According to this year's Point in Time count,
children without shelter accound
for roughly 1/3 of the total increase
in homelessness in Multnomah Co.
They are an invisible community,
though, and that's often on pur.
Parents keep their campsites
hidden deep in the woods,
and they're always on the move.
Blair best found one homeless
family willing to talk on camer,
but they did not want to show their faces,
afraid the state would
take away the children.
Hiding in plain sight, A survivl
tactic this single mom has
honed throughout her time on the street.
We were in and out of shelters for a while.
I lived at a DV shelter for more than a
year and there was drug use in the shelter.
We were surrounded by it.
So she and her two young childrn
moved to the only place she felt safe,
a tent deep in the woods in Gre.
We found a spot in the woods.
We stayed safe. We had our dogs,
like people weren't allowed
to come mess with us.
They also camped under the Hawthorne Bridge
and you'd see some tweaker rocky
and all of a sudden it was tent time.
That's what we did it.
It was clap clap tent time and
if they heard that around the
camp they ran to the tents.
A hyper vigilance.
These kids learned early on andy
lived like this for about a yea.
Home schooled outside and away
from the structures of society.
Hello. Hello.
Perhaps one of the reasons our
camera equipment was so excitin.
I'm 10 years old. I honestly
thought it was really nice beca,
like, so we lived in a little wd
area away from all the drug add,
and we always got to run around.
I used to play my little imaginn
games off my own little world.
It was really fun.
I was like teaching them to
read and write like on my own.
But now they're in public school
and they're absolutely loving i.
But they feel a little bit
like they're outcasts.
They're outside kids.
That's what they call themselve.
Currently, these outside kids
live in affordable housing.
But say the complex is unsafe.
I'm surrounded by drug dealers d
drug addicts, and there's no pe.
They're preparing to move back outdoors.
If it weren't for the fact that it was
a roof over my head, I would rar
be outside. The color
palette is that of the ocean
Brandy. Tuck runs Path Home in Southeast
Portland, one of three homeless shelters
for families in Multnomah Count.
Here, they focus on bringing the outside. In
some of the features of trauma,
informed design and architecture
include a real connection to na.
So it's about real plants,
indoors and outdoors.
Natural material, natural light.
When you drive around Portland
and you see all these tent
villages and RV's everywhere,
you don't realize that there
are thousands of kids and their
parents without homes too.
They're the invisible homeless population.
That hide for fear of something
happening to their kids or the
state taking their kids away.
Right now there are 800 homeless
families with children on housig
wait lists in Multnomah County.
Last year, PATH Home served 1800 people.
More than half were children,
a majority under the age of fiv.
The children that
experience homelessness today
can turn into the chronically
homeless adults of the future.
And so unless we do something
now to help these kids.
We'll never be able to solve
the issue of homelessness in
Portland, a crisis this single m
has been stranded in for years,
unable to find a safe way out.
Portland is they care,
but something here is going wro.
Taking my kids for me and puttig
them in foster care is not
what's going to keep them safe.
Putting us in shelter situations
where we can't regulate the
people who are around us,
that's not going to keep us saf.
So Blair's joining me now and my gosh,
what a heartbreaking story for
any parent or grandparent to se.
Something like that. And 800 families.
Yeah, 800 families are currently on the wait
list for family shelter in Multnomah County.
And that means way more
children than that, right?
Because families have many fami,
have more than one child.
How did you find this family? Y.
So it was a bit of a scavenger
hunt and it was pretty challeng,
which I think speaks to the
importance of this story.
This is truly the invisible
homeless population.
And in part that's why there's
a lack of resources for them.
So anyways,
we got some tips that there was homeless
families camping out on the Sprg
Water Crossing Trail in Southea.
The quarter. Yeah.
And we liked that trail for abot
5 1/2 hours looking for familie.
We talked with neighbors.
We didn't want to go on camera
but told us they hear babies
crying at night in the woods
that are camping off this trail.
I mean we hiked in the woods,
we found so many tent sites but no one
was there or they were hiding inside.
I'm not sure.
And it wasn't until we were
heading back to the station.
We ended up going through an ara
of North Portland and we saw a
family leaving a grocery store
and happened to be homeless and
they were willing to talk with s
on camera and share their story.
Yeah,
Yeah. And you just think about
the reality of those little kid.
Yeah. How different that is from
most of the kids growing up in
our area. Right.
And it was kind of interesting
talking with them because as you
and I talking to them, you know,
we're like, wow, right.
We feel bad for them or sad or.
A myriad of different emotions.
So when you're talking to them,
they were excited and they were like,
we love camping outside.
It's fun for us.
So it was a really interesting
experience for me to do that
interview because it was a mix
of emotions of how I was supposd
to be feeling in the moment.
Yeah, yeah. And now the moms most likely
taking the kids back out of the shelter.
Because she thinks itself safero
be on the spring water or somewe
around it. Yeah, I mean,
she talked to him getting assaud
at their apartment complex and
having drug dealers outside.
And she says it's safer for hero
live with her children in the ws
than it is an affordable housin.
And that's just, I don't know.
That speaks to a bigger issue, right?
She says taking her kids away fm
her and putting them in foster e
isn't going to keep them safe.
And neither is this affordable housing
complex. Yeah. Which is outrageous. Yeah.
But. And she's been homeless for years.
Right? So all she knows,
her comfort is outside in a ten.
Yeah. Wow.
Well, thanks for bringing us that story.
Yeah. Even though it makes me furious.