Luz Pena: “How much do you pay for these things?”
Angel Sanchez: “$7 for that. I sell it for $9.”

Angel buys his merchandise at the flea market and slightly marks up the price. He’s making between .50 cents to $2 per item.

Angel says he would never steal. He buys everything he sells, though he doesn’t ask where the items come from. With his profits he pays the bills, and the rest he sends to his kids in Mexico. One is going to college and the other one is in high school. Lately he says business has been difficult.

Luz Pena: “Two years ago, how many vendors were out here?”
Angel Sanchez: “Eramos as 6.” (We used to be about 6)
Luz Pena: “Now?”
Angel Sanchez: “20”

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Susana Rojas Executive Director of Calle 24’s Cultural District says many of the new vendors are coming from the Tenderloin following the state of emergency declaration in that neighborhood.

“I think they are coming from the United Plaza in the Tenderloin because they are being very strict,” said Rojas and added, “It is getting worse. Unfortunately, as things have been happening in other parts of the city, then people get desperate and they start moving around trying to find a place to be able to either set-up a tent to sleep or a tent to sale some supplies.”

Watching everything from afar is Diana Medina. She’s opened Diju Jewelry 14 years ago. She used to be a street vendor and understands the struggle. Medina wants street vendors to have a permit.

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Many street vendors we spoke to say they want a permit.

Rojas and her team are signing up vendors like Angel to a program introduced by Supervisor Hillary Ronen that will require street vendors to have permits starting next month.

“After May 7, if someone cannot prove where their items come from, they are going to be confiscated and asked to move,” said Rojas.

Rojas says it will be complicated for many vendors to reproduce proof of purchase even though they are paying for items.

“The problem is that they do go to the flea market. They get them legally, but they don’t give them any receipts. When they come over here, they won’t be able to prove where they get their items from,” said Rojas.

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More than 20 vendors have signed up for the program so far.

Rojas says the plan is to continue registering vendors to the program and assign them specific areas from Cesar Chavez to 24th street. Rojas says the city still doesn’t know how much, if anything, they will charge these vendors to set-up shop.

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The Oregon HVAC industry struggled to withstand the record breaking heat

Phones rang at Southern Oregon Heat and Air Conditioning in Medford last weekend in June as meteorological records melted across the state of Oregon.

The company’s small crew worked around the clock to meet demand. Over the weekend, the company gained 50 customers but received 500 calls a day, turning away many potential customers.

“We had people calling and saying how unhappy and how hot they were and I had to say, ‘Look, I feel awful, but our crew works a 12-hour shift seven days a week,'” says Jesse Phillips, a dispatcher at the heating and air conditioning company. “We could only do so much.”

During the heat wave, temperatures rose to 117 degrees in some areas of the state – causing HVAC companies across the state to scramble to keep up with the sudden demand for services.

“Before the heat wave, there wasn’t really a pile of service orders,” said Brian Hansen, general manager of Bull Mountain Heating & Cooling in Portland. “People weren’t prepared for the temperature and the stress was high. What happened was this big bubble that put a lot of pressure on the industry, ”says Hansen.

In Portland, only 70% of households have air conditioning, according to data from the US Census Bureau. That makes Portland one of the least air-conditioned cities in the United States – third to last behind Seattle and San Francisco.

Those on lower incomes were less likely to have air conditioning at home, leaving many Oregonians looking for oases like cooling centers or air-conditioned accommodations – or heading to cooler parts of the state.

But not everyone was able to do it, and the results were tragic: by Tuesday morning, 99 people across the state had died from heat-related causes during the heat wave. Many, officials said, were found alone in their homes with no air conditioning or fans. Hundreds of others sought emergency care when temperatures rose.

And even households and businesses with air conditioning couldn’t necessarily keep them waiting: of the five HVAC companies contacted for this item, four stopped accepting new customers.

That’s because the HVAC industry, like many others, is faced with a staff shortage – so business owners are understaffed even in their services.

“We’re trying to get as many people into the industry as possible. We pay to take in a lot of people and pay for their schooling, ”says Hansen. “There aren’t many hands here.”

Hansen says he will always recruit and train qualified people who want to become HVAC technicians, but that he and his colleagues in the industry are struggling to find enough employees.

“Not a lot of people want to train outside in the heat,” says Phillips. “We lost a technician in our crew. Everyone in the industry has problems filling positions. ”

A 2019 report by the State Department of Labor found that craftsmen, including plumbers, truck drivers and maintenance workers, were viewed as “difficult to fill positions” because they could not be filled due to a lack of qualified applicants.

Northwest Apprenticeship Services’ apprentice administrator Lou Long said that Oregon’s skills shortage was a long time coming.

“I wasn’t even allowed to go to high school career fairs for a long time. Everyone was pushing for colleges and nobody wanted to hear about apprenticeships and vocational schools, ”says Long. “Now all of our journeymen are retiring and we have no one to fill this gap.”

That could mean that more homeowners and landlords are foregoing or doing without basic maintenance due to a lack of qualified hands.

But that trend could also be reversed due to COVID-19 and rising college costs. According to a 2020 analysis by the U.S. Department of Labor, the number of citizen apprenticeships exceeded 636,000 in 2020, a 64% increase from 10 years ago.

President Joe Biden’s administration has also signaled support for craft training: the American Jobs Plan, if it goes into effect, will allocate $ 48 billion to train workers, including the creation of “one to two million new ones registered apprenticeships “.

Training can take up to six years, but on-the-job training and booming demand could put an end to the skills shortage in Oregon quickly.

The more lucrative the trade work becomes, the more attractive it could be to high school students who are unable or unwilling to take on large college debt.

If the historic heat of the weekend – and climate models that predict an increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including extreme heat and cold – are any indication, the need for reliable heating and cooling systems will become even more important for Oregonians in the near future. And that means the demand for skilled HVAC technicians will continue to grow.

“If journeymen don’t work, it’s their own fault,” says Long. “The demand is huge.”

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