Andre Polk spent 10 years living on Portland’s streets, doing his best to sequester himself from the violence and drug use that the 55-year-old said surrounds many in the city’s homeless population.

That changed last week when Polk, with the help of a Multnomah County program beset by a sluggish rollout, finally got into an apartment.

The Housing Multnomah Now program missed its original goal to house 300 people last year through rent assistance and housing navigation services. But the ambitious housing program pushed back its deadline to the end of this month, and now county officials say they’re confident they’ve finished the job.

“We did get off to a rocky start,” said Dan Field, director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services, a city-county partnership. “Rather than scrap the project or move on to something else, we took a minute to say, ‘What’s not working and what is working?’ I think that’s what any responsible organization is going to do.”

The county has spent $3.3 million on the program as of May 31. They’ve moved at least 292 people into apartments so far, and that number is likely higher due to a lag in the reporting system.

County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson launched the initiative in February 2023 with the goal of housing 300 people in four months, focusing specifically on drawing participants from areas near Portland’s Steel Bridge. One year after the launch, the joint office and its partners had housed only 37 people, according to a tally by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

It appeared the program was a bust, but officials said they reorganized and found new leadership. Field took over the joint office in April 2023, shortly after the project started, and a new Housing Multnomah Now director, DeAnna Negrete, was hired in September 2023. Officials extended their deadline and opened their outreach efforts to include more areas of the county.

“One of the huge strengths of this project is being adaptable and listening to our providers,” Negrete said. “But we still stayed focused on that main goal of housing unsheltered individuals in our county.”

The bulk of the work fell on the shoulders of nonprofit organizations like Ground Score Association — founded in 2019 by Barbra Weber to pay homeless people to clean up trash — that were contracted by the county to find people willing to enter the rehousing process and find places for them to live.

Ground Score’s program helps people like Polk fill out the necessary paperwork and offers rent assistance up to $1,080 a month for those who qualify, among other services.

Their efforts started gaining traction after the nonprofit’s housing program director, Mac Smiff, a prominent figure in the Black Lives Matter protest movement in 2020, joined the team in February. He‘s working with Cory Elia, another figure in the 2020 protests, who is now Ground Score’s outreach coordinator.

They had three months to house 20 people before the funding dried up, Smiff said. They expect to hit 18 before Sunday.

“It’s been go go go since the end of February,” Smiff said. “A lot of people on the streets, if they want help today, might not want help next week. So you have to activate and move.”

Housing Multnomah Now has budgeted $5 million for the upcoming fiscal year to support everyone in the program with rent assistance. But after that year is up, it’s unclear what will happen to participants, Weber said.

County officials said they would continue to invest in similar rapid housing projects, but did not comment specifically on what would happen to Housing Multnomah Now recipients after the fiscal year.

For now, Polk will have rent assistance until June 2025.

“We went through the process,” he said. “They gave me the keys and said, ‘Welcome home.”

— Austin De Dios covers Multnomah County politics, programs and more. Reach him at 503-319-9744, adedios@oregonian.com or @AustinDeDios.

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