The building at SE 21st and Cypress is drawing a crowd. Here's who runs it and who to call.

I understand the people working out of this building are trying to do good. But I'm getting tired of the harassment happening outside it.

Mental health is a huge issue, and yes, these people deserve more. But I don't think the people coming into the area are being helped the way these organizations intend, and it's causing problems.

The other day I watched two men walking around screaming at people riding by on bicycles. The day before, three people were on the corner by the Sunset Esplanade begging for money.

Honestly, any one person asking for money doesn't bother me. I've gone out of my way to bring people food when I'm getting something for myself, and I feel for most of them. It's the volume that wears on the neighborhood. When it's every corner, every day, plus the yelling and the garbage, it stops being about any one person and starts being about how the area is being managed.

What's actually at 1440 SE 21st

The building belongs to the Salvation Army, which is why its banners are on the fence. It was their thrift store until 2019, served as a temporary homeless shelter in 2020 and 2021, and now houses the Salvation Army's Washington County HOPE Center, which runs a food pantry and family case management.

Since last winter, it has also housed Project Homeless Connect's Access Center, temporarily relocated there through the east end entrance. That's the day center most people on the corners are likely coming from. It's open Wednesday through Sunday, 9 to 5, and offers two meals a day, showers, laundry, ID help, health plan enrollment, and assessments for shelter and housing waitlists.

Thank you for the info u/Kaliedra

By PHC's own numbers, the Access Center served 836 people in 2022, more than 2,400 in 2024, and 1,985 in fiscal 2025. PHC says its old building on SE 6th was so overcrowded that people had to wait outside. The temporary move appears to have relocated that crowd to SE 21st. PHC is building a permanent 12,000 square foot center next to its headquarters on SE 6th Ave. No opening date has been announced.

A BottleDrop is also reportedly in planning for the area. I couldn't find a state filing yet. If it's a full-service redemption center, state law requires notice to the local state representative and a public comment period before approval, so neighbors will have a chance to weigh in.

I did hear this rumor from my wife as well. so i think its accurate.

Who to call

PHC published neighbor contacts with its new shelter on SW 17th, and they cover the Access Center too:

• Garbage, or someone from the center coming into your business: PHC Access Center, 971-713-3930
• Someone loitering on your property, needles, someone in distress: PHC Outreach, 503-440-1758
• Drug use or dealing, theft, vandalism: Hillsboro PD non-emergency, 503-639-0111
• Violence or a medical emergency: 911

Hillsboro also bans camping within 500 feet of homelessness services.

Why calling matters

If neighbors complain on Reddit and Nextdoor but never call, the official record shows a quiet neighborhood. Call every time, and keep your own notes.

The long-term question

The shelter on SW 17th came with a written Neighborhood Plan negotiated with the city and county. I couldn't find one for this temporary site, even though it sees a daily crowd. Questions worth asking PHC (info@phcwc.org) and the city:

1. Will the temporary Access Center adopt a neighborhood plan like the shelter's?
2. Who is responsible for litter around the building, and how often is it picked up?
3. When will the permanent center on SE 6th open?
4. How many Access Center guests have been placed into shelter, housing, or work?

I'm writing this as a local resident because I'm fed up with people screaming at pedestrians, garbage left everywhere, and constant panhandling. I can usually handle the panhandling, but it's getting hard. This isn't about partisan politics. It's about letting people who live here know what's in place and who to call when real problems come up.

• Project Homeless Connect: Access Center
• Hillsboro Shelter Neighborhood Plan and Escalation Chart (PDF)
• Salvation Army Washington County HOPE Center
• City of Hillsboro: shelter site and 500-foot camping rule
• Oregon Legislature: 2025 redemption center measure summary

Northeast Portland's The Sports Bra, the women's sports bar on NE Broadway, has spent two weeks as the target of a manufactured fight.

It started on September 6. A group of five patrons was asked to leave The Sports Bra after other bargoers were made uncomfortable by their apparel. The shirts were from XX-XY Athletics, a brand built on the slogan that sex is binary and that women's sports should be sorted by chromosomes rather than gender identity. A staff member told the group there were people uncomfortable with the shirts and asked them to leave, saying that if authorities had to be called to remove them, they would be. One of the group, Amy Sousa, filmed the exchange and posted it. The footage passed 6 million views on X. That same day, Sousa and seven others were removed from a Portland Thorns match at Providence Park, with security citing an NWSL code of conduct infraction. Group with 'XX-XY' apparel kicked out of Portland OR's Sports Bra bar, Thorns match +3

From there it escalated on cue. About seven demonstrators gathered across the street from the bar on September 11 to protest the decision, and more than 30 counterprotesters, including members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, showed up in response. The two sides traded chants along Northeast Broadway before the confrontation moved into a nearby parking lot. Transgender rights activists accused conservative livestreamer Thomas Allen and people with him of spraying a chemical irritant at demonstrators and entering a nearby grocery store while carrying weapons. Police arrived around 5:45 p.m., directed both groups away from traffic, reviewed two complaints about irritant spray, cited insufficient probable cause to arrest anyone, and reported no injuries. Portland women’s sports bar clash draws police after ‘XX-X +3

It happened again today. A counterprotest group gathered outside the bar on Sunday afternoon in response to a reported anti-trans demonstration, with about a dozen people standing across the street to protest the bar's decision. KOIN.com

The shape of it is worth stating plainly. A private business enforced its own dress code. That decision was filmed, clipped, and handed to a national audience primed to be angry about it. The protests followed the camera. They did not come first.

There is a tell in who is angry about this. A few years ago the right to refuse service was a conservative cause. When a Colorado baker declined to make a cake for a gay couple's wedding, the same broad coalition now protesting The Sports Bra defended it's right not to be compelled to endorse a message they disagreed with, and the prior it took the Supreme Court to do it. A bar asking patrons to cover a message it disagrees with is that same principle pointed the other way. The anger was never about the principle. It is about who is holding it this time.

Now the shirts.

"XX-XY" is meant to read as settled science. Two chromosome pairs, two sexes, nothing further to discuss. The trouble is that the people wearing it are claiming a certainty that human biology does not have.

Start with how many people are not the karyotype they assume they are and never find out. Klinefelter syndrome, an extra X producing XXY, occurs in roughly 1 in 500 to 1,000 births assigned male, and most cases are never diagnosed. XYY occurs at a similar rate and usually goes unnoticed for an entire lifetime. Triple X, an extra X in someone who develops as female, shows up around 1 in 1,000 and is likewise usually silent. A person can carry any of these, live an ordinary life, and die without ever once having had a reason to get a chromosome test.

Then there are the cases where the chromosomes and the body point in opposite directions. In Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a person has XY chromosomes but their cells cannot respond to testosterone. They develop as female, are raised as girls, and frequently do not learn their karyotype until puberty fails to arrive or a fertility workup turns it up. Swyer syndrome is another XY-female presentation. Running the other way, de la Chapelle syndrome produces XX males, because the actual trigger for male development is a single gene called SRY, which normally rides on the Y but can end up translocated onto an X.

The most self-assured alpha male in the room could be carrying XX chromosomes and never know it. That is documented biology, not a thought experiment. there's a 1 in 500 chance that maybe even one of the people wearing those shirts is.

That is the error at the root of the slogan. The Y chromosome is not what makes someone male. SRY and the hormonal cascade it sets off are, and both can and do come apart from the chromosomes they usually travel with. Sex has at least four layers that can disagree with each other: chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, and anatomical. For most people the layers line up. For a real and countable number of people, they do not.

None of this means most people aren't XX or XY. They can be. It means the slogan takes a layered biological opinion and prints it as a clean two-box sorting problem, then wears the mistake on its chest as though it were a credential. The people most sure that sex is simple are, as a rule, the ones who have never had cause to look at how it works.

Grow up. Get a life. And think next time you deny someone a wedding cake over their sexual orientation. It only makes you look hypocritical when you then freak out about being denied over a t-shirt you shouldn't have worn somewhere you knew it wasn't welcome.

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TO BE CLEAR: For the people that do not understand that there ARE LIMITS TO FREE SPEECH.

They were on private property. Freedom of speech means they can express that opinion right up until the property owner tells them to leave. That's the whole legality of it, and it cuts exactly one way. The First Amendment stops the government from punishing them for the message. It says nothing about the bar. A bar is private property and a business open to the public, and the owner decides what happens inside it.

So yes, they got to wear their dumb shirts. Nobody arrested them. Free speech worked. And then they got a response, which is also free speech: the bar asking them to leave.

Both sides are exercising the exact same right. The difference is whose property they're standing on. Once the owner says go, the shirts don't buy them another second inside. Staying isn't speech anymore, it's trespassing, and legally they were required to leave.

By this insane logic that "freedom of speech" is some magic cure-all for your sick opinions, I could walk into your home, get in your face about everything I think, and you COULDN'T REMOVE ME. My shirt is speech, my mouth is speech, so you have to host me indefinitely. Obviously insane. Your home is yours. You'd throw me out in about four seconds and every court in the country would back you. A gay bar telling bigots to leave is the same act, on the same legal footing.

That's what makes this take so dumb. It doesn't defend free speech, it inverts it. "The bar has to put up with them" would mean forcing a private owner to host a message they don't agree with. That's not protecting the First Amendment, it's violating it, just pointed at the bar instead of the bigots.

The people crying free speech are demanding the one thing free speech actually forbids: compelled hosting of speech on someone else's property.

The Record She's Already Given Us: Why Christine Drazan Is the Wrong Choice for Oregon

Christine Drazan is not an unknown quantity. She has held office in the Oregon Legislature for seven years, led her party's caucus twice, and run for governor once before. When someone has that long a record, you do not have to guess at what they will do. You can read what they have already done. And what she has already done is the argument against her.

The short version

Drazan's defining act in office was shutting the Legislature down. In 2020, as House Republican leader, she led her caucus out of the state to deny the quorum needed to pass a climate bill. It worked. The bill died because the people elected to debate it refused to show up. Oregon voters were unimpressed enough that they later passed a ballot measure to penalize legislators who walk out. Her signature move is now something the electorate voted to punish.

In 2025 she was the lead sponsor of a bill to dismantle vote-by-mail, the system Oregon has used successfully for nearly thirty years. The bill would have made in-person voting the default, forced voters to request a mail ballot 21 days out and only if they could prove they were "unable" to vote in person, required government-issued photo ID, killed the grace period for ballots postmarked by Election Day, and stopped the state from paying return postage. She wanted to refer it to the ballot so voters would approve their own loss of access. It did not advance, and thousands of Oregonians testified against it.

Her money comes from the timber industry, national party committees, and, in her last run, the oil industry through the Republican Governors Association. Her closest business-sector ally helped engineer both the walkout and her rise to leadership, and stands to gain influence if she wins.

That is the case in brief. The rest of this is the detail, because the detail is where it stops being an opinion and starts being a record.

The walkout: governing by not governing

In February 2020, Oregon Democrats brought forward a cap-and-trade bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It was not a surprise attack. It was the continuation of a years-long effort, and it had already died once, in 2019, when Senate Republicans fled the state to deny quorum.

When the bill came back in 2020, Drazan was in charge of House Republicans, and she chose to repeat the tactic on her side of the building. Much of her caucus left the state, some going as far as Reno, specifically to prevent a vote. Under Oregon's rules at the time, the Legislature needed a two-thirds quorum to conduct business. Deny the quorum and nothing moves. The bill died a second time.

It is worth being precise about what this tactic is. A walkout to deny quorum is not a vote against a bill. It is a refusal to allow the vote to happen at all. When a minority loses an election and then prevents the majority from legislating by physically leaving, it is substituting absence for argument. Both parties in Oregon have reached for the tactic over the decades, but in the years around Drazan's leadership it became a Republican habit, used repeatedly and specifically to block climate legislation.

Even sympathetic observers describe the 2020 walkout as the key to understanding her. Not because of its policy effect, which was limited, but because of what it demonstrated: that she could hold twenty-plus people together in a single act of obstruction. A Democratic colleague who often clashed with her acknowledged it was genuinely hard to pull off. That is real political skill. The question is what she chose to spend it on. She spent it on stopping the Legislature from functioning.

Oregonians noticed. In the aftermath of years of walkouts, voters approved Measure 113, which bars legislators with too many unexcused absences from serving another term. The voters looked at the tactic that defines Drazan's career and decided it should carry a penalty. That is not a partisan characterization. It is an election result.

Vote-by-mail: sponsoring the dismantling of Oregon's elections

Oregon pioneered vote-by-mail and has run its elections on it for nearly three decades. It is popular, it is secure, and it produces some of the highest turnout in the country. In 2025, Christine Drazan put her name first on a bill to take it apart. This is not a paraphrase of an opponent's press release. It is in the text of House Bill 3872, which she sponsored.

Here is what the bill actually did, section by section, from the bill itself:

It made in-person voting on Election Day the standard method of voting in Oregon, rewriting vote-by-mail from the default system into an exception. Under the bill, you could still get a mail ballot, but only by requesting one, no later than 21 days before the election, and only if you were "for any reason unable to vote in person on the date of the election." A system that currently mails every registered voter a ballot automatically would have become a system where you have to ask, and qualify, and plan three weeks ahead.

It required voters to present government-issued photo identification both to vote in person and to request a mail ballot. In a mail-based system that has functioned for decades on signature verification, this adds a documentary hurdle in front of every voter, one that falls hardest on the elderly, the poor, the disabled, and anyone who does not drive.

It required all ballots to be received by 8 p.m. on Election Day, repealing Oregon's current rule that counts ballots postmarked by Election Day and received up to seven days later. That grace period exists because mail takes time. Removing it means a ballot mailed on time but delivered late does not count. The bill's sponsor positioned herself, on this specific point, to the right of even the current U.S. Supreme Court, which has declined to force that outcome nationally.

It removed the requirement that the state pay return postage. A cost the state currently absorbs to keep voting free would have been pushed back onto the voter. It is a small sum per person and a meaningful signal about who is expected to bear the friction of participating.

And then the most telling part. The bill did not simply try to change the law through the Legislature. Its final section referred the whole package to the ballot, to be submitted to the people for approval or rejection. Drazan wanted Oregonians to vote to strip away their own automatic access to the ballot. The bill was written to take effect in 2028 if voters went along.

The bill did not advance. A companion version in the Senate drew testimony from thousands of Oregonians opposed to it. But a bill that dies still tells you what its sponsor wanted, and what she would sign as governor if a friendlier Legislature ever put it on her desk. She has since described the bill in gentler terms, saying it "would have created an opportunity for in-person voting while protecting access to the absentee ballot." Read the text against the description. The text makes mail voting conditional, gated, and harder. The description makes it sound like an expansion. Those are not the same bill, and the text is the one with her name on it.

Who funds the campaign

In her 2022 run, Drazan's largest checks came from national party infrastructure and business interests. The Republican Governors Association put in $1.5 million. Nike co-founder Phil Knight, after first bankrolling the unaffiliated candidate, switched and gave her $1 million when polls showed her competitive. Her business donors clustered in extractive and construction industries: half a million from a lumber company, hundreds of thousands more from plywood manufacturers, excavating firms, and general contractors.

Her opponent tied the RGA money to the oil industry, and the connection is not far-fetched given how much fossil-fuel interests route money through that committee. For a candidate whose defining act was killing climate legislation, the funding and the record point the same direction.

One detail from the current cycle is worth noting because it complicates the picture rather than simplifying it: Phil Knight did not back her in the 2026 primary. He spent on a different Republican. Make of that what you will, but the state's most prominent anti-incumbent megadonor looked at the field and did not land on Drazan this time.

The ally behind the curtain

The most underreported thread in Drazan's story is her relationship with a business-sector operative who was among the cap-and-trade bill's most active opponents. According to reporting in Willamette Week, sourced to people familiar with Oregon GOP internal politics, this same figure pitched the idea of the 2019 walkout and helped build the support that made Drazan the caucus leader. He has denied that walkouts were the issue and called his role in her rise overblown. But by the accounts of those sources, the person who helped put her in leadership and the tactic that made her name are connected, and he is now described as perhaps her strongest ally in the business sector, positioned for outsized influence in a Drazan administration.

This matters because it goes to the question of whose governor she would be. A candidate is entitled to allies. But when the same interest helps engineer the obstruction, helps engineer the leadership, and stands to collect the influence, voters are owed a clear view of it.

His name is Shaun Jillions.

What she says about Kotek

A candidate's record includes how they run against an opponent, and here the method is worth a close look, because it is the same pattern in a different setting: a true fact used to carry a false conclusion.

On the campaign trail, Drazan cites a figure. Homelessness in Oregon rose 35 percent since Kotek took office. The number itself is real. A Portland State University count found more than 27,000 people experiencing homelessness in the state in 2025, a 35 percent increase over the previous tally. Drazan does not misstate the figure. What she does is drop everything the people who produced it said about what it means.

The researchers who ran the count attribute the rise partly to economic insecurity and the shortage of affordable housing, and partly to better data collection, especially in Multnomah County. Some of that 35 percent is not more people newly on the street. It is more people finally being counted. Over the same period the state added more than 3,000 shelter beds, a 39 percent increase in capacity. The response grew faster than the counted population did.

More to the point, the researchers are direct about the cause, and it is not the governor's competence. The Portland State team states plainly that the largest driver of homelessness is the lack of affordable and available housing. A homeless-services director described the mechanism in one line: the primary causal factor is that people cannot afford their homes, and almost everyone's first step into homelessness is triggered by an economic crisis. The trend also predates Kotek. Oregon's homeless population had already climbed more than 22 percent between 2020 and 2022, before she was sworn in, on top of a housing shortfall estimated at well over 100,000 units that no governor built in a single term and none could erase in one.

None of this means homelessness is not a real and worsening problem, or that a challenger has no standing to raise it. It means the particular way Drazan raises it is misleading by construction. She takes a housing-market outcome, one that began before Kotek and is driven by cost and supply rather than by any decision on the governor's desk, and presents it as a personal verdict on Kotek's leadership. The figure is accurate. The story bolted onto it is not.

The move should look familiar by now. It is the same one she used on her own voting bill, describing a measure that narrows access to the ballot as one that protects it. In both cases the technique is identical. Keep the literal facts defensible, and let the framing carry a claim the facts do not support. A voter who hears only the headline number walks away with a false impression, which is the function it is meant to serve.

What the record adds up to

Set the pieces side by side. When the Legislature tried to act on climate, she stopped it by leaving. When Oregon's election system worked, she sponsored a bill to make it harder to use. Her money comes from the industries most opposed to the policies she blocked. And the person who helped build her career is the person who would benefit from it.

None of this rests on what Drazan might do. It rests on what she has done, in the public record, with her name attached. She has told Oregonians who she is by how she has used power when she had it. She used it to obstruct, and she tried to use it to narrow the vote.

A candidate can be smart, disciplined, and effective and still be the wrong choice, precisely because those qualities make the record more consequential rather than less. Drazan is all three. That is the problem. The competence is real. It is the direction that should give any Oregon voter pause.

Sources: Oregon Legislature bill text (HB 3872, 2025 session); OPB; Willamette Week; Oregon Capital Chronicle; Inside Climate News; KGW; Oregon Secretary of State campaign finance records. Two claims circulated by the Democratic Party of Oregon, that Drazan sponsored a ballot-return restriction and opposed multilingual voter pamphlet materials, are not part of HB 3872 and are not included here pending separate primary-source confirmation.