The city of Portland and Multnomah County first agreed on a plan to address homelessness in 1983. What followed was a 12-point plan, a shelter reconfiguration plan, a 10-year plan, countless committees, sit-lie ordinances, and other creative solutions. In a new report, researchers deployed a fresh concept: ask homeless residents what they need. The data showed 98% of people who responded to the survey want housing, but fear they’ll lose it if they can’t afford it.
A new report by Portland State University’s (PSU) Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative (HRAC) offers data to better understand and support people experiencing homelessness. The Pathways Study, published April 9, outlines findings from surveys with 541 people over more than nine months. Participants all recently experienced homelessness in Multnomah County, and were at various stages of their work toward housing.
The 145-page report offers nuance to what a growing body of studies have found regarding the most effective ways to address homelessness.
“Collectively, the findings from this report paint a picture of people experiencing homelessness who know what they need to obtain and maintain permanent housing,” the report said.
The study comes at a time when state and local governments face challenging budget cycles amid a steady rise in homelessness. The city and Multnomah County are figuring out how to divvy up scarce resources, debating whether to prioritize rent assistance, shelter programs, or other services. Meanwhile, more people are becoming homeless each month than are obtaining housing.
The findings demonstrate that the vast majority—98 percent—of survey participants want permanent housing. But many are often worried they will lose housing again if they can’t afford it. Financial support was consistently ranked as the top need, while legal assistance and help finding jobs were recorded as the greatest unmet needs.
A central piece of the HRAC methodology for the two-year project was the inclusion of people who have experienced homelessness to help execute the project.
Many of the report’s findings challenge common narratives, including the notion that people experiencing homelessness don’t have dreams or goals, according to Theodore Hutchison, a member of the Transformational Research for Equity and Experience in Shelter (TREES) Committee. The TREES Committee is made up of 17 members with experience in homelessness who co-designed the project.
“It is very reductive for the media, or politicians, or anyone to paint the trajectory or goals of somebody being houseless to not being permanent housing,” Hutchison told the Mercury.
A TREES Committee statement included in the report said no two stories are the same, and the group’s diversity was important for compiling information that can be used to find solutions.
“This is about more than just collecting data—it’s about giving a voice to people whose experiences are often overlooked, misunderstood or spoken about instead of listened to,” the statement said.
While each story is unique, the data suggests the type of housing support people need is highly consistent. Over 65 percent of participants said rent assistance was the top support they needed in a living situation, followed by 55 percent who ranked financial assistance first, and 54 percent who said food access.
Dylan Franklin, another member of the TREES Committee, helped survey people for the study. He told the Mercury the people he interviewed repeatedly gave similar answers and were broadly related to financial challenges. He said people he spoke to wanted help to get into housing, and to have the opportunity to show what they can do.
“People just needed the chance,” Franklin said.
Franklin was homeless for eight years, living at a Thousand Acres encampment at the Sandy River Delta. He has been housed for five years after receiving job training through Cultivate Initiatives and a year of free rent through a county program, but still faces housing insecurity despite working long hours at a physically demanding job.
“I’ve been close to being kicked out, and that just makes me so frustrated, to realize that I’ve got a full time job and I can’t even pay for my place,” Franklin said.
The Pathways Study was meant to provide better understanding around how people move through the local homelessness system, and what role various services play in the process of keeping people housed. It follows other recent reports that, taken together, may help narrow the focus on effective solutions to the local homelessness crisis.
The October 2025 Finding Home report by the Welcome Home Coalition—a survey of over 650 people who have experienced homelessness—found that survey participants rated temporary shelter equally as undesirable as living outside, and 91 percent would move into housing if they could afford it. (PSU researchers also helped advise the Finding Home report.)
And findings in the 2025 Tri-County Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, released in November, showed that of nearly 1,800 unsheltered people who answered the survey, 83 percent said they were last housed in the tri-counties, Clark County, or in the state of Oregon. The Pathways Study similarly found that 75 percent were last housed in Oregon, with 92 percent living in the tri-county area before losing housing. In other words, homeless services primarily support people who are from Oregon.
Kathleen Conte, an assistant professor and HRAC senior research fellow who led the study, said the research shows policymakers that services to help meet basic needs like food, hygiene, or places to charge phones are working, and they matter. But she said policymakers should not overlook how the overarching homelessness system operates as a whole, including thinking about what responses get in the way of housing people, like encampment removals, commonly called “sweeps.”
Acknowledging that the term “sweeps” can be politically charged and may not capture the physical and psychological harm people experience, and that “encampment removal” can obscure the trauma or frame the practice in terms of liveability, the TREES Committee worked on terminology that it felt better represented what happens during encampment removals. It settled on the term “involuntary displacement.”
“The TREES Committee hopes that people who find ‘involuntary displacement’ unsettling will pause for a moment to consider the source of this feeling and read on with an earnest desire to listen and understand these data,” the report said.
Asked about their experience with involuntary displacements, 40 percent of participants said they had experienced at least one displacement in the past six to 12 months—with 48 percent saying they were moved 10 times or more.
Those displacements are not without consequences, both for health and for stability obtaining housing. When people are moved, they report losing access to things they need in order to utilize the homelessness and housing system. Nearly 86 percent of respondents reported losing personal belongings, 58 percent losing their phones, and 49 percent reported losing medications or identification. That can contribute to poor mental health, increase substance use, and exacerbate the bureaucratic issues people face when they’re trying to gain housing.
“They are losing access to personal identification documents,” Conte said. “They lose access to people who are helping them, important social support services, important housing services. They miss meetings with people who are helping them try to navigate the homelessness system.”
In their own words, survey participants briefly explained their traumatic experiences with involuntary displacements. The report presented them as written in survey responses.
“People should take care of fellow humans better than the stray dog,” one person wrote. “Yes ive lost an started over like 30 times an cant take anymore losses,” wrote another. “I lost my friend, his head was driven over by a car as he came out back of the tent. The tent removal truck scared him out,” another said.
While it is not prescriptive, and was not meant to study the causes of homelessness, the survey presented a range of reasons that may have contributed to a respondent’s homelessness.
“Lost or reduced income” was recorded by 44 percent of respondents, followed by “I experienced a trauma” at 34 percent, and “eviction notice” at 31 percent. Most respondents answered multiple contributing factors for their homelessness, with 80 percent selecting two or more reasons.
“What our data shows is that affordability is the main cause of homelessness,” Conte said. “And that is reinforced by studies, many different studies, approaching this problem from many different ways. So, affordability of housing is the main cause of homelessness.”
The PSU Institutional Review Board approved the PSU Pathways Study before it was published, and the Multnomah County Homeless Services Department funded the study.
A follow up report is expected to be released Summer 2026.