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2025 Point in Time Count Findings -- Summary Report: Count of People Experiencing Homelessness in Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington Counties, Oregon
No full textThe U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires continuums of care (CoC) across the country to routinely count people experiencing homelessness. This count, called the Point in Time Count (PITC), enumerates the number and characteristics of people who are experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. As a result, the count provides a snapshot of homelessness within a CoC. In the Portland metropolitan region, Clackamas, Multnomah, and Washington counties administer their respective CoCs. These, referred to as the tri-counties in this report, are responsible for submitting PITC data every year.
The PITC is a survey of people experiencing homelessness. Their experiences of homelessness are classified as either sheltered or unsheltered depending on where they were sleeping the night of the PITC. For the shelter count, CoCs are required to report the number of people living in their shelters on one night in January each year. HUD recognizes that conducting the unsheltered count requires significant effort and resources. As a result, counties may opt to count people living unsheltered each year or every other year. Counties may also opt to add supplemental data to augment the unsheltered count.
These requirements make the PITC one of the few standardized, national data sets about people experiencing homelessness. It collects data locally that, once aggregated, provides a snapshot of homelessness on a single night across the country
Social Work in Times of Genocide: a Palestinian Feminist Praxis of Social Work
No full textThe abstract is translated in Arabic below. Social work cannot meaningfully claim a commitment to justice, human dignity, and the worth of people while simultaneously remaining committed to colonial logics. Recognizing and resisting collusion with settler colonialism demands structural shifts in knowledge production, curriculum, practice, and institutional alignment. This article speaks to organized social work’s collusion with the zionist project of Palestinian erasure amid the ongoing Nakba and genocide. Since Palestinian social workers are living and surviving genocide as they practice social work, worn binaries, such as provider–client, are unsettled in ways that make a Palestinian feminist praxis of social work visible. This article begins with a nod to the overwhelming global social work collusion with the ongoing Nakba and accelerated genocide in Palestine. This article offers an initial articulation of a Palestinian feminist praxis of social work as epistemic disobedience, refusal to be disappeared, and Palestinian insistence on life
Support Beyond Services: Examining the Role of Neighbor Relationships, Housing Staff, and Place in Mental Health Recovery
No full textThis dissertation explores the role of non-clinical support for individuals with serious mental illness (SMI). Through three interconnected manuscripts, this dissertation highlights the importance of housing staff support, places in the community, and neighbor relationships in fostering recovery for individuals with SMI. The first manuscript analyzes how housing staff support influences residents\u27 well-being through an ecological lens. This study found that staff support is associated with reduced loneliness, higher residential satisfaction, and increased sense of community. This study also considers the role of self-determination as a moderator, demonstrating the importance of resident agency in maximizing well-being outcomes. The second manuscript synthesizes literature on the relationship between place characteristics and community integration for individuals with SMI, addressing the physical, social, and psychological dimensions of place. The final manuscript examines the impact of neighbor support on recovery, investigating the mechanisms through which supportive housing facilitates relationships with neighbors. This study found that increased neighbor support was associated with recovery and considered whether frequency of contact and housing tenure influenced that relationship. Together, these manuscripts underscore the value of non-clinical sources of support in facilitating recovery and integration, offering actionable insights for housing providers, policymakers, and mental health practitioners. The findings highlight the need for supportive environments that promote autonomy, meaningful relationships, and social inclusion, contributing to a broader understanding of recovery-oriented care for individuals with SMI
Building Belonging Infrastructure in Cities: Arts/Culture-based Critical Participatory Action Research and Youth
No full textBelonging is a critical human need. Urban planning\u27s history of bureaucratic expertise continues to champion the powerful, resulting in structures and procedures that still separate and damage city communities. This research challenges the current hegemony of urban planning that centers geography--the container of land--in its practice. Instead, centering the belonging of people to each other is the essential quality of healthy urban planning. A people-centered urban planning practice where the community\u27s people are the experts and decision-makers of their own cities--and belonging is the primary objective--is long overdue.
Arts/culture-based critical participatory action research (PAR)--where the research questions, design, data collection, meaning-making, conclusions, products, and actions are created by a community for themselves, from an arts and/or culture perspective, integrated with belonging epistemologies and belonging rubrics identified in this research--is an urban planning belonging infrastructure system that rotates the focus away from geographic space that codifies individualism and capitalism, and instead centers and strengthens communities intergenerationally, pivoting to an effective belonging methodology for regenerative urban planning practice.
This research is multilayered. Case studies of three completed arts/culture-based critical PAR projects--two in New York City and one in Saint Paul, Minnesota--were analyzed. Each project archive was reviewed. Post-project open-ended individual and focus group interviews of twelve youth, 17 to 24 years old, and three adult mentors were conducted. Afterward, a group interview was facilitated with all interviewees invited from the three projects. The participants created questions to ask each other in the group interview. Youth were also encouraged to submit art connected to their critical PAR project and feelings of belonging to their community.
Data from the archives and the artwork were analyzed based on a rubric operationalizing belonging using three models: the Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) framework, Critical Indigenous Pedagogy of Place (CIPP) epistemology, and the Healing Centered Engagement (HCE) schema. A separate rubric of the youth\u27s understanding of belonging evaluated all the interview transcripts, plus the artwork. The two rubrics--the Three Models Belonging Infrastructure Rubric and the Youth Belonging Infrastructure Rubric--are compared. A short summary of each city\u27s history is also included.
The Youth Belonging Infrastructure Rubric identified these core measures for youth belonging: 1) feeling radically embraced and celebrated as their complete selves; 2) practicing community arts/culture-based inquiry with agency and sharing intergenerationally; 3) organizing through repeated iterations of community gathering, dialogue, and action; and 4) unbelonging as a space of collective agency to undermine oppressive hegemonies and counter othering. Additionally, four related themes resonated in the youth interviews: 1) shared cultural identity is powerful, 2) arts/culture-based critical PAR is effective, 3) youth leadership is essential, and 4) unbelonging is a place of agency.
This research found a strong connection between participating in arts/culture-based critical PAR and belonging for youth (and adult co-researchers) in their communities, neighborhoods, and cities. This opens possibilities for repositioning urban planning away from current community engagement practices that center geography and instead toward arts/culture-based critical PAR, plus OBI, CIPP, and HCE belonging models, and belonging rubrics that first center belonging to each other intergenerationally to develop people-centered cities with youth involved in all processes of city-making decisions and leadership
The Living Dead on Mount Athos: Monastic Politics of Escape
No full textThe Monastic Republic of Mount Athos is a unique and confounding political entity - both Greek and multi-national, democratic and theocratic, autonomous and subject to the European Union - with more than a millennia of history and institutional memory. While Athos has been amply appreciated for its religious, historical and cultural significance, the political institutions which govern this community have been neglected in the modern era and merit greater attention. Similarly, while much of the recent English-language literature on the topic focuses on the near-death and miraculous resurrection of Mount Athos in the 20th century, this work also tends to focus on the remarkable charisma of Athonite ascetics and monastic traditions as explanatory factors, rather than examining the socio-political institutions which have allowed the community to defend and renew itself over time. This thesis poses a number of questions and proposes some answers in the hopes of encouraging future research on this topic.
Two questions in particular frame the paper that follows: How did the political systems which governed Mount Athos contribute to its 1000-year survival, particularly in the modern era? How does one compare a polity like Mount Athos to any form of modern state, given that it has self-consciously retained its political form for a full millennia?
Relying on James C. Scott\u27s definitions of \u27state evading\u27 and \u27state preventing\u27 behavior, I will argue that the Athonite political structure is designed to maximize the utility of democratic institutions to defend against the threat of external intervention, as well as to minimize any internal state-building activities which might depart from the monastic ideal. This tension between the need to pursue a \u27worldly,\u27 external political strategy to maintain autonomy, while also cultivating an aggressively anti-secular internal governance strategy, is a fundamental component of Athonite history. Through an analysis of past and present Athonite political institutions I will show how Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox Christianity have influenced the process of state formation, creating a political entity which has retained a recognizable form for well over a thousand years
Al-Driven Interfacial Gap Prediction in Overlapped Al/cu Laser Weld Joint for Battery Applications
No full textThe battery tab-to-busbar welding process forms the primary electrical path in battery packs and is directly linked to both performance and safety. Variations in jig alignment, material tolerance, and forming quality can cause small interfacial gaps that lead to weak welds. An artificial intelligence (AI)-driven method was proposed in this study for predicting interfacial gaps in aluminum-copper overlap joints by integrating deep learning with multi-sensor data. A charge-coupled device (CCD) camera, spectrometer, and optical coherence tomography (OCT) sensors were employed to develop and validate deep learning models under varying gap conditions. The results revealed that the variation in melt-pool dimensions, changes in keyhole behavior, intensity variations at specific wavelengths, and keyhole depth derived from the OCT data enabled accurate gap classification. A 0.04-mm binary classification model achieved the highest accuracy of 99.33%. Among the sensors, the spectrometer was the most influential sensor, whereas the CCD and OCT sensors provided complementary inputs. The best performance was achieved on fusing all three sensors, which emphasizes the importance of sensor fusion for precise gap prediction
Power, Benefits, and Visibility in Qualitatively Driven Mixed Methods Research
No full textThis article demonstrates the importance of power, benefits, and visibility in understanding the past, present, and future of qualitatively driven mixed methods research. For power, I examine the past roles played by both quantitative and qualitative methods, and the greater influence of quantitative methods in the development of mixed methods. For benefits, I discuss the need for value added in our current studies, and sequential designs that give equal attention to both qualitatively driven and quantitatively driven approaches. For visibility, I emphasize the future importance of promoting qualitatively driven designs, such as sequential sampling and sequential transferability. The article contributes to mixed methods by calling for both more attention to large QUAL and small quan components in mixed methods designs
2024 Oregon Statewide Homelessness Estimates
Get PDFThe Point-in-Time (PIT) Count is a census of people experiencing both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness on a single night in January. The federal government requires this at least every other year as a condition of funding it distributes to Continuums of Care (CoCs), networks of government agencies and service providers that manage homelessness services and funding in specific regions. The unsheltered PIT Count is only required during odd-numbered years. Because of the cost and complexity involved, not all CoCs conduct an unsheltered count in even-numbered years. In 2024, all Oregon CoCs submitted sheltered PIT Count data. Only some conducted an unsheltered count, while others used “by-name” lists of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness who had engaged with local services or outreach workers. This means that there is not a 2024 unsheltered homelessness total for many Oregon counties.
This report provides county-level unsheltered totals where available and makes no attempt to infer an updated statewide unsheltered total given the lack of data. The report does include sheltered totals for all Oregon counties and across the state, as well as the Housing Inventory Count (HIC) data on shelter and housing bed totals for people experiencing or exiting homelessness, both reported by Oregon CoCs. We also include the number of children enrolled in Oregon schools who were reported by school districts as experiencing homelessness under a definition that includes PIT Count criteria, as well as children doubled up with other families by necessity rather than choice. Finally, we include estimates of total doubled-up homelessness across the state calculated using census survey data
Tree-equity and Environmental Justice Discourses Among Urban Forestry Professionals in Portland: Current Impacts and Future Implications
Get PDFUrban tree equity is critical for addressing environmental justice and mitigating the effects of climate change in cities. This study investigates how professionals in Portland\u27s urban forestry sector conceptualize and implement tree equity, focusing on equity and justice discourses. Through 27 semi-structured interviews with 29 professionals from government agencies and NGOs, I examine how these discourses shape decisions regarding tree planting, distribution, and maintenance, particularly in underserved communities. The analysis draws on political ecology, systems dynamics, and structuration theory to explore the systemic barriers perpetuating inequities in tree canopy distribution. The findings reveal tensions between different approaches to equity, such as opt-in versus opt-out tree planting models, and highlight the need for more community-driven solutions. This research contributes to understanding how environmental justice frameworks can guide equitable urban greening practices, offering insights into policy reforms and practical strategies for enhancing tree equity. Ultimately, the study calls for a more inclusive and participatory approach to urban forestry that prioritizes both ecological and social justice outcomes
Towards a Global Understanding of Tree Mortality
Get PDFRates of tree mortality are increasing globally, with implications for forests and climate. Yet, how and why these trends vary globally remain unknown. Developing a comprehensive assessment of global tree mortality will require systematically integrating data from ground-based long-term forest monitoring with large-scale remote sensing. We surveyed the metadata from 466 865 forest monitoring plots across 89 countries and five continents using questionnaires and discuss the potential to use these to estimate tree mortality trends globally. Our survey shows that the area monitored has increased steadily since 1960, but we also identify many regions with limited ground-based information on tree mortality. The integration of existing ground-based forest inventories with remote sensing and modelling can potentially fill those gaps, but this requires development of technical solutions and agreements that enable seamless flows of information from the field to global assessments of tree mortality. A truly global monitoring effort should promote fair and equitable collaborations, transferring funding to and empowering scientists from less wealthy regions. Increasing interest in forests as a natural climate solution, the advancement of new technologies and world-wide connectivity means that now a global monitoring system of tree mortality is not just urgently needed but also possible