"This is Cookie," she says, referring to the man.

Graves has known Cookie on Vancouver's streets since he was 14. He has severe fetal alcohol syndrome, she said, and has been addicted to drugs and alcohol since she's known him. In the last few years she's watched every step of the agonizing process as he's picked himself up and gotten himself squeaky clean minus a little pot here and there. She nearly cries with pride as she talks about it. The dog Cookie hugs in the photo he just got recently, she tells me. He named it Fiona, "not after the princess, but because it's the most beautiful name in the world," he told Graves.

Just recently, though, Cookie's housing program lost funding and he went back onto the street. Now they're housing him in the Stanley Hotel, "where there's only hard drugs," Graves says, and where all his hard work -- work he did, she emphasizes -- could be reversed in days. If she could, Graves would find Cookie a home with a community of people like him, young people with fetal alcohol, with a den mother to watch over them, not too tightly, but enough to make sure they're at the table for dinner, a place with stability. But with no flexibility in funding, her hands are tied. It makes no sense, she says.

"People can't fit just into these models, and we know that because they're on the street. If they could just fit in, they wouldn't be there. Anybody who had another option would never even dream of it."

Money matters

It would be wrong to portray Portland as a city that has solved homelessness. Oregon Housing and Community Services finds the number of homeless people across Oregon rising significantly as the recession ratchets up unemployment numbers. In fact, Oregon has more homeless people per capita than any other state, according the U.S. government.

And this month more homeless people became visible in downtown Portland after a law prohibiting sitting on the sidewalk was ruled unconstitutional.

Still, some of the policies I learned about that do seem to be working in Portland might bear scrutiny by politicians in Vancouver and the B.C. government.

Regardless, Portland has one final advantage over Vancouver: a whole whack of federal funding.

In the United States, federal funding for housing programs still flows through the veins of its states and cities. Canada, from the early '80s to the early '90s, cut almost $2 billion from national housing funds and later cancelled all funding for new housing, transferring the majority of the administration of housing programs to the provinces. If the City of Vancouver, like Portland, could tap into a national fund, it might have a chance at reaching its goal of ending homelessness. But as it stands, such hopes are as only as healthy or slim as the current provincial budget.

"Ten-year plans work if they have funding. We have a 10-year plan that nobody's funding. That doesn't work," says Graves.

"If we had a budget like they have, we'd end it too."