Despite mayor’s assurances, more people than ever are homeless in Portland

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson told an audience of hundreds Friday that the apparent decline in unsheltered homelessness he has observed in the city was real.

“I’ll try not to get mired in numbers,” Wilson told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof Friday during a conversation after the mayor’s State of the City address. “I think your hope, what you see, is real and what I see is real. So we have to go by that.”

And yet, the best available data show that whatever changes the mayor and others may have observed do not tell the whole story.

Read the full story on The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Photo by Mark Graves.