The ambitious new Homelessness Response Action Plan is supported by top city, county and state officials. Others want to torpedo the joint homelessness office.
Multnomah County and the city of Portland have a new agreement on joint efforts to address homelessness — almost.
Top elected officials touted the new intergovernmental agreement governing the Homelessness Response Action Plan, or HRAP, as an encouraging step toward a collaborative approach, despite a long and sometimes arduous process. However, a handful of city and county commissioners appear ready to torpedo the plan altogether, focusing on how the respective councils could ultimately terminate the contract governing the HRAP even if signed in the short term.
Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, Mayor Ted Wheeler, Gov. Tina Kotek, three county commissioners and some of the region’s largest homeless service providers support the plan.
Both the city and county’s processes for approving the plan highlighted the challenges of creating an agreement in an environment rife with political infighting and theatrics. At a June 20 City Council meeting, Commissioners Mingus Mapps and Rene Gonzalez repeatedly questioned whether the agreement demonstrated the right approach. The two commissioners — both of whom are running for mayor this fall — worked in tandem, asking why the city sends significant investments to the county as the homelessness worsens.
City Council is scheduled to vote on the agreement June 26. With the city adding amendments added to the HRAP, the county is required to vote again on the agreement with the amendments intact. The city amendments may be nonstarters for some county commissioners, creating new challenges in passing the agreement.
The city and county often disagree on how the Joint Office of Homeless Services should allocate significant amounts of money to respond to homelessness. The county adopted a fiscal year 2025 Joint Office budget of $285 million, though it will likely have considerably more money to spend due to Metro Supportive Housing Services funds the county receives. The $285 million includes $127 million to support the new HRAP.
The city sends roughly $31 million per year to the county for the Joint Office. However, Wheeler noted the county sends $21 million back to the city to support its Temporary Alternative Shelter Sites, balancing the city’s total contribution to $10 million, a relatively small fraction of the office’s total budget.
Forecasts predict the Joint Office will have $304 million in Supportive Housing Services funds alone in the 2024-25 fiscal year, including $148 million in carryover from the previous cycle, according to Antoinette Payne, Joint Office finance director.
As Mapps and Gonzalez signaled a desire to withhold the city’s financial contribution and break ties with the homelessness office, Wheeler said the investment is worthwhile as it gives the city leverage in directing Joint Office finances.
“It’s so that we can integrate the service delivery and that we have an ability to actually steer a much, much larger pot of funding towards resolving homelessness in Portland,” Wheeler said June 20.
The city and county worked on the new agreement for over a year, and the previous agreement expires July 1. The new three-year agreement lasts through June 30, 2027, and sets goals for reducing homelessness in the region through rent support and added shelter space. Whether those goals can be achieved is an open question, but if passed, the plan represents a relative meeting of the minds for a city-county partnership that has seen its share of strife as homelessness grows.
Gonzalez and Ryan’s offices did not respond to requests for comment at the time of publishing. Andrew Baker, Mapps’ communications director, declined to provide additional comment.
The Multnomah County Board of Commissioners passed the HRAP in a 4-1 vote June 13, inking its part of the agreement with the city of Portland to clarify roles in the local homelessness crisis. Late game antics threatened to derail the county’s part within days of the scheduled vote, but it ultimately passed before heading to City Council, where further discussions and new amendments led the city to postpone its own scheduled vote.
The back-and-forth may be a fly in the ointment for commissioners hoping to move forward with the plan. If the city passes the agreement with amendments, the county board will need to vote on those amendments amid commissioners’ planned vacations. And, it remains to be seen if the board will approve of the city-introduced amendments to the final plan at all — some of which could dramatically alter the approach.
The HRAP aims to reduce homelessness by focusing on the by-name count — a list of 11,153 total homeless residents identified by the county as of January 2024. The plan seeks to shelter or house 2,699 people — a 50% reduction of the 5,398 known unsheltered people on the by-name list — and increase adults entering permanent housing from shelter by 15% by the end of 2025.
At present, Portland’s publicly funded shelter space is deeply inadequate relative to the need. The plan seeks to address the issue by adding 1,000 shelter beds by the end of 2025, increasing the local shelter system capacity — 2,692 as of May 9, according to the county — by nearly 40%. That includes adding 555 beds by the end of 2024.
Including city-run shelters, the additional beds will bring the total shelter beds in the local system to just over 3,750 by the end of 2025, according to Julia Comnes, Joint Office communications coordinator. The plan also intends to add 401 supportive housing units.
“The goal is for those additional shelter beds, combined with housing resources, to bring us to the 2,699 total,” Comnes said.
A lofty vision set in the HRAP demonstrates many of the social solutions to homelessness and will require buy-in from state and federal partners to fund some portions of the plan. The agreement seeks to ensure 75% of people placed in permanent supportive housing retain housing for two years after placement. It also seeks to end all behavioral health and hospital discharges to the street by the end of 2025 and end discharges from carceral settings to the streets by 2026 while ending homelessness for youth aging out of foster care by 2027.
City Council amended its ordinance for the HRAP on June 20, adding further accountability measures for the county moving forward. Once passed, the ordinance will authorize Wheeler to sign the agreement with the county, and will require the county to update City Council on the HRAP by Oct. 15. That indirectly gives City Council a specific date by which it could choose to terminate the new agreement.
Asked what would happen if the city simply chose to allow the previous agreement to expire July 1, city attorney Robert Taylor said the previous agreement was not explicit about an exit process.
“We get a messy divorce,” Taylor said.
The amendments require the Joint Office to launch dashboard pilots showing outcomes of its work, a detailed plan on location and costs of new shelters and a pilot system showing real-time shelter availability for outreach workers moving people into shelter.
For Gonzalez, the Oct. 15 report date represents a looming opportunity to terminate the agreement if the Joint Office does not agree to stop providing tents and tarps to nonprofits distributing them to homeless Portlanders.
“I'm a ‘yes’ vote on termination if we haven't seen progress on tents, tarps and harm reduction governance,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez maintains a project barring city programs from distributing the lifesaving equipment to homeless Portlanders. His office did not respond to Street Roots’ request for comment asking what issue he believes halting tent distribution will solve, or whether or not the city should approve the plan if the Joint Office refuses.
Commissioner Carmen Rubio, also running for mayor, was the only commissioner to voice opposition to Gonzalez’s ultimatum, saying a blanket prohibition on tents and tarps will not be effective if sufficient shelter beds are unavailable.
“People will seek shelter in other places,” Rubio said. “To repeat again, just for the record, as we reduce the distribution of tents and tarps, it must follow and be tied to the increase of shelter beds.”
City Commissioner Dan Ryan’s eleventh-hour amendments add a business sector representative, a behavioral health representative and a high-income Supportive Housing Services taxpayer to the strategic oversight committee passed in a 3-2 vote.
City Council is not the only group with members looking for a way out of the Joint Office. The county board spent over an hour June 11 and over three hours June 13 attempting to agree on processes and amendments, despite most of the proposed language already being included in county code or in other parts of the HRAP.
Commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards said she was concerned the agreement could bind future commissions from budgetary discretion, nodding to a near future in which the board is four-fifths freshman commissioners. With the exception of Brim-Edwards, all county seats are up for grabs in the November election.
While the HRAP said a lack of truly affordable housing is a primary cause of homelessness, Commissioner Sharon Meieran, the lone “no” vote on the HRAP, spent significant time in the board meeting rifling through the agreement, seeking to move language from one section to another. Most notably, Meieran wanted to introduce an amendment adding distinct language tying behavioral health and substance use as contributors to homelessness, which was already included in other parts of the document.
“I have expressed my questions, concerns and constructive feedback publicly and privately for months, and was dismayed that none of the issues I raised were addressed,” Meieran told Street Roots.
Meieran said she was opposed to the HRAP since she first saw it, adding she believed the process to its creation was devised in secret. Multnomah County and the city of Portland released initial recommendations for a shared framework on the intergovernmental agreement Dec. 6, 2023. They presented a draft agreement March 11, hosted a community town hall March 21 and received community feedback through March 29.
Despite the HRAP's lofty goals, Meieran said her biggest issue is that it does not provide a cohesive, holistic, comprehensive plan for addressing homelessness, and believed Portland city commissioners raised valid concerns.
“I’m grateful that three commissioners seemed to see through the charade and that there will be more daylight shone on the process,” she said.
When asked if she agreed with Gonzalez’s proposal to suspend tent and tarp distributions, Meieran wouldn’t say directly but said the county approach is emblematic of the dysfunction in a larger system.
“It’s hard for me to consider tent and tarp distribution in isolation because the problem of homelessness is so vast, and our current systems are causing so much harm,” Meiran said. “We need to be solving systems problems, not hyperfocusing on individual programs.”
In a welcome change from recent policy-making, some local service providers said the city and county included them in conversations and incorporated their recommendations into the HRAP’s ambitious goals.
Scott Kerman, Blanchet House executive director, said Blanchet House did not have conversations with the county specific to HRAP, but consistently offered perspective on the role day centers play in the continuum of shelter and housing. He said the inclusion of day centers is evidence the message is resonating with local leaders.
“The recognition of day centers is part of the plan, which I believe is a result of the collective effort of many day services providers over the past few years,” Kerman said.
Historically, local government excluded day centers and other providers from planning processes impacting their role as a place of first resort when people have nowhere else to go.
The HRAP was shaped from the start with feedback and input from provider organizations and experts, according to Comnes.
Still, some service providers said the county will need to update contracts to pay a housing wage to the workforce moving homeless residents into shelter, housing and behavioral health services at the increased rate.
Alongside other local organizations, Transition Projects participated in developing a two-year strategic sheltering plan, according to Tony Bernal, Transition Projects CEO. Transition Projects is one of the largest housing and shelter service providers in Portland.
Still, Bernal said Transition Projects has not been asked to take on a particular scope of work related to the HRAP, but further investments, particularly to pay staff, are necessary to achieve the goals in the three-year timeframe.
“A primary challenge we face is paying a housing wage to our staff so that we can sustain our work,” Bernal said. “Too many of the people doing the work of helping people end their homelessness are themselves housing insecure.”
Cascadia Health, one of the largest behavioral health and substance use treatment organizations in Oregon, was not directly part of the planning process, according to Stephanie Tripp, Cascadia Health director of communications. She agreed paying staff is a similar challenge.
“If Cascadia Health is approached by the county or city, funding and staffing levels would be a top concern, as existing programs are currently underfunded as is,” Tripp said.
The HRAP sets a goal of evaluating state and county contracts specifically to increase wages and training in April 2025.
Applying Multnomah County’s “Equity and Empowerment Lens” — an internal set of principles meant to create more equitable policies — the HRAP will purportedly create a culture with a “bold and courageous commitment to addressing root causes and barriers.” In that context, the agreement mentioned the necessity of reducing barriers five times throughout the document.
“People experiencing homelessness often face numerous barriers to obtaining the services and resources they need to find stability without additional support,” the agreement said.
The plan also outlines what supports can help a person find housing and stability, including state-issued identification, health care, workforce assistance, and expungement services to clear legal issues.
“This plan centers equity and those with lived experiences in the solutions it offers and the engagement that informs them,” the HRAP says.
The city’s own policies may undermine efforts to reduce barriers to housing. Portland City Council unanimously passed its revised sleeping ban May 8, banning sleeping on public property under threat of civil and criminal penalties if a person has access to reasonable alternative shelter. Those found in violation of the ordinance can receive a fine up to $100 or seven days in jail.
With a wide gap between the number of people who need shelter and the number of available shelters or affordable housing units, legal questions remain as to whether the ban can be enforced on an individual basis. A Multnomah County Circuit Court judge struck down a similar law last year, deciding enforcement would likely violate state laws.
The sweep and fine approach is relatively common in cities across the United States. Local and national advocates say the practice creates legal issues and erodes trust while doing nothing to resolve homelessness.
“The only time, often, people staying outside come in contact with the government official, it's a police officer giving them a fine, slapping them with handcuffs, telling them they can't be here,” Jesse Rabinowitz, National Homelessness Law Center campaign and communications manager told Street Roots. “That's not a way to build trust. That's a way to further disconnect people with our government.”
Enforcement of the revised sleeping ordinance is set to begin on July 1, 2024, according to Cody Bowman, Mayor Wheeler’s communications director. Bowman said enforcement will begin narrowly focused on encampments throughout the city that present the greatest health and safety risks. Bowman added the Street Services Coordination Center and Neighborhood Response Teams will work collaboratively to offer shelter when available.
Wheeler’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the time of publishing.
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