Good follow-up on this important issue and keep focusing on what is and isn't being done to address it. While your focus has to be on the local, don't lose sight of the fact that despite INTERNAL DISPLACEMENT and Homeless Families being a national problem, the term "National Security Risk" is never used to describe it and none of the national media and political attention much less legislative leadership that attends any "NATIONAL SECURITY RISK" has followed despite the decades of this domestic humanitarian crisis building and going mainstream.

Your stunning mid-winter report of 2-4-2015 headlined "SOMBER CENSUS" is a news link I have since sent to my Media Discussion List.
http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/…

Also the VICE video magazine feature published Thanksgiving 2015 on Boise, Idaho's policy of seeking to hide its homeless opened the depth of the unseen homeless of the Pacific NW up to the rest of the country and the world:
https://news.vice.com/video/hiding-the-h…

Although media savvy would suggest that the business advertising local newspaper chain PAMPLIN TRIBUNE, with nearly all except for its PORTLAND TRIBUNE catering to suburban readers would tread lightly on the issue of homelessness so as not to distress its better housed readers, the superb muck raking staff of the Po'Town TRIB street edition (stories not easy to find on their online suburban sister Pamplin paper editions) have pursued Homelessness with increasing vigor these last two years including a current investigative series presented in collaboration with commercial radio station KGW and named "OPEN: Housing" following developments in neighborhoods like Kenton with the Women's Village growing out of the historical ground given and broken for Dignity Village:
https://openhousing.net/contrasts-and-co…

May your coverage in THE MERCURY and Seattle sister weekly THE STRANGER along with the welcome resources given over to Public Interest Muck Raking by the more suburban angled PAMPLIN Papers including the Po'Town TRIB draw back the alternative press renaissance once fueled in weekly papers across the country by the rock industry's excesses and generous advertising.

Even the Grey Lady aka 'bailed out by Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim newspaper of record' the NY TIMES has assigned a full-time beat reporter Nikita Stewart who tracks Homeless Families and the ballooning crises of renters' and homeless emergencies that have accompanied mega gentrification during the three consecutive Mayor Bloomberg administrations of widely reported "urban renewal and generation of wealth" where the Neo-Liberal E-CON solutions the billionaire oligarch mayor sought led to these sorts of expected results that limit solutions for market-created problems to market-based solutions. Like this Get Rich Quick Off the Misery of the Poor scheme reported with keen analytic insight by Andrew Rice during Christmas Season 2013 and that now seems illustrative of American life under the PRIVATIZING "reform administrations" of Obama-Biden that led into the current Crony Continuity:
http://nymag.com/news/features/podolsky-…
"Why Run a Slum If You Can Make More Money Housing the Homeless?
One notorious real-estate family has converted its run-down buildings into for-profit shelters, paid for by the city. The going rent per cubicle: $3,600 a month."

Keep on doing Dirk and MERC staff!
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Shifters
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa
Media Discussion List