Wapato's lost promise: Few people in public life care as much about the homeless as Deborah Kafoury, chair of the Multnomah County Commission. That's why it's disappointing to learn her county's report on the potential use of Wapato jail for homeless people is so persistently negative, prompting Kafoury to declare the jail unsuited for such a use. Has anyone noticed? It's cold outside. Absent other promising short-term solutions by the county, the county's job is to find a way to get to yes on Wapato – not no. The city of Portland recently and correctly declared the homeless situation to be a public emergency in need of imaginative actions – hence its sudden use of the armory to temporarily house homeless people otherwise found in city parks, on downtown sidewalks and beneath roadway underpasses. The county's plan to sell the never used $58 million Wapato jail should stand. The structure is a monument to failed public policy and has become an embarrassing drain on taxpayers. But its redemption, should it have any in the immediate short-term, would be in temporarily sheltering the city's dispossessed and allowing the county a bit more time to explore more lasting solutions. Kafoury, for her part, could insist upon overcoming fine print objections to the jail's use, one of them a zoning incompatibility, and help the county get to yes.