As Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office last month escalated the city’s response to the homeless crisis with a series of attention-grabbing orders, a formidable group of local organizations quietly coalesced in opposition.
They were unhappy that the mayor issued rules restricting where people could sleep without offering safe, supportive alternatives. The newly formed coalition of housing advocacy groups, as well as a neighborhood association, now have issued proposals of their own. One novel idea: they want private sector landlords to convert at least one apartment unit each to subsidized housing.
Beginning in early February, Wheeler’s office called for shelters that would house 1,000 people each and be staffed by National Guard soldiers, lifted due process protections for people camping along busy roads and ordered bureaus overseen by other city commissioners to yield to his anti-camping orders. Proposed mass tent sites, championed by mayoral aide Sam Adams, were the final breaking point for many local housing leaders.
“Unfortunately many of the current proposals bring urgency to the wrong solutions,” the new coalition of local housing nonprofits wrote on its website. “These actions (would) increase racial disparities, intensify trauma, cost millions and do not add a single unit of housing.”
Instead of forcing as many as 3,000 people to pitch their tents on one of a few large sites, which advocates say would cause significant trauma to vulnerable individuals, the city should use its resources to find ways to house those people, they argue.
The coalition, made up of 32 local organizations including county- and city-funded nonprofits such as Street Roots, JOIN and Transition Projects, calls their counterproposal “the 3,000 challenge.”
The Old Town Community Association, meanwhile, touted its own neighborhood-specific proposal for addressing homelessness and public safety.
While each proposal has gained some vocal support, few if any aspects of any of the proposals have drawn the money they would need to become reality. The challenge the city faces was already steep, and the organized opposition to Wheeler’s plans adds a yet-another hurdle.
WHEELER PROJECTS
In early February, Wheeler issued a state of emergency to allow the city to more easily remove tents from busy roadsides and other places the city deemed dangerous for campers to live. This order came in response to a rise in fatal pedestrian accidents among people experiencing homelessness.
Days later, Wheeler and Commissioner Dan Ryan announced that camping will not be allowed within 150 feet of any of the city’s long-delayed safe rest villages, which are intended to provide transitional housing once they open, nor will it be allowed along the streets between a safe rest village and the nearest transit stop.
Since Feb. 1, about 35 encampments located on land near freeways or high crash areas have been swept, said city spokesperson Mark Alejos. Most of those removals met the official public health threshold to be swept – just five did not but got the OK to be swept under Wheeler’s new mandate.
The city pays its contractor $70 per hour for each worker assigned to remove an encampment, Alejos said. The clean-up teams typically include three workers and sweeps can take anywhere from two hours to three weeks, he said.
Wheeler’s emergency orders stating where people can’t pitch a tent are a done deal. So too is a new street services coordination center, now in the planning stages, led by Wheeler’s community safety chief, Mike Myers, and designed to better deliver supportive services to those living unsheltered.
The command center, which is meant to immediately identify available shelter space and other assistance within the tangled homeless services system in Multnomah County, has been discussed for years but is just now taking shape. The City Council approved funding last fall to hire staffers and the mayor directed the city budget office to prioritize funding for the center in future budgets as well. Its operations are slated to begin in mid-April, said city spokesperson Rich Chatman.
What is less clear – and more worrisome to local housing providers -- is the feasibility of the plan to force unsheltered individuals to cluster on one of three designated city properties. In mid-February, Wheeler’s office came out with a plan slated to decrease the prominent visibility of homelessness in the city. The proposal suggested creating up to three sites, at each of which perhaps 400 to 500 people now living around the city would be directed to pitch their tent.
As envisioned by the mayor’s office, the sites would offer basic services to maintain safety and cleanliness. But the office hasn’t provided details about whether and how people would be kept safe from severe weather or offered connections to supportive housing or behavioral health services. Nor have any locations been publicly proposed. Adams told The Oregonian/OregonLive last month that individual shelters with roofs, secure storage for residents’ belongings and on-site caseworkers all would be unlikely due to limited financial resources.
Tristia Bauman, senior attorney at the National Homelessness Law Center, said the proposal to require people to camp at those sites would likely be rejected by the courts under a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that limit cities’ ability to prohibit camping if they don’t provide safe indoor sleeping alternatives.
THE 3,000 CHALLENGE
In early March, the coalition of homeless services providers announced three strategies that they said would be more humane than Wheeler’s tent site proposal and could make a quick and significant dent in the county’s homeless population if they were fast-tracked.
The first: Ask property owners with empty apartment units to commit at least one to be used as affordable housing by accepting a federal housing voucher or public rent assistance. Kaia Sand, director of the nonprofit newspaper and homelessness services organization Street Roots, said eight landlords have already pledged a unit in response. Advocates plan to hold workshops for landlords in the coming weeks and months.
Denis Theriault, spokesperson for the joint city-county homelessness office, said joint office staff and commissioners are working with providers to understand what is feasible and what kind of policy changes can accelerate moving unsheltered individuals into housing, a process that typically takes a few months to a couple years.
In the Portland metro area, there are about 12,000 to 15,000 vacant units at any given time given that there’s typically a 5% vacancy rate, said Robert Black, a Portland real estate broker. In downtown Portland, he estimates the vacancy rate is higher, slightly above 10%. And the lion’s share of those units are non-luxury apartments, he said.
According to Theriault, “The county is excited by this idea and the energy behind it -- we all want to get more people into existing apartments. And we know one of our biggest challenges is getting access to the empty units we know are out there.” Building relationships with landlords has historically been a heavy lift for housing agencies, he said.
The coalition’s second ask is directed at the county and city, requesting that they purchase or lease entire apartment buildings for nonprofits to use as affordable housing for their clients. While there has been no commitment from local government yet, Sand said some Multnomah County commissioners have expressed interest in supporting the request.
Marisa Zapata, director of Portland State University’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative, argued that surplus revenues and leftover federal pandemic funding should be used to purchase apartment buildings or motels.
According to a Portland State University eviction cost report, budget reports from the city-county homelessness services agency and the Urban League of Portland, investing in housing could pay off in the long run:
- It costs about $8,000 to provide what is known as “rapid rehousing” for one household, which includes short-term rent assistance but little other support.
- It costs $20,000 to fund permanent supportive housing for one individual or household for a year, which includes rent coverage and other assistance such as behavioral health support.
- It costs $17,000 to $40,000 to provide group shelter for one person for a year, due primarily to high costs to staff such shelters.
- It costs about $26,000 to fund one sleeping pod at one of the city- and county-created pod sites for a year.
- It costs about $16,000 a year to house a person for one year at Kenton Women’s Village, which is outfitted with custom tiny homes.
- It costs about $51,000 to house a person or household in a motel room for a year.
Instead of spending money to create additional shelters or tent sites, Zapata argued it would be more cost-effective to just place people now living in tents in apartments or converted motel rooms.
Critics of this argument say some people are not ready to move into housing immediately and need assistance either before or after moving in to make the housing placement successful – adding to the price tag.
Zapata said it is the county and city’s job to find money to care for people living in crisis on the streets and decide how to appropriately spend it. But she said the role of the 3,000 challenge group is to push back on ineffective, inhumane or excessively costly proposals and point out better uses.
The coalition’s third call to action is to make more of the affordable units that are already financed by the city or county into supportive housing by providing residents with additional services such as behavioral health care.
Additionally, members of the housing alliance laid out actions that can be taken to support individuals before they get into permanent housing including providing restrooms, hygiene stations and trash collection to current encampments.
The coalition also recommended the city and county do more to help people living in group shelters move into permanent housing. This would free up shelter space on a larger scale, eliminating the need to build more shelter infrastructure, they said in their proposal.
“People get stuck in the shelter system and if we work hard to get those people into housing, that opens up more shelter beds,” Sand said.
In the 2020-2021 fiscal year, 5,390 people spent at least one night in one of Multnomah County’s government-funded shelters, whether a congregate site or a motel, said Theriault. Of those, at least 720 households transitioned into housing. The county believes that number is an undercount. Not everyone who moves into housing necessarily informs the county.
In just the first six months of the 2021-2022 fiscal year, which spans July through December 2021, 3,750 people spent at least one night in shelter.
Proceeds from the Metro homelessness services bond that voters approved in 2020 allowed the county to begin awarding more housing vouchers and other stipends beginning last spring to get people living in motels and some shelters into apartments.
Officials in the mayor’s office have not talked with challenge organizers yet but plan to do so soon, Adams said. County officials have been communicating with organizers and plan to schedule a meeting with them, Sand said. But no one in either local government has committed to paying for any pillars of the 3,000 challenge plan.
OLD TOWN RESET
As the mayor’s office shot out plans and local leaders responded with broad systemwide rebuttals, one community took a narrower response. The Old Town Community Association submitted its own proposal for how the city should clean up its area, which has one of the city’s largest clusters of unsheltered people living inside its borders.
Its 90-day reset plan didn’t just focus on homelessness, but proponents largely focused their talking points on that challenge as they see it as the biggest obstacle to the neighborhood’s well-being.
Drafted by hotel co-owner Jessie Burke, who chairs the community association, the reset plan calls for the city to reduce the number of tents in Old Town by 33%. While setting that as the end goal, Burke said she doesn’t have suggestions for the most cost-efficient or ethical way to accomplish the change. Part of her group’s request is that the city conduct monthly tent counts in Old Town to see if the number of individuals experiencing homelessness in the area has decreased.
The association also wants the city to enforce minimum distancing between tents and buildings to create enough room for individuals with physical disabilities to pass by in their scooters or wheelchairs.
Old Town-based homelessness service providers say they have been told that increased sweeps will be happening soon in Old Town. But Adams, Wheeler’s director of innovation, said as of last week, no authorizations for strategic sweeps in the area had been issued.
While homeless advocates push against sweeps, saying they cause harmful disruptions and sometimes loss of possessions for campers, Burke says sweeps offer a chance for people to be connected to services. Workers with the firm the city contracts with to perform camp removals, Rapid Response, told her that people who are ordered to relocate are first offered shelter, housing, food and connection to services.
“Building housing takes time and often the people who are chronically homeless that we see in Old Town who are severely mentally ill need something different than the standard housing that is offered,” Burke said. She said the outreach prior to a sweep could be a chance to make that connection.
However, a survey of 300 people living unsheltered in Portland conducted by The Oregonian/OregonLive found that 95% of those who reported they had been swept from their camping spot said they were not offered any sort of assistance or shelter.
While neither the city nor the county has responded by adding money for any of the Old Town association’s requests, one of its priorities had already been funded– adding mental health workers at Blanchet House, an Old Town charity that serves free meals each day.
Scott Kerman, Blanchet House director, piloted a two-person peer support program at his facility over the past year to offer visitors to Blanchet House who experience a mental health crisis a safe person to talk to who can help calm their episodes. Now, with funding approved last fall by Multnomah County, Kerman plans to enlarge that team to serve the whole community of Old Town.
The county gave the Mental Health and Addiction Association of Oregon $1.25 million to fund six to eight peer support specialist who will be co-managed by Blanchet House and the association. The three to four teams of two will move from location to location on a regular schedule to provide services at Blanchet House, Maybelle Community Center, Rose Haven, Sisters of the Road and William Temple House, all of which serve people experiencing homelessness.
While money for the workers was greenlighted nearly five months ago, set up has been slow as Blanchet House has attempted to work with the county to cross off the final to dos. Kerman said he believes the county should move with more urgency as people continue to suffer on the streets. But he conceded that hiring qualified peer support specialists or other mental health workers has been a challenge for most organizations over the past year.
Speaking of the peer mentors who will soon be deployed, he said, “We hope they are able to de-escalate or pre-escalate crisis” among clients at any of the nonprofits. “We know that when someone experiences a crisis here, that stays with them as the move throughout their day, so if the peer support (workers) can move to places throughout the day where we have shared clients, they will be able to consistently access someone who is already familiar with them.”
Nicole Hayden reports on homelessness for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She can be reached at nhayden@oregonian.com or on Twitter @Nicole_A_Hayden.
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