In 2015, city and county officials made a bold claim. With unprecedented and continued funding toward the right resources—permanent housing, shelter, and preventing people from falling into homelessness in the first place—they said the city could slash its homeless population in half by 2017.
They were wrong.
Despite record amounts of spending and thousands upon thousands of people served, the still-unfolding housing crisis has led to a roughly 10 percent increase in the homeless population in the last two years, from 3,801 in 2015 to 4,177 this year.
At the same time—and amid ever-more visible encampments throughout town—officials say their plans have paid off in a meaningful way: The number of unsheltered homeless people in the city has decreased by nearly 12 percent.
The 1,668 individuals accounted for as part of a single-night count in late February is the lowest number of people found in tents, cars, abandoned buildings, and other unsheltered living situations in the last 8 years. It would be lower still if federal rules allowed officials to omit the people living in sanctioned organized encampments like Right 2 Dream Too, Hazelnut Grove, and Dignity Village.
The number of people in shelter the night of the count doubled, not surprising given the huge number of beds officials have created.
The long-awaited data was released Monday afternoon, when the city/county Joint Office of Homeless Services (JOHS) unveiled preliminary findings from an every-other-year “point-in-time” homelessness count carried out earlier in the year. The count—by its nature imperfect and under-representative—combines computer system data about people staying in homeless shelters with findings from an army of volunteers who fan out to survey people living without shelter throughout Multnomah County.
The picture the findings paint is equal parts dispiriting and hopeful. On one hand, it shows that the most comprehensive and data driven approach to reducing homelessness in the city’s history hasn’t been able to fulfill its promise. People are simply falling into homelessness at too great a rate, officials say, to stem the tide as they’d hoped in 2015.
“Part of that model assumed the rate at which people were coming homeless would stay the same,” says Denis Theriault, a spokesperson for the JOHS (and former Mercury employee). “Very clearly that did not stay the same. The inflow has apparently gone up, gotten worse. Housing has gotten more expensive. That impacts everything our service providers do.”
Even homeless veterans—a population for whom officials claimed to have “functionally ended” veterans’ homelessness for late last year—were up from 2015. The data showed 446 self-identified homeless vets, compared to 422 two years before (though changes in methodology prevent a precise apples-to-apples comparison).
The number of homeless women, people with disabilities, and chronically homeless individuals have all increased.
But the data also shows that the Portland region’s efforts—and the tens of millions in public dollars put toward this problem—have helped a lot of people. Officials are heartened that the count shows an 11.6 percent decrease in unsheltered Portlanders, marking the first time since Portland began counting in this manner that there were more people in emergency shelter than living on the streets.
That’s possible because the city and county have increased shelter beds by roughly 630 since January 2016, creating more space for homeless families, women, people with pets, and others. They’re also placing record numbers of people in permanent housing—more than 3,500 from July to March alone—and helping thousands more avoid homelessness through prevention services like rent assistance (which stretches less far than it used to, what with the city’s rising rents).
“The decline in the count of unsheltered individuals, despite ongoing challenges such as rapidly increasing housing costs and stagnant incomes for low-income households, likely reflects our community’s significant expansion of prevention, housing placement, and emergency shelter capacity over the past two years,” reads a memo by JOHS Director Marc Jolin on the findings.
Some other takeaways from the study:
•The number of homeless families, a point of concern in the 2015 count, remained roughly the same this year, but many more were sheltered this time around. The county saw a nearly 50 percent decrease in unsheltered families.
•The number of chronically homeless Portlanders has increased by 24 percent. The vast majority of those people, 71 percent, are unsheltered.
•There are fewer African Americans experiencing homelessness—positive news for another group that generated particular concern in 2015. This year’s count found 187 185 fewer Black people, including a 57 percent reduction in those without shelter.
•The number of Native Americans who are homeless ballooned—from 82 in 2015 to 424 in 2017. Officials chock that up to an “unexplained issue” in the 2015 count they believe resulted in the Native American population being undercounted. People of color as a whole are overrepresented in Portland’s homeless population, but Native Americans see a particularly stark disparity. Their rate of homelessness is roughly four times their percentage of the population.
•The number of homeless women also increased, from 1,161 in 2015 to 1,355 this year. Again, though, the number of homeless women without shelter had decreased.
•Fewer people reported being homeless for a short period of time, and more reported being homeless for a long period of time. Of people responding to a survey given to unsheltered Portlanders, 36 percent said they’d been homeless for less than a year, compared to 41 percent in 2015. In addition, 32 percent of people said they’d been homeless for two years or more, compared to 23 percent in 2015. “It’s harder to get people into housing,” Theriault says.
The data comes as Portland is once again planning to spend record amounts of money on addressing homelessness. Between them, the Multnomah County and the City of Portland have budgeted more than $50 million in the next year for the Joint Office of Homeless Services, to continue its work of placing people into housing, preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place, and providing emergency shelter.
But the homelessness data also points yet another bold arrow toward the severity of the city’s housing crisis, showing the city needs solutions that help people from falling into homelessness. As we reported this week, the state legislature is considering a proposal that would provide for new tenant protections. But that legislation, House Bill 2004, has already been watered down due to concerns from some legislators, and it might have to be weakened further to earn the crucial vote of one skeptic, East Portland-based Senator Rod Monroe.
Here’s the full data, shared in a memo from Jolin to the executive committee of A Home For Everyone, the community-wide task force that strategizes on fighting homelessness. Jolin is scheduled to lay out the findings at a meeting Monday afternoon.
Least we forget those not included in the survey, including;
-Student.
-Those doubled up and/or couch surfing.
-Those living in an RV (the county receives 1,000 calls monthly requesting towing).
-Those living in a car.
-The transitional working homeless.
-Youth Homeless.
-Airbnb (those sheltering/living short and long term).
When asked to address concerns about the accuracy of the Homeless survey, HUD spokesperson Brian Sullivan responded; “There are those who say that this count does not express the totality of the need out there on the streets of this country to that we say, exactly, yes. We totally agree that this count doesn’t express the totality of need in our country. But this is what the count is.”
Portland will never adequately address its Homeless Crisis without a campus style care community. I fear the number of unsheltered homeless will continue to rise through 2020.
Homeless shelters do one thing, they save life’s, and yes, adequate space is in dire need. However, even if three shelters opened every month between now and December, it would not adequately supply the coming demand as temp drop this coming Portland Winter.
So the number of housed people has increased, yet the number of homeless has also increased and the vacancy rate in existing housing remains historically low.
The fact of the matter is Portland does not have nearly enough housing, and is not building new housing at a sufficient rate to keep up with the demand, so without adequate housing stock it doesn’t matter how much money is thrown at the problem otherwise.
Also, if the number of people housed has gone up and the homeless population is still increasing, that indicates that existing and/or future homeless people are moving to Portland to be homeless in Portland. This is a national issue that Portland cannot possibly solve on its own as long as there is a steady influx of homeless and guaranteed-to-be homeless folks of lesser means who continue to move to the city. If each new influx simply replaces/adds to the count on the streets, people are eventually going to get fed up with dumping increasing amounts of money towards the problem without the corresponding social relief of seeing an effect in practical terms for the look and safety of our city.
Bottom line is we need a combination of 1) a lot more housing in Portland, 2) more and better services to assist folks who are homeless or on the edge of homeless and who want/need the help, and 3) significantly stricter enforcement against the population who is homeless as a lifestyle choice, with the associated theft, drug use, and unsanitary results for the rest of us.
The information in this article comes from those paid to shelter people. They are paid a great deal and if you ask people in the shelter system if they feel safe, represented or like the money is equitably spent, they’d have a lot to say. There are empty shelters in Portland.
I drive all over town for work and I’m sorry, i’m just not seeing these good-hearted, law-abiding, “just down on their luck” homeless people.
What I see are countless camps filled with drug addicts and the like. I see more and more RV’s typically occupied by white men who are totally tweeked out. I see garbage, stripped bike frames, needles, and burnt out vehicles.
I just drove by Montavilla Park and there was a group of homeless people on the lawn all high on what appeared to be heroin. (Tip: Don’t EVER use the porti-potties there; they’re filled with discarded needles!)
These types of homeless people don’t want to move indoors or to stop using drugs. Why no mention of that? Why is every homelessness article framed like these are just good families who are simply down on their luck?
You can’t force an addict to stop using, they have to want it. With this increase in homelessness, it looks like they don’t want it.
Portland’s social services agencies need to disburse their funding on a triage basis instead of prioritizing those who will never get to the point where they can function in life and at least defray some of their cost by working part-time. I go to Central City Concern, and let me tell you: it’s the people on parole, in drug and alcohol treatment, and the severely mentally ill that get more than the lion’s share – money wasted on incorrigibles and incurables!
I got into housing after almost five years on a wait list, but now I’m running into the brick wall most aspiring to domestic living do. How in hell am I going to get a job when gas stations and fast food joints run background and credit checks, Latinos own the restaurant workforce, and my body’s too trashed from bad genes and even worse living to lump drywall?
I just want to live on a boat in the San Juans, eking out a life of modest comfort writing freelance and developing Android apps. Instead I’m languishing downtown, where normies want nothing to do with me and I want nothing to do with the drunks and freaks who seem to enjoy my company (I quit drinking four months ago). And all the people who would never hire me or anyone like me hate me because eighty percent of my rent is tax-subsidized.
Jello Biafara had it all wrong: it’s the Clackistanian Tea Baggers who want to nuke us (only slightly) poor(er) with neutron bombs; the liberals just want to incarcerate us in feel-good-for-them reservations a la Brave New World, where our victimhood will be perpetually reaffirmed and our dependence on social services will end only on the day we die.