Two days into Mayor Ted Wheeler’s term, the temperature dropped and a man died in a downtown Portland doorway, frozen beneath a single blanket. The next week, the skies opened and snow fell in record-setting amounts.
The joint office for homeless services – shared by the city and Multnomah County and only 6 months old — opened emergency shelter beds, deployed volunteers to check on people who shunned shelters and beseeched residents to reach out to homeless people stuck in the cold.
But by the time the deep freeze lifted, three more adults and a baby would die on Portland’s streets.
The crisis highlighted the urgency for city leaders to act. After a year of significant false starts by predecessor Charlie Hales, the new mayor is plotting a different course. He’s trying to avoid the previous pitfalls but build on ideas he believes have more promise.
Wheeler favors establishing enclaves of tiny house developments on city property rather than perpetuating organized camps. He wants to take the scuttled plan for a warehouse-size shelter funded by private developers and break it into several smaller social service and housing centers.
He also wants to put more emphasis on helping people pay their rent and mortgages to keep them from losing their homes and apartments in the first place.
Last fiscal year, the city and county helped 15,414 people – the most ever. But the numbers of people on the street are growing.
Some homeless people say they wait in lines for hot meals that are twice as long as they used to be and that day centers and temporary shelters are more crowded.
Both the city and county face tough budget decisions as market forces squeeze the region’s inventory of affordable housing. Despite the city’s fall 2015 declaration of a housing emergency, Wheeler acknowledges that many people aren’t necessarily better off.
“I’d say for the people living on the streets, no they’re not,” he said. “And there are people living on the streets today that weren’t a year ago.”
What shelter looks like
At news conferences and meetings with advocates during the storm, Wheeler publicly resisted renewed interest in one of 2016’s most controversial ideas: a large-scale homeless shelter, such as the one Portland developer Homer Williams proposed for the city-owned Terminal 1 at the Northwest Portland marine port.
Williams wanted to build a homeless “campus,” where hundreds to thousands of homeless people could live, with support from nonprofits and social service agencies.
County Chairwoman Deborah Kafoury also battled a similar idea for the county to finance the conversion of the decommissioned Wapato Jail into a homeless shelter.
To many, the appeal of the Terminal 1 proposal was Williams’ involvement. Anger at developers for rising rents and gentrifying neighborhoods has raised calls for greater private investment in fixing homelessness.
The mayor knows that — and said he continues to push developers and others in the business community to help government out.
Wheeler said Williams is still involved in planning an approach to shelters that looks more like what the joint office has done. Last year, the office opened 550 publicly funded beds — with 100 more due this year. The additional beds target especially vulnerable populations – women with children, couples, disabled people and veterans. The shelters are in areas near public transit, grocery stores and laundromats.
Private nonprofits also provide hundreds of shelter beds.
Wheeler’s vision for smaller shelters includes “triage centers,” where a homeless person could walk in and meet with mental health specialists or seek advice on credit problems and other matters.
“In order to solve this communitywide problem, we’re going to have to be more collaborative,” Wheeler said. “We’re going to have to partner with the private and nonprofit, the philanthropic and the faith-based sectors.”
A new approach for camps
Wheeler has spurned one approach lauded by homeless advocates – adding more self-governed camps on city property where residents find community among other homeless people and can be easily served by social services.
At Forgotten Realms in Northeast Portland, about 15 people live in a collection of tarps and plywood shacks behind Legacy Emanuel Medical Center. The camp, served by two portable toilets, formed in the wake of the city’s sweep of homeless people last summer along the Springwater Corridor.
Aaron Martin, 45, and his girlfriend built a sprawling tarp lodge where he lets friends stay when they need a warm place. He was at the camp when a fire started in December and helped pull people out of their tent.
“We’re like a family here,” Martin said. “It gives you a chance to get stable instead of being run out of everywhere.”
Kevin McGuire, one of the camp’s founders, is aging and appreciates the proximity to a toilet. He built a little house out of wood that’s surprisingly warm with a small space heater so he can store his belongings and escape the rain.
“I got tired of camping in tents for so long and trying to hang up clothes to dry,” McGuire said.
The camp – like Hazelnut Grove in North Portland and Right 2 Dream Too in Old Town – doesn’t meet city codes for human habitation and has often drawn complaints from neighbors and businesses nearby.
The 6-year-old Right 2 Dream Too received an eviction notice from the property’s owners in early February. It’s the latest twist after years of handwringing about whether it should exist and where it should move.
Wheeler hasn’t decided how to deal with the camps. He likes the idea of community, but said he’d rather move toward developing and multiplying one of Hales’ last ideas – a village of 14 tiny houses for homeless women proposed for the Kenton neighborhood. City and county officials have tentatively voiced support for the project, which is still in the planning stages.
Marvin Ross of Hazelnut Grove
The pilot project would test whether sleeping pods are safe and cost-effective. The idea is that the pods could be quickly assembled and easily moved – a more independent version of living in a shelter, which could appeal to people who have suffered abuse or trauma. Social service agencies would be in contact with the residents, trying to help with their day-to-day needs while they wait for more permanent housing.
“My focus during the campaign and now is creating as many alternatives to people living on the street or in camps,” Wheeler said.
“What I would like to do is see more humane alternatives to connecting people with water and sewer and dry, warm shelter.”
Beyond shelters
Both Wheeler and Kafoury support a strategy established by the joint office: more shelter, but with an eye toward spending the bulk of the city and county’s money on less visible work keeping people off the streets.
Covering someone’s rent, car payment or an unexpected medical bill is nearly 10 times cheaper than paying for that person to live in a publicly funded shelter, according to data from Multnomah County.
Kafoury said multiple times during the snowstorm that city and county officials must decide how best to use every single dollar. Often, that dollar goes further keeping people in their own home or supporting them once they find an apartment they can afford.
“There is a balance between the sense of emergency and the fact that it’s not a one-time crisis. It’s a recurring crisis in our community,” said Marc Jolin, director of the joint office.
The office compiled a statistical model to predict how much to spend on shelter beds versus programs to keep people off the streets. It’s a new approach for the city and likely will need adjusting as the office assesses demand.
That opportunity will come at the end of this month, when the county counts people living on the street on a series of nights. The “point-in-time count” is a federal effort that occurs every two years. Recently, Multnomah County decided to start counting every year because of the mounting homeless crisis.
Jolin told city and county officials at a recent meeting that even though the office is helping more people, it’s unlikely to reduce the general homeless population if the housing market continues on its escalating track.
“We’ll have to see, but right now we’re seeing a lot of new people in our systems,” he said.
Need to stay creative
Concern about housing affordability helped catapult Portland Commissioner Chloe Eudaly into office. She agrees that organized camps aren’t a permanent solution to homelessness, but she argued that the city should be considering more options, not fewer.
“I know what my ideal is, everyone has a roof over their head. But there’s not enough roofs available. So what’s the next best thing?” said Eudaly, who is the City Council’s liaison to the joint office board. “I don’t want to send a signal that shantytowns are our future, but the reality is we have more homeless people than we have stable shelter.”
In her first two months in office, Eudaly won enough support to push through an emergency ordinance that forces landlords to pay the relocation costs of tenants evicted for no cause or who raise rent more than 5 percent.
She hopes that measures like loosening restrictions on living out of RVs in driveways or creative financing to build small living units in backyards or over garages will provide stable housing for people on the edge.
“We shouldn’t be preventing people from providing shelter,” Eudaly said. “We need to be creative. It’s really feeling like this is going to get worse before it gets better. No one should be sleeping unsheltered or dying on the streets.”
Those are measures that fall mainly to the City Council. At the county level, Kafoury hopes that better communication between the city and county will waste less time on discarded ideas. She was a force in last year’s drive to open shelters and is now anxious to focus on tested methods that reduce the homeless population.
“I think the mayor’s job is ridiculously difficult, and I know that our new mayor like our former mayor is going to be under an extreme amount of pressure to do something, to do something quickly, and to do something visible to the public,” Kafoury said. “That said, I do think that — and I have told the new mayor — that the successes we’ve had to date are because we are all pushing in the same direction.”
Ultimately, both the city and county will need to devote significant sums of money to their initiatives. In 2016, the city pledged $20 million and the county $10 million. Kafoury said she’s willing to pare back other services to retain money to fight homelessness.
“We can do this work, we can get people off the street and into housing. It just takes us to prioritize it,” Kafoury said. “Maybe something else isn’t going to get done.”
Wheeler said the budget is still in its beginning stages, but homelessness and housing are top priorities.
“We can do so much more than what we’re currently doing,” Wheeler said.
— Molly Harbarger
mharbarger@oregonian.com
503-294-5923
@MollyHarbarger
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