The brewery district, warehouse district, armory district, railyards, mills...    You don't have to be a native of Portland to understand that homeless people lived there going back to at least the Great Depression, until they were all driven out by the developers and yuppies who redefined it as "The Pearl", presuming that they would somehow plop themselves in the middle of downtown and make the homeless people somebody -else's- problem.   

What did you expect, that you could just kick them all out to other people's neighborhoods? F--k you, Pearl.