Street Roots

Summer wouldn’t have a fighting chance against autumn. It’s fully and officially fall, and Portland’s creative sectors are in high spirits. Everyone is rested from summer break and ready to make magic before the rains return. Halloween may not be until the 31st, but Portland’s cultural institutions will celebrate all month with plays, concerts, movies and more dedicated to the spooky season (and, it’s worth noting, Milagro will celebrate Día de los Muertos with weeks of festivities).

It’s barely even October, but Jimmy Jones is already making out his wish list. Some housing would be nice. So would groceries, utilities, health care, child care and transportation. “Those pressures are connected, but they are not experienced equally,” he said.

When something scares me, my eyes start to water. This is a known and observed phenomenon. Someone tells me a spooky story, and immediately, my eyes are watering. And it’s a fun thing, to be a little scared. I believe in getting spooked. The first time I remember this happening was with a VHS tape we got from Title Wave Bookstore. If you’re not familiar, Title Wave is in a former Multnomah County Library branch, one block from Matt Dishman Community Center in North Portland.

A storm of revelations about data centers’ aggressive expansion around Hillsboro and elected officials’ support for them created powerful grassroots opposition this year. That coalition now threatens to topple the area’s longtime development-above-all status quo. The broad movement already notched victories, including pushing officials like Gov.

Editor’s Note: You can report e-scooters and e-bikes parked blocking the sidewalk by calling 311, emailing 311@portlandoregon.gov, using PBOT’s online reporting form or filing an ADA Title II complaint. Rod Barker was excited when he heard rentable e-scooters were coming to Portland in 2018. “I thought, ‘Oh, here’s an alternative mode of transportation that doesn’t take gas,’” he said.

If you’ve seen the Portland Clean Energy Fund, or PCEF, in the news lately, chances are it wasn’t in a story about clean energy projects. Groups floated PCEF, designed to support carbon-reducing projects with public funding, as a source to fund everything from more police officers to Moda Center renovations. Organizations like the Kijani Collective, which focuses on advancing Black-led climate solutions, want to ensure PCEF funds are being utilized for their original intentions.

Portland’s ban on sleeping in public took effect last Nov. 1. Since then, the city’s Impact Reduction Program swept over 6,000 encampments. Police assist in 16% of sweeps, according to Portland Police Bureau data. Some city officials say the ban, which criminalizes unsheltered homelessness by imposing fines up to $100 or up to a week in jail on people for sleeping in public, connects homeless Portlanders to shelter.

I’m starting to prefer the cooler, quieter seasons. Summer is the worst. Often romanticized as a glorious time with gorgeous weather, when everybody’s sitting poolside (more likely riverside in Portland) drinking a piña colada (it’s Portland, so probably an IPA), as if we’re in a Janelle Monáe music video. But really? Summer is a profoundly chaotic, sweaty time, and even the fun things are becoming exhausting.

For people living outside, sweeps are stressful at any time of year. In the summer, they can be devastating. Kelly Clendenon recalled how when he was homeless, there were a couple times he passed out from the heat and ended up in the hospital. His experience isn’t a rarity. A 2025 study found that in 2021 and 2022, the rate of heat-related emergency department visits for homeless people was 30 times higher than among adults who were housed.

The situation has calmed outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility on South Macadam Avenue in recent months, in stark contrast to the scene for much of the past year. Federal officers’ aggressive crowd control tactics placed tenants at a nearby low-income apartment complex in the crossfire, according to two lawsuits.