27. Good Talk #5: K. Rambo

"Maybe the issue with homelessness isn't that I'm seeing trash in my neighborhood. Maybe it's that there are literal human beings sleeping next to that trash."

It should come as no surprise that, last week, The Oregonian reported that homelessness is the top issue for Portland-area voters going into the upcoming election. A humanitarian crisis is playing out all over the western United States — something that, last year, Israel Bayer described to me like this:

“On the west coast specifically you have the most concentrated wealth in the world living right next to people that don't have any resources whatsoever,” he said. “Especially in the American west and especially in urban environments, we've become, we've become so ‘successful’ where it's almost like we're living in Adult Disneyland. San Francisco, Seattle, Portland. There’s these places where most common folk don't have the ability or the capital to ever come here and actually root themselves in society through the lens of homeownership.”

In the gubernatorial debates, there has been a lot of talk about homelessness, but much of that discussion is distanced: whole groups of people who are being talked about like some strange species by three candidates who claim to have the answers for their lives. 

In this month’s newsletter, I’m publishing a new edition of my Good Talk series: my conversation with K. Rambo, the incredible editor of Portland’s longtime street newspaper Street Roots. 

I’ve talked a lot in the past about how street newspapers inspired my early love for journalism. If you aren’t familiar with Street Roots, it’s a weekly newspaper “focused on social and environmental justice issues,” written by a staff of professional journalists and sold by vendors experiencing homelessness and poverty. Vendors purchase the paper for a quarter apiece and then turn them around for a buck, keeping the profits. (If you want to know if there’s a street newspaper where you live, check out this handy map.)

As I learned, K. Rambo’s story of getting into journalism is hardly typical. We talk about what it’s like to run a newspaper focused on the unhoused community right now, at this moment, and the conversation dips into lots of other things: objectivity, false narratives about homelessness, false narratives about police and… well, just read it. This was a fascinating conversation, and I hope it gets you thinking.

Before we get started with that, as always, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I am never short on ideas, but always short on funding. Your subscriptions help fund my work as an independent journalist, and in the last year, helped pay for work that went into my book, When the Moon Turns to Blood, and a ton of reporting for the podcast Burn Wild.

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LEAH SOTTILE

Let’s start by hearing about the path that brought you to editing Street Roots. 

K. RAMBO

That's a good question. I was homeless when I was younger — my teenage years to the tail-end of my early twenties. I did what a lot of homeless folks in general do: I kept trying to find stability and work. Of course that's really difficult when you don't have access to a shower or a place where you can lock a door. Eventually I built a support system that allowed me to shower regularly. I was sleeping in a friend's backyard and found some work through a temp agency, like kitchen stuff, and saved enough to buy a ’99 Astro van that had a blown up transmission and parked it in a friend's driveway. I lived in it and found work galvanizing steel, which was a very brutal job. 

Not that I lacked inspiration prior to that to find some stability and be able to do something with writing, but it was one of those things where I was making 12 bucks an hour. That was good money at the time, but I just kind of realized, like, ‘okay, my boss who's been here for a decade makes $16 an hour.’ There’s not a living wage associated with most manual labor. So it was like, well, even the best of what's available to me won't really ever be enough to put things together. I did make enough to get into a small apartment.

I enrolled at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, which happens to have a really good journalism program. I took a journalism class and was like, ‘oh, this is a way that I could feasibly make money as a writer.’ I transferred to Iowa State because it was affordable relative to a lot of good journalism schools. I interned with a nonprofit investigative newspaper while I was in Iowa. 

In 2020, I got an internship at The Oregonian. The pandemic happened … and then I was there during the protests in 2020. I did a lot of accountability-related stuff, specifically with police transparency stuff. Then I worked for about five months at The Gazette-Times and The Democrat-Herald in Corvallis and Albany and was commuting from Portland, which was a nightmare. I saw that Street Roots was doing an editorial fellowship and I was fortunate enough to get it and, later, I applied for the editor in chief job and was fortunate enough to be selected.

LS: 

I saw an Oregonian story today that homelessness is top of mind for most Oregon voters right now, but I think that’s the case throughout the western United States. So I'm curious about being in your job right now — what that's like? 

KR: 

Uh, it's busy. [laughs] I think maybe in terms of our expertise around homelessness reporting, I think that's a little better known in the industry than it is to readers. I do think there's a lot of folks who aren't aware that the full-time newspaper staff at Street Roots — we’re all professional journalists. And I'm not the only one who has lived experience with homelessness. 

I think homelessness follows a similar trend that a lot of more controversial topics might, which is there's quite a bit of polarization, and I think people are very committed to their particular understanding of an issue. They tend to seek out media that confirms that understanding rather than challenging it or providing them with new information. So there’s an effort for us to try to reach people who maybe have a more individualistic understanding of homelessness rather than a systemic understanding of homelessness. Trying to get them to read Street Roots is a challenge and something that we talk a lot about. 

I think amongst the ranks of people who understand homelessness as a systemic issue, there are differing ideas of what that particular systemic issue is, how it should be addressed, who should or should not be interviewed for certain things. I think about a story in particular earlier this year that Piper McDaniel, our staff investigative reporter, wrote about the housing shortage, clarifying that that doesn't mean there just isn't enough housing.

Certainly experts Piper interviewed agreed addressing a housing shortage or creating more housing stock really slows that rate of rent increase. It kind of stabilizes. If you don't have a housing shortage, you're much less likely to deal with like the 40 percent rent increase that Portland experienced in 2021, right? 

So you have this entire existing problem that won't be addressed, which is people who are already priced out of the rental market. We talked to experts about, well, is it rent control? Is it wages? There's these differing theories on how to address that part of it. We got a lot of pushback from advocates who their entire thing is ‘we need to build, we need to build, we need to build.’ I think folks who are maybe more avid readers of Street Roots, occasionally their own understanding of what a solution is ends up in the crosshairs of investigative journalism. 

Of course, there's always that pushback of ‘you're poking holes in the one thing that we know we can do’ or ‘you're not promoting this thing that I see as a solution.’ … Being somebody reported on police accountability in 2020, the kind of unhinged conspiracy, death threat voicemails and emails I would get… 

LS: 

Over the reporting you did on police accountability?

KR:

Oh yeah. I got a lot of nasty emails. A certain Portland area person was accusing me of recruiting child soldiers for Antifa because I wrote about the Youth Liberation Front and asked ‘what is a decentralized, non-hierarchical activist group?’ Like, how does that work essentially? And what does it mean to be an anarchist? These basic explanatory stories. I wrote about what does it mean to abolish the police or to defund the police? Where does this idea come from? Where does policing come from as an institution in the United States? Certainly when you're talking about how policing evolved from slave patrols, you will get people who believe that police should never be criticized — that you should never even provide information that could be seen as questioning the premise of American policing.

I think a lot of that kind of far right energy has now been transferred to homelessness and poverty, as well as folks who use drugs — particularly homeless folks who use drugs, especially as Measure 110 has become a more prominent target.

LS: 

That's a really interesting observation that you think that the far-right energy is transferring over to homelessness. Talk more about that.

KR: 

I think it makes sense from a 1000-foot view around the false idea that homeless people are criminals. If we talk about vandalism, murders, theft — I get emails about catalytic converter theft and stuff like that — when the false narrative that that's all related to homelessness becomes so prominent, then you get ‘well, Portland shouldn't have defunded its police department. Portland shouldn't have tried to hold its its police accountable.’ I think there's an entry there for the very anti-police accountability people. Because it's beyond just being pro-police, right? It's being opposed to accountability for police, and that political ideology transfers very smoothly to ‘homeless people are this huge problem. The police haven't been given enough leeway to arrest or hold them accountable.’

LS:

But Portland didn’t defund the police. I mean, today we're all seeing Nick Kristof tweet ‘two years after Portland, defunded its police’ and every journalist in Portland is saying ‘no, they have more funding than ever.’ But this is the story people want to believe is true. Do you think that that says something specifically about Oregonians?

KR:

I don't think it's unique to Portland or Oregon. Having been homeless in other cities and in different places throughout the country — everywhere from here to New Orleans — there is a systemic and structural problem in this country with accountability for anyone who's in power. That applies to politicians. That applies to police. That applies to wealthy people. 

There is a threshold of entrenched systemic power that if you have enough of it, there is a lack of ability for that person to be held accountable. Power does something to people. … You’ve got people who, maybe, four generations of their family have been able to act without any real concern for accountability. You have a system or a set of systems that has just become more and more conducive to people acting that way. I think policing is symptomatic of a much larger problem in the United States. 

LS:

Do you think that the institution of journalism obviously is failing? And what I mean by that is: there are no jobs, the pay is terrible, people are getting laid off like crazy. And so I wonder if you think not enough people working within journalism — because of the industry’s pay barriers — have personally felt the butt end of power? And so there's maybe a lack of people concerned with demanding accountability for people with power? 

KR: 

That's a huge part of it. I think in journalism you broadly have two groups of people. I think that that you have people broadly that are in journalism because they wanna hold people in power accountable. And I think the other group is in journalism because they want proximity to power and powerful people. 

The people who are in it for proximity to power tend to get much further. I think they generally come from more privileged backgrounds, so they already have much more access to an industry that, in many ways, requires you to take unpaid internships or internships that pay you next to nothing to be there, want you to relocate for free. I think if you are somebody who comes from fewer resources and maybe you're motivated by understanding that there is a world of injustice that should be revealed by good journalism, you will have a lot fewer opportunities to achieve your goals in the industry. 

I think what you get left with broadly are people who agree with this kind of outdated and — I would argue — inaccurate understanding of what objectivity means. You are left with a lot of people who come from privileged backgrounds who see power and powerful people as being an example of how to live. For marginalized people, powerful people represent an obstacle for how we would like to live, right? It's two very different understandings of power and how it interacts with society at large. 

LS:

I feel like you're describing so much of my experience in journalism. I graduated from college and was like, yeah, but I can't afford to live anywhere else but Spokane or Cheney, Washington, where I had my first reporting job. There was never an option to, like… 

KR: 

Move to New York? 

LS: 

Exactly! Who could even conceive of that? I remember going to my a journalism conference and meeting a bunch of people and being like, 'wow, I am not like any of these people. We are not in this for the same reasons.’ My whole reason for doing this is because of wanting to hold people accountable. I thought that's what we were all doing?

KR: 

I mean, the people who are kind of held up in these higher roles, they don't necessarily know what the fuck they're talking about. And they seemingly lack the ability to be auto-critical or to evaluate their own positions on journalism. And I think that attitude permeates so much throughout journalism that it is alienating to many readers.

LS: 

When I used to work at an alt-weekly, we would talk about how if we just tell the stories of real people, it would illuminate issues that the mainstream reader maybe couldn’t access otherwise. But I don't know if I think that actually works anymore, because we're now living in a world where people only engage with the media that re-enforces their views. Where do you stand on that at Street Roots? 

KR: 

That's a tough one. I think I have a little cognitive dissonance around that because I don't think you can convince anyone of shit, right? Most of the people I interact with professionally are, themselves, very set in a particular ideology or belief system. But I do think that there are a lot more people than we realize who aren't necessarily so cut and dry about what they believe and why they believe it. And I think the vast majority of people, their political beliefs are incoherent — and I don't say that derisively. I think that’s a common thing, because we pick up bits and pieces as we go. Maybe I hope there are people who do actually take in the information that they receive and consider it before just going, ‘this doesn't align with my existing belief, therefore it's a lie.’

I think a lot about the folks who recognize the problems that exist. Poverty is such a visible problem in Portland that I think everyone knows it exists at this point, right? … I think the goal for me a lot of the time is trying to reach the people who don't know what they don't know. They just know it's a problem and they care that it's a problem. 

Obviously as a journalist, you're always trying to figure out ‘why should they care?’ When we write about anything, the question is ’how do we get the people who aren't personally impacted by this to care about it?’ And I think when you are a newspaper that focuses on equity, you're writing about a lot of marginalized groups who a lot of Portlanders don't really have any personal connection to. We're writing in a city where a lot of people make a lot of money and have their entire lives, and that's the only thing they know. And they’re white. They’re from here. The big thing for us is really highlighting the humanity of the people that we're writing about. And I think that's something that a lot of newspapers could do a lot better with, particularly when reporting on homelessness. 

I wrote a story about the Old Town Reset over the summer and how the city was returning to using abatement sweeps, which were basically the only form of sweep that existed prior to the Anderson Agreement. So you had cops show up, they post a notice and the folks there have an hour to leave. 

Well, if you just write that story and you just talk about it and look at it from the historical perspective, a lot of people are gonna go, ‘well, I'm not homeless. I don't know anyone who's homeless. Why should I even give a shit about this?’ So the story is really an investigative piece about the use of that tactic and the history of it. The narrative that lays out that investigative information is framed around the experience of DJ, who is a Street Roots vendor. He had been swept something like four times in three weeks or was continuously trying to replace his tent and his sleeping bag. 

Literally, when I was interviewing DJ, someone drove by and told him, ‘hey, you’re getting swept.’ So we run over and, sure enough, DJ's stuff had been swept. I was talking to him about what he felt and the thing that stuck with me is, like, when you leave your apartment in the morning, you're never worried that you're gonna come back and it's gone. What we're dealing with is an unending cycle of trauma and displacement for people who have next to no resources to begin with. Then they're being put in this cycle where they are continually losing the few resources that they have over and over and over again. So I think really it's about the way we approach it — to try to find the information that people don't know from an investigative level and from a systemic level, and then try to help people understand how this affects individual human beings going about their daily lives.

LS: 

It seems like there are so many emotions right now in Portland about seeing poverty, There’s hopelessness, but then I think there's also the: ‘I don't want to see these tents anymore.’ There was a Willamette Week letter about a person staying at the Benson Hotel who claimed she couldn't even walk outside. There seems to be so many different lenses through which people see the version of reality that they want to see. And I am constantly struck by how often that lens is a callousness to poverty. Where do you think that callousness towards comes from? 

KR:

Well, I mean, I think part of it is you have a very prevalent narrative that is inaccurate that people believe: which is that homeless people are dangerous, filthy, lazy, drug addicted — did I say dangerous? That’s the big one. 

LS: 

Well, in the last governor debate, Betsy Johnson said ‘we need to find out why people are on the streets. Is it poverty? Is it domestic violence? Is it drug addiction? Is it mental illness? Or is it just a criminal decision to live on the streets and victimize others?’

KR: 

Good lord. Holy shit. [laughs]

LS: 

[laughs] I mean, it’s not funny but it is. Like, ‘oh people are homeless because just one of those five things!’ 

KR: 

At times it seems like Nathan Fielder is her campaign manager, just giving her the worst advice about how to speak about people. In our election issues, I compared her campaign messaging to a Mad Max plot. 

If you listen to her, you can't walk down West Burnside. One person's gonna rob you and the next person's gonna kill you. I think you have this kind of deeply ingrained fear, and then occasionally there's confirmation bias, right? Like, you see somebody who's homeless experiencing a mental health crisis, it scares you because you don't know how to respond. Or you've got kids who walk to school past homeless encampments. I can kind of get it, right? But I think a big reason for the callousness is bad journalism. You have a lot of ways journalists reproduce the cultural norms in the United States, which moralized success and failure to such a degree that if someone's successful, well, it's because they worked hard and they earned it, and they're smarter and they wake up at 4:30 am and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

LS:

But we don't live in a meritocracy! How do people not know this yet?

KR:

I think something people are still struggling to challenge — that we as a culture are struggling to challenge — is that failure or poverty is the result of some moral defect. Maybe it's because they don't work hard enough or they're lazy, they're not smart. They want to be a criminal or something. I think journalism has in many ways kind of reproduced that cultural norm that attributes poverty to an individual's failings.

Journalists have not done a good enough job of challenging what is a cultural norm that creates this idea that people who are on the street deserve to be there. People experiencing poverty are doing it by choice, or they're doing it by their own negligence, or lack of motivation. … You end up with this adversarial “us” against “them.” The “us” is everyone who lives inside and the “them” is homeless folks.

I think that that gets reproduced by the media and then people who trust their news source are going, ‘oh, I knew it.’ So it just kind of snowballs to the point where you have people who probably have a sign in their front yard that says, “In this house, Black Lives Matter. Trans people are welcome.” You get these people who would consider themselves liberals or progressives who would love nothing more than the city to just round up homeless people by the bus load and go dump them off in some vacant lot by the airport or something. It's a contradiction.

LS:

That is confounding and disheartening.

KR:

The level of other-izing and dehumanizing that exists in socially-acceptable rhetoric around homeless people in Portland is really shocking. If you don't hold those views, I think it's remarkable to read or hear people talk about homelessness and homeless people the way they do. Sweeps — whether you love them or hate them — they don't end homelessness. They don't reduce homelessness, they don't connect anyone with resources. It is literally a temporary thing that makes homelessness less visible in a particular area for a short period of time. They go somewhere else and they end up coming back cause they get swept out of that other area.

I mean, if you read, The Oregonian’s endorsement of Rene Gonzalez, one of their criticisms of Jo Ann Hardesty — and people can support whoever they want — they say like Hardesty opposes sweeps, but at the same time she laments the lack of progress in addressing homelessness. And it's like, well, those two things aren't at odds. You can be opposed to sweeps and also be unhappy with the prevalence of unsheltered homelessness because sweeps don't address that in any way. I mean, we're talking about an editorial by Oregon's paper of record that just very casually repeats this understanding that is not accurate. But if you read that, I think you do see kind of that other side of the coin as far as people's opinions about homelessness, where there isn't a whole lot of talk about how inhumane homelessness is. Or how it's a humanitarian crisis. 

What you're reading about is ceding our public parks to drug dealers, police who don't show up fast enough when there's property crimes, neighborhoods with piles of trash. Those are the things that are in the material interest of more affluent people to be worried about. You see that really informing the opinions that a lot of people have around homelessness. 

The folks who run particularly larger legacy publications tend to be from very similar demographics of older, white, wealthier people. I think if the entire journalism industry has catered to that perspective as being the objective and rational one, then there's not a whole lot of incentive to wonder. “Hmm. Maybe the issue with homelessness isn't that I'm seeing trash in my neighborhood. Maybe it's that there are literal human beings sleeping next to that trash.” 

And this is my last tangent on this, and this is actually I think, an important point about kind of how that callousness has become so prevalent: I think there is a really outsized focus on the signs and conflicts around homelessness. Like physically evident signs of homelessness and the conflicts that exist much more than there's a focus on the causes and solutions of homeless. 

I spoke at SPJ Oregon’s conference on Saturday and one of the panelists asked me, ‘okay, well if you don't think centering the business perspective when you're writing about homelessness is the right way to report on it, what do you do when a particular business has people who keep going to the bathroom in front of it?’ The point, to me, isn't that there’s shit on the sidewalk. The point is that somebody doesn't have a place to go to the bathroom, right? The issue isn't, to me, that people smell bad. It's that they don't have access to a shower. It isn't about the fact that people are doing drugs in public, but that they lack access to services, whether you think that should be safe injection sites or rehab or whatever else. 

These are all the things that people are mad about. There are causes to those things, and there are ways that they could be addressed and I don't think that media spends enough time talking about that. Instead, we're just talking about how widespread the problem is, how pissed off everyone is. And I think it feeds the sense of hopelessness.

(Note: this interview has been edited for length and clarity)