An Update on the Mayor’s Plan to End Unsheltered Homelessness

This week, I delivered a quarterly update to the Portland City Council committee on housing and homelessness. We’ve made great strides in less than four months. Since taking office, we’ve opened three shelters and are on track to open far more as we build the capacity necessary to provide a safe bed for every Portlander, every night. 

We also had sobering news to discuss: Multnomah County’s newly-released “by name database,” representing the most accurate homelessness count our region has ever produced. This new data revealed we have nearly 7,000 living unsheltered in the Portland metro area, far more than previously thought. 

Emergency sheltering hasn’t kept pace. The shelters we have are effectively full, and my greatest fear is that our “domicile unknown” deaths will continue to track these increases, and we’ll see yet another year of record-setting deaths on our streets. 

Does this new information change my plan? Yes and no. We already understood our community needs to move with urgency to add more shelter beds to our system. As we construct new beds, we will watch the data closely to monitor bed utilization. We are committed to providing a safe bed for every person, every night, and our plan will adjust as necessary. 

I have other crucial projects in the works. Our systems work best when they work together, especially with better coordination between shelters, outreach workers, and other services. We’re improving our ability to reunite people with loved ones and shuttle vulnerable individuals to the help they need. We’re coordinating with the justice and hospital systems so our vulnerable neighbors aren’t discharged onto the street. 

Our city wants elected leaders to get the basics right: that means budgeting more for street cleaning, graffiti, potholes, and trash removal. I’ve also secured funding from regional partners for my emergency shelter response, protected our existing shelter assets, and will propose badly-needed funds to deal with hazardous RVs and encampments in the coming weeks. We’re the City that Works, and we’re going to act like it. 

That said, we’re on a ticking clock. Every person on my team is counting down to our December 1st deadline. That is just 221 days away. We know what we need, and we know how to do it. This is our moment. We must not miss it.