Accountability and Oregons homeless crisis: Steve Duin column [Video]

Doug Marshall has spent 30 years doing his part with the homeless. He brings some interesting thoughts to a week that featured the U.S. Supreme Court hearing oral arguments about people dealing with homelessness and public safety in Grants Pass, and the Portland City Council once again debating the same.

After moving back to Portland in 1993, Marshall invested 16 years venturing out with Blanket Coverage, which works with the chronically displaced. He and his wife, Carol, also started The Jesus Table, which offered weekly meals and connections for the impoverished at Cedar Mill Bible Church.

In 2019, Marshall decided he wasn’t doing enough. “Like most Oregonians, I was getting more and more frustrated that the crisis was getting worse, not better,” he says, “so I started Hope for the Homeless.”

Marshall, recently retired from a career in commercial real estate, first reached out last December after I wrote about “The vicious paralysis of Multnomah County.”