free and welcoming for all.

Sight Unseen: City’s count of people on the street finds some, but misses the broad scope of modern homeless demographics

By Mara Grunbaum, Staff Writer

Want to fill out a survey?” asked outreach worker Brandon Schwanz of a young man on a bench outside the downtown library. “It’s so we can get an idea of how many people are homeless in the city.”

The kid laughed.

“Good luck!”

The streets may be a statistician’s nightmare. Still, every two years, Portland conducts the One Night Street Count to try to quantify the city’s homeless population. Over the last week of January, outreach workers surveyed people they found on streets, under bridges, in parks and in campgrounds. Social-service providers surveyed their clients. The one-page street count form collects demographic data and the answer to one primary question: Where did you, or where will you, spend the night of Wednesday, Jan. 28?

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development mandates the street count, and the simultaneous One Night Shelter Count, from any community that receives federal funding for housing and social service programs. The counts also give local policymakers feedback on how well their 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness is working.

The last Portland street count, in 2007, found 1,438 people sleeping outside. The shelter count, which is administered by Multnomah County, found 3,018 people in shelters, transitional housing or emergency rent assistance programs.

Schwanz works for Yellow Brick Road, an outreach team that targets Portland’s homeless youth. The evening of Jan. 27, he and two other outreach workers took street count surveys on their regular tour of downtown. None of them had given the survey before.

“It’s going to be awkward,” Schwanz predicted.

“We’re not crazy”: Gulf War illness is real — deal with it, veterans tell national panel

By Cydney Gillis, Street News Service

In the final days of the first Gulf War in Iraq, Mark Nieves was a soldier in a unit assigned to destroying munitions dumps. When the war was over, he came home to Seattle and started college, joining Reserve officers’ training to further his career in the military.

His body, however, had other plans. As a junior in his 20s, Nieves began to notice that he couldn’t exercise without becoming unusually winded. He became drowsy and lethargic, saw blood in his stool and, after exercising, he started breaking out in head-to-foot hives the size of dollar bills — a condition for which he sought help early on from the Seattle veterans hospital, only to regret it.

Because no welts were visible during his first visit, “one resident doctor became irritated with me… yelling at me and kicking me out of the treatment area. I was humiliated in front of everyone,” Nieves told a national panel of doctors and veterans who visited the Seattle hospital in January. He went in a second time, he said, and was simply given a common anti-allergy medication.

“From that day,” Nieves said, “I gave up on the VA.” He never went back — a problem that, 17 years after the war’s end, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is finally trying to address.

Elsewhere Man: Sociologist Dalton Conley takes a wide-angle view of the newly hatched middle class

By Adam Hyla, Street News Service

Once, it seems like years ago, the American work force’s rising productivity was supposed to buy us some free time. No less an eminence than Jon Kenneth Galbraith worried about what Americans would do as technological advances brought leisure to the masses. Today, we understand that the digital age means the collapse of old boundaries between work and play as we enter a life in which we’re intimately reachable ‘round the clock. We used to brag about being plugged in; these days, we can’t get unplugged.

Sociologist Dalton Conley describes the social and psychological consequences of this and other aspects of the “weightless” economy in his new book “Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety” (Pantheon) as high technology, changing gender roles, and hardening class lines have altered life in the workplace and at home.

The dollar value of one’s labor, Dalton argues, has abstracted as the middle class moves from the industrial into the symbolic sector, spurring anxiety about one’s earning power and social standing. There’s an old word for this, Conley writes: alienation. Our sense of detachment from the real economy has us working scared and putting in more hours, while the rise of the two-income family has created a whole new demand for more personal services at low cost — in other words, low-wage work that only worsens inequality.

Conley is chair of New York University’s sociology department, Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research. With his books; “Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America” and “The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why” and he has explored the interaction of social class with racial and other physical characteristics. These are subjects that Conley, in his youth, explored empirically: his memoir describes growing up in the mostly black and Latino housing projects of New York’s Upper East Side.

Adam Hyla: You left your cell phone at home today. How appropriate. How does it feel?

Portland Women’s Crisis Line benefit Friday

Looking for something to do Friday night? How about an evening of song, dance, slam poetry and burlesque to benefit the Portland Women’s Crisis Line, which provides 24-hour support to survivors of domestic and sexual violence? You know you want to go.

WHAT: “Words, Women and Song: A Sexy Sassy Celebration of Females.” A night of entertainment featuring Annie Verngetti, Sossity, Diane Anderson-Minshall, Stella and Talulah of the BB Dolls, Blacque Butterfly and Shakespeare’s Crush. Also: compete in Portland’s premiere all-girl poetry slam. $7 donation.

WHEN: Friday, Feb. 20. Doors at 7 p.m., show at 7:30.

WHERE: E Room, 3701 SE Division, Portland.

For more info: www.myspace.com/sqlfx

Latino marchers seek support in Columbia County

On Wednesday afternoon, members of the Latino community and their supporters in Columbia County will hold a “Procession for Respect and Dignity” in the city of St. Helens, despite threats and intimidation attempts the organizers say they have received.

In November, voters in largely rural Columbia County passed a ballot measure that would fine employers for hiring undocumented immigrants. A county judge issued an injunction Feb. 2 that prevents the bill from taking effect, but immigrant rights advocates say the dialogue around the issue has gotten ugly.

“The vitriol is becoming even more violent and disturbing,” writes Amy Dudley of the Rural Organizing Project. She says comments on local blogs advocate things like throwing acid in the faces of ROP lawyers. “It is now commonplace to walk into a coffee shop or feed & seed and hear a loud pronouncement on just how this person would deal with illegals.”

The church where the march was originally slated to begin received harrassing phone calls and backed out, according to Dudley. The group is calling for supporters to join the walk in the hope that stronger numbers of peaceful protesters will prevent any interactions with counter-protesters from becoming volatile.

“We have a situation that we do not want to spiral out of control around us,” Dudley writes. “This procession is happening. But it will happen with much better calm, the more peaceful allies who travel in to show solidarity.”

The details, from Dudley:

WHAT: Members of the Columbia County Latino community and their allies will join together for a Procession for Respect and Dignity.  The walk is a public demonstration of the faces of Columbia County’s Latino community that have been under attack for the last eighteen months by anti-immigrant ballot measures.

WHEN: Wednesday, Feb. 18, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m. Procession starts at 4:45.  Peaceful signs and participants welcome.

WHERE: St. Helens, Oregon. Starting at the First Christian Church at 185 S 12th in St Helens, and ending at the County Courthouse.

WHO: New community organization Latinos Unidos para un Futuro Mejor, in collaboration with Columbia County Citizens for Human Dignity, and with support from Rural Organizing Project and CAUSA.

Fresno police officers beat homeless man

Posted Israel Bayer

Helen Thomas: The First Lady of the White House press corps takes her seat for another term

By Joanne Zuhl
Staff Writer
Helen Thomas has the reputation among journalists for asking the uncomfortable question – and fortunate for us her target is the President of the United States. She has covered every White House administration since John F. Kennedy, becoming in 1960 the first female member of the White House press corps. While she wrote for the news service, United Press International, Thomas’ tenure was honored with the first question during White House briefings. In more recent years, her journalism has turned to commentaries in newspapers and books, her most recent being “Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How it has Failed the Public.”
Thomas now prepares to cover her 10th administration, and in a recent interview shortly before the inauguration, she reflected on the Bush administration, and her hopes for her newest target – Barack Obama.

Joanne Zuhl: Today you attended the last press briefing of President Bush, and you weren’t called on. If you had been called on, what would you have asked?

Helen Thomas: I was going to ask about Gaza and the very fact that he has played a big role in giving the Israelis F-16s, bombers, Apache gunships, cluster bombs, God knows what else, maybe phosphorous and so-forth, used on a helpless people. He complains about smuggling for the Palestinians — we’re doing wholesale weaponry to the Israelis to kill.

J.Z.: Was that addressed during the conference?

H.T.: No. It was very nostalgic. I think the questions were good about how he felt about things and so forth, so it was very warm and sympathetic, and he had his say, which was very self-serving.

J.Z.: You have been among the throngs of people very critical of the White House Press Corps. You titled your 2007 book “Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How it Has Failed the Public.” Why do you say the press corps failed the public?

H.T.: Because they did. They let this country go to war without asking why.

Read more after the jump

Low income housing funds in recovery bill in jeopardy

Senate “moderates” of both parties have agreed on a list of cuts in the economic recovery bill. Reports from the Hill are that low income housing funds previously in the bill could be cut. Low income housing funds under threat are:
$5 billion for public housing modernization
$3.5 billion for HUD project-based assisted housing
$2 billion in Low Income Housing Tax Credit gap financing
$250 million for HOME

Very deep cuts in funding for other programs that would benefit people with low incomes are also projected to be on the chopping block. Call your senators to tell them that these funds must not be cut.

Posted by Israel Bayer