Portland’s Mayor ran on a promise to provide shelter to everyone living outside. His cry for targeted and urgent action resonated with many voters. This confirms what we know: Portlanders are ready to see a plan turned into progress. As a coalition of service providers and people who have experienced homelessness, we are also ready to see progress.
Our coalition stands firmly in its value that everyone deserves a safe, stable place to call home, and ultimately, a shelter bed is not a home. Currently, only 1 in 5 people in Multnomah County are moving from shelter into stable housing. This is due to a lack of investment in resources that help people move out of shelters. Rather than growing our stock of shelter beds, we can free space by moving people out of shelter and into a place to call home.
When we pair shelter sites with peer support specialists (people who’ve been through it themselves), case management, rent assistance, and a laser focus on connecting people to housing, shelters are shown to deliver on their promise to reconnect people with a safe, stable place to call home.
There are shelter providers that are living up to their promises and are successfully moving households from homelessness back into stable housing. Four Welcome Home Coalition Members that provide emergency shelter: Raphael House, Path Home, Family Promise of Tualatin Valley, and NW Housing Alternatives all have success in moving over 80% of households from their shelters into stable housing. These success rates depend on funding for rent assistance, peer support, and case management. Ultimately, all four of the shelter programs remain deeply committed to the same end goal – to move households into stable housing from the moment they connect with the organization.
As it stands, the Portland Mayor’s investments in overnight shelter are not paired with the necessary supports to move people out of shelter and into housing. We fear that without increased focus on the services that create pathways back to housing, Portlanders will once again be met with a homelessness plan that does not result in meaningful progress.
But it is not too late to pivot. With the Mayor struggling to open his 1,500 new overnight shelter beds, we can ask him to reinvest that funding into housing resources that free up existing shelter beds without growing a failing system.
