Things to Do in Portland This Week, February 2026
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Over 17,000 people are experiencing homelessness in Multnomah County, according to data from November. Per the latest census, just under 800,000 people live here. That’s to say, roughly one in every 50 people in Portland and its surrounds is unhoused. That’s to say, the ruthless gears of society refuse to make space for one out of every 50 people who live here. State and city programs and nonprofits and advocacy organizations work to ameliorate this failure. But day-to-day, person-to-person, stranger-to-stranger, society treats unhoused people as a glitch in a system—simply pretends they don’t exist. Emergency shelter operations and groups creating pathways to employment and permanent housing are the most direct forces combating the housing crisis, but putting a roof over someone’s head is far from the only step in redeeming their humanity. The 501(c)(3) Humans for Housing works instead on awareness, more specifically on humanizing the 17,155 unhoused people who live in Portland through storytelling.
At the end of 2024, the nonprofit produced the short documentary No Place to Grow Old, which went on to screen in 60 cities across the country. Focused on Portlanders over 60, the film puts faces to statistics representing the truly horrendous fact of this county that aging into homelessness is a thing. Saturday, Humans for Housing is opening Dear Portland (thru April 7; reservations are free but encouraged to control the flow of viewers), an exhibition at the Pearl District gallery Stelo Arts, framed as a letter to the city. Instead of projecting shame or anger, the exhibition follows a similar documentary format to the film, screening short interviews with unhoused Portlanders and breathing life into housing research through immersive installations. In a press release, the nonprofit’s executive director, Michael Larson, described it as an opportunity for “slowing down and listening to the people behind the data.”
A block party (11am–3pm Saturday) opens the show with live music, free coffee and doughnuts, and a chance to chat with the team behind the exhibition, including Davey Schaupp, the director of No Place to Grow Old. In many ways, this kind of casual interfacing is the larger goal of the project—putting faces to names and engaging with Portlanders, housed or otherwise. “It wasn’t about being polished or perfect,” Zahra Malikshah, a Portlander who has struggled with housing insecurity and who was interviewed for Dear Portland, recently told Oregon ArtsWatch. “It was about putting my real experiences out there and knowing they might actually make someone think differently about housing and homelessness.”
More things to do this week
COMEDY Willamette Week’s Funniest Five
7PM THU, FEB 5 | REVOLUTION HALL, $17+
Since 2013, Willamette Week has polled the city’s comedians, club owners, show producers, comedy hangabouts, and, of course, podcasters to ask, Who’s the best stand-up in town right now? In 2026, it’s Andrea Menchaca—“I know I have a reputation in your household,” she jokes in a bit about seeing her ex’s new wife at the gym. This event collects the five highest-voted comics from this year’s poll, which drew from 100 respondents. It’s no American Idol–style contest, but instead a showcase of the funniest people in the city right now, including, alongside Menchaca, Erica Figueroa, Jordan Casner, Ash Allen, Lucas Copp, and 2025’s champ, Ally J. Ward, hosting.
DANCE Urban Bush Women
7:30PM THU–SAT, FEB 5–7 | NEWMARK THEATRE, $6–85
Choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar founded her revered company, Urban Bush Women, over 40 years ago in Brooklyn, New York. The mode was and remains dance as cultural expression and means for social progress, namely amplifying the perspective of Black women. Thanks to Portland dance presenter White Bird, Urban Bush Women’s retrospective THIS IS RISK tour is in town this weekend. Look out for Zollar’s 1988 dance exploring homelessness titled Shelter, as well as Batty Moves, from 1995; using the Caribbean slang term for butt, the piece interrogates and reclaims perhaps the most exploited and fetishized part of the body.
BOOKS Pool Party Magazine
6PM TUE, FEB 10 | GRAND GESTURE BOOKS, FREE
Pool Party launched as a reading series, quickly sprouted a literary magazine, and is now growing a book-publishing arm. Local authors and wife-and-husband cofounders Ryan-Ashley Anderson and Kevin Maloney are hosting a reading to celebrate mag’s first birthday at Portland’s lone romance bookstore, Grand Gesture. Portlanders Chelsea Bieker, Jon Raymond, and Camille McDaniel share the bill with California novelist and writer Luke Goebel (who cowrote the screenplay for Eileen, the film adaptation of his wife Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel), San Diego poet Adam Deutsch, and Lauren Lavín, a Seattle writer whose debut essay collection, The Third Beat, came out this month.
Elsewhere...
- Megan Burbank remembers Judith Arcana, “Portland’s own underground abortionist-turned-poet.” (Portland Mercury)
- Wake up, babe, new D. B. Cooper FBI files released. (The Oregonian)
