The number of homeless students has risen by fourteen percent this year, according to the Oregon Department of Education. This year eighteen-thousand students are homeless, compared to about fifteen-thousand last year and eight-thousand in 2003 and 2004, when numbers were first reported.
Kenna Gair of KBOO sat down with Michael Anderson of the Oregon Opportunity Network, a non-profit housing and community development organization. He says that more students are homeless not only because of the general economic downturn, but because the Federal government has not done enough to increase access to affordable housing since the seventies.