Government

Best practices are supposed to be exactly what the name suggests: practices shown to produce the best results. It makes sense, then, that organizations receiving government grants would be expected to follow them. If public money is being spent, there should be some confidence that the methods being funded actually work. At the Medford Gospel

Seattle is famous for one needle. But the Space Needle is not the only needle found in the city’s public spaces. Since 2020, We Heart Seattle has removed garbage, drug paraphernalia, and discarded needles from parks, greenbelts, and abandoned encampments while conducting personal outreach to people that are living on the streets. Now the Washington

Last month, in my post Crunching the Numbers, we looked at homelessness in Oregon and asked a simple question: if the current approach is working, why do the numbers look the way they do? Oregon’s homeless population has continued to grow even as millions of dollars have been spent, programs have expanded, and reports have

Each year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) releases the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress, to understand the state of homelessness in America. The report is based on the Point-in-Time Count, an annual census taken to estimate how many people are experiencing homelessness. This report provides a benchmark for understanding trends

Recently, former President Barack Obama described America’s homelessness crisis in stark moral terms. “It is morally… an atrocity that in a country this wealthy, people are living on the streets.” Few people who work directly with the homeless would disagree. Anyone who has spent time walking through encampments, working in shelters, or sitting across the

A couple of months ago, I published a blog post titled “When Housing Becomes the Answer to Everything—and Solves Nothing.” In that article, I reflected on the growing assumption that homelessness is primarily a housing supply issue and questioned whether decades of housing-first policy have truly addressed the deeper causes of suffering on our streets.

When temperatures drop, the City of Medford announces the opening of a severe weather, low-barrier warming shelter, and local news outlets quickly report it. Like many in our community, I am grateful whenever steps are taken to ensure people do not freeze during extreme weather. Preserving life should always matter. However, one line in the