As houseless Portlanders woke to nearly two inches of snow Tuesday morning, city officials joined private developers in kicking off a project that’s promised to significantly expand the region’s permanent shelter network before next winter.
At 7:30 am, the bundled groups of city leaders broke ground on the long-awaited bright-green homeless shelter coming to Northwest Portland.
The new tent-like facility will act as a “navigation center” for homeless Portlanders. This means that, along with offering 120 shelter beds for temporary respite, the facility will help connect guests with health care, addiction recovery programs, longterm supportive housing, and other services addressing issues that often keep people from finding a home.
The project was first proposed by Harbor of Hope, a homeless solutions nonprofit led by developer Homer Williams, in April 2018. The facility will be built with private dollars—$1.5 million from Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle and $3.5 million from Harbor of Hope’s fundraising efforts—on the city-owned land that lies beneath the Northwest Lovejoy ramp to the Broadway Bridge. The shelter and programming will be run by Transition Projects.
The property lies across the train tracks from the former location of peer-led homeless camp Right 2 Dream Too. Ironically, Williams forced that camp to relocate to the Rose Quarter after complaining about its proximity to the $49.5 million Residence Inn he owns.
“One thing I realized is that we’re all going to have to be involved,” Williams said when announcing the project in April. ”We can’t have people pooping in bushes, drinking bad water, not getting enough sleep, we’re a better country and city than that.”
But the investment that Williams, Boyle, and other business leaders have put into this project have given some homeless advocates pause for being an ingenuous marketing tool, one that could put public services into the hands of private developers.
Transition Projects Director George Devendorf dismissed these theories. While private dollars may be bankrolling the center’s construction, the publicly-funded Joint Office of Homeless Services (JOHS) will cover the annual operating costs of $1 million.
“The navigation center will be operated just like other Transition Projects shelters that are funded by the Joint Office,” said Devendorf. According to Devendorf, the center’s structure and programming is modelled after similar facilities in San Francisco and Seattle.
The center will prioritize adults and couples over 50 that have been categorized as “chronically homeless”—or, people who haven’t been able to find reliable housing for a while due to their health, finances, or any other contributing factors. Guests will be allowed to stay up to 30 days. Like many Portland shelters, the center will be “low-barrier,” meaning guests aren’t required to be sober when then enter, and can bring their pets with them.
The center will not be a drop-in site for anyone seeking help. Instead, prospective visitors will need to call a reservation hotline or register in person at Bud Clark Commons, another Transition Projects facility just three blocks from the planned center.
Williams originally promised the facility would be up and running by the end of 2018—but the timeline was delayed by a number of neighborhood conflicts, permitting delays, and environmental cleanup work. The center now promises a June 2019 start date.
However, a pending lawsuit threatens to extend this deadline. In November, private developer Jim Winkler appealed the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’ (DEQ) decision to green-light the navigation center without completely removing the leftover industrial waste from the property’s soil. The DEQ did place a temporary concrete “cap” on the soil to prevent exposure (a fix that will be reconsidered in five years), but Winkler says its not enough to protect the health of homeless Portlanders. (What’s not mentioned is that Winkler owns property adjacent to the lot, and probably fears his land will lose value once a homeless shelter sets up shop next door.)
In an FAQ about the navigation center provided by Harbor of Hope, the nonprofit calls Winkler “an excellent developer and citizen,” but argues that the navigation center will improve the quality of life in the neighborhood—rather than detract from it. The state asked a Marion County judge to dismiss the appeal last month, but Winkler responded with a request for oral arguments.
It’s still unclear how this pending litigation could impact the navigation center’s success—and when construction will truly break ground on the site.
“But the investment that Williams, Boyle, and other business leaders have put into this project have given some homeless advocates pause for being an ingenuous marketing tool, one that could put public services into the hands of private developers.”
Translation: Homeless “advocates” are concerned their grift of public funds without actually solving the problem will come to an end now that private developers are actually doing something to address the problem.
How unbelievable that there could be “concern” of this nature over a project that will add a large number of shelter beds and additional services, kind of gives the game away even more than when the “advocates” argued vociferously against using Wapato as a shelter. Anything that doesn’t funnel money directly through their control and into their projects, well, that is simply “concerning” and “not the right solution”…
Thanks for keeping Merc readers up to date.
The Merc has a role to play continuing to report in depth on this project.
Readers may want to know how the project will measure itself, how it self corrects, measurement of street campers (decreasing?), police interaction data referring clients to the center, mental health referrals from the center, and the experience of the homeless-customers.
So the question for journalists is “what are your going to measure? How are your going to measure it?”
Almost always, the press wants to generate negative outrage, feeding advertising pageviews. But perhaps the Merc could be helpful in guiding continuous improvement based on measurements and adaptation for this project.
Flavio, once again you’re a fool. This assertion that you and other clods have been making lately is a disgraceful and unsupported smear against the exact people who have been doing the heavy lifting on this issue for years. You don’t care. You just call them names and peddle your idiotic conspiracy theories, and for what? To persuade this community to cut off funding for the people who have a proven track record? To put public dollars into millionaire pet projects, because THEY have such a great track record? (They don’t.)
How about from now on, when you know nothing about a topic, you spare us your “hot takes”? They aren’t helping.
Euphonius, what, pray tell, is this “proven track record” you speak of? The homeless population has only gotten bigger. The meth and opiod epidemics have only gotten worse. We are one of the worst cities in the entire country when it comes to the percentage of our population that remains unhoused.
If that’s “success” based on the current crop of advocates/experts, I’d say it’s time for some new advocates/experts.
And you’re always free to skip right over my comments if you don’t want to read them, dumbo.