Portland Mayor Keith Wilson is planning to exit some homeless residents from the city’s alternative shelters, instead referring them to emergency overnight shelters and day centers.

In an email Wilson sent to city councilors Tuesday, Wilson said nearly 100 homeless Portlanders who are living in alternative shelters are expected to reach their 120-day stay limits, and the city plans to move them out of those shelters if they have not engaged in services during that time.

“Stay limits and engagement requirements are nationwide best practices used to encourage continuous progress towards stability, independence, and appropriate housing,” Wilson said in the email, dated January 6.

The city’s 10 alternative shelters are sites like the city’s Safe Rest Villages, which allow people to live onsite for an extended period of time, typically in single-occupancy tiny home villages or safe parking areas for RVs. They operate differently from other temporary sites, including Wilson’s emergency overnight congregate shelters, in which people are expected to leave each morning.

Wilson said the city’s 867 alternative shelter beds are intended to be a temporary resource for homeless residents, not to be used as long-term housing.

“Per our Housing First strategic framework, we have a responsibility to incentivize individuals to move through our emergency shelter system and into permanent housing,” Wilson’s email said.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness—a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to prevent and end homelessness—says on its website that housing first policies by definition do not impose one-size-fits-all rules that disqualify clients.

“People with sobriety and substance use issues seek and accept help in different ways and at different speeds,” the website says. “It’s up to the Housing First provider to design a program that serves the unique needs and interests of each client being served[.]”

Wilson said some exemptions apply, including those a shelter case manager chooses to waive, or for people experiencing severe mental health challenges and other acuity issues.

Tuesday’s email came as the city and Multnomah County are currently unable to keep up with the need of homeless residents, as people are losing housing at a faster rate than either government can get them into housing affordable to them. The most recent available data from October 2025 shows 1,969 people entered the county’s homelessness system that month, while 1,275 exited the system. Of those, 409 gained permanent housing and 866 became inactive in the system.

In late October, Multnomah County paused its rapid rehousing voucher program after it lost state funding it expected to receive. Those programs largely helped to move people from shelters and into permanent housing. While the county vote maintained funding for 1,051 people working through the process to housing, some 700 people lost out on the opportunity for a housing voucher.

Wilson said Multnomah County is preparing to close its Market Street and Wy’East shelters, for a total loss of 210 beds, and his office anticipates pressure on shelters that are often at full capacity will continue to increase.

“The City of Portland cannot indefinitely utilize emergency units with individuals unwilling to engage with those who are here to help them,” Wilson said.

But local leaders pushed back on the mayor’s plan, saying exiting people from programs even if they are not engaged, does not help them become housed.

Councilor Candace Avalos, the chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, said in a statement to the Mercury that she is concerned about Wilson’s new approach.

“I’m deeply concerned that we’re enforcing stay limits in shelter without having real housing off-ramps in place,” Avalos said. “I hear the Mayor’s commitment that exiting people is a last resort, but referrals to overnight shelters, day centers, or outreach workers are not the same as access to housing.”

She said data shows people are not homeless because they are ‘service resistant,’ but because housing is unaffordable and the services they need often don’t exist or are not accessible.

“About half of all Portland renters are burdened by their rent and our ‘affordable’ units are basically the same cost as market-rate housing,” Avalos said. “Oregon ranks near the bottom nationally in behavioral health capacity. We can’t punish people for systems that have failed to meet their needs."

Avalos sees another way.

“A safe bed is not a reward to be earned — it’s a baseline of human dignity,” she said. “If we want shelter to be a true pathway to housing, we have to pair expectations with real investments in housing placement, supportive services, rent stabilization, and prevention. Otherwise, we risk cycling people back onto the street instead of moving them forward."

Councilor Angelita Morillo, who also sits on that Committee, echoed Avalos’ statement. She said people come to mistrust the system after services provided to them are inadequate or unacceptable, meaning they may not engage after a period of time.

“When we provide really good, robust services, people opt in—and not everyone is treated the same under these systems,” Morillo said.

“Anyone who has actually lived on the streets or had to live in a congregate shelter for an extended period of time understands that it is not a cushy, fun lifestyle,” Morillo said. “It is very difficult. It can often be re-traumatizing. We do not need to incentivize people any further to get off of the streets. It is a brutal, difficult, and short life.”

Wilson said in the email that the city established “trauma-informed engagement requirements” within the alternative system.

“There is no way to repeatedly displace people from the only small, meager stability that they have, and not have that be a traumatizing process,” Morillo said.

Wilson’s order comes as people living on the margins are grappling with fewer resources from local, state, and federal governments.

In November, Oregon joined 20 other states in a lawsuit against the US Department of Housing and Urban Development over its guidance that reversed longstanding housing first policies and pulled grant funding that state and local governments typically receive.

The lawsuit argued that federal cuts undermine the housing first approach. The lawsuit noted that previous HUD guidance defined housing first as a “model of housing assistance that prioritizes rapid placement and stability in permanent housing in which admission does not have preconditions (such as sobriety or a minimum income threshold) and in which housing assistance is not conditioned upon participation in services.”

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield issued a statement November 25 when the lawsuit was filed, saying HUD’s guidance would upend housing supports and lead more Oregonians into homelessness.

“Imagine finally getting into a stable home after years of homelessness, only to have the rug pulled out because the rules changed overnight,” Rayfield said. “That’s what HUD’s new policy does – it puts Oregonians at risk of losing the housing and help they’ve worked so hard to get.”

US District Judge Mary S. McElroy granted a preliminary injunction December 23 requiring the federal government to maintain the status quo regarding federal grants.