A church in Monmouth was exploring the idea of creating microshelter housing for people experiencing homelessness. The housing would have been located on a grassy field owned by the church. The idea was scrapped after community backlash against the proposal. We hear more from Bill Poehler, a Statesman Journal reporter, who has covered the issue.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Allocating money to respond to homelessness is sometimes easier than actually spending it. That’s one of the lessons that came out of Monmouth recently, where a church planned to use more than a million dollars of state money to build a microshelter, but then had to scrap those plans in the face of community resistance. Bill Poehler wrote about this for the Statesman Journal and he joins us now with the details. Bill, welcome.
Bill Poehler: Hey, how’s it going?
Miller: Doing very well, thanks for joining us today. I want to start with the big picture. What did you hear about what homelessness looks like in Polk County right now, in the mid-valley, as opposed to in more urban areas?
Poehler: Well, when you talk about Polk County, specifically we’re talking about, and this stuff is rural Polk County. So that is, there are five cities in Polk County, and they don’t count West Salem as part of that. As you know, Salem’s broken up into Polk County and Marion County. But other than that, what you don’t necessarily see it in the same way that I see it - going through a walk through my neighborhood or, where we see tents popping up all over the place and we see encampments - when it comes to rural Polk County, you see more like somebody just taking in the… I was hearing stories about a child whose father wasn’t around, the mother had died and somebody who just - this is a teenager - just take him in, in a spare room. Or people living in RVs that are not hooked up to anything and it just looks differently than say the drive through Portland where you’re gonna see some tents here and there.
So you don’t necessarily see it in rural Polk County, but it’s there and they have evidence of that in the point in time counts, which it’s pretty dramatic how many people in rural Polk County are experiencing homelessness.
Miller: And as we’ve heard over the years there’s a lot of assumptions that those point in time counts are not even a full accounting of people experiencing homelessness. But what do the recent counts show?
Poehler: And that’s definitely what I’ve heard too. It’s hard and let’s face it, we all know that it’s very hard for them to find just everybody who’s homeless, who’s experiencing homelessness at a certain point. The latest ones that I saw, and as we all know, again, drastically undercounting, it was something like 144 people total in the point in time count in rural Polk County. That includes people who are at risk of being homeless, or no, sorry. That includes the ones who are sheltered homeless and unsheltered homeless. 91 unsheltered homeless, 43 sheltered homeless, and of those 34% of them are in Dallas, 25% are in Monmouth and Independence, 30% are in Falls City, which is a lot, and then there’s others who live in many other places, because Polk County is a big place and only has really the four cities, four and a half, we could call it. So a lot of them, there’s plenty of people and 16% of those live in a vehicle, 41% live outside. There are all these statistics about that kind of stuff that people give out. It’s pretty amazing when you consider how many people are out there.
Miller:, As you reported, not too long ago, the current debate in Monmouth, the debate that was really raging last month, it was precipitated by a big statewide infusion of money approved by the legislature, signed by the governor to address homelessness and housing affordability. Two bills that allocated $200 million between them, and of that, about $5 million is supposed to come to Polk County. What was the proposal for Monmouth in particular?
Poehler: Well, what they really wanted was to do a microshelter somewhere, because there’s been these proposals around. Well, and realistically there’s been people working on this issue for quite a while before this money was even there. There’s a church out in Dallas, they have a house there that they’ve been renovating and trying to make it livable so that a family can come, one family at a time can come [and] live there as kind of a transitional thing. Grand Ronde, and I’m not sure exactly who it was in Grand Ronde, but they did some microshelters earlier this year. It’s like four of them and they’ve been having a lot of success with that, but this one, they wanted to find one that they could do a bigger microshelter and do it in one of the cities specifically.
And so they went out to say, OK, could anybody help us with this, does anybody have land available? There were two groups that came to them. Christ Church Methodist and Presbyterian United was the one that said, yes, we’re willing to go forward with this in your timeline, because it was a pretty quick timeline, as we all know. So once they said, “Yeah, we’re willing to go forward and just look at it,” the idea was, we’re willing to look at this. So that’s when they said OK. Well, let’s do some microshelters there, and they brought Church At The Park in and they thought, hey, let’s, let’s look at this. That’s all they were gonna do, let’s look at this.
Miller: The Christ Church Methodist and Presbyterian United, they own a plot of land that is essentially a grassy field in the middle of Monmouth. How has it been used in the past? How is it being used right now?
Poehler: It’s being used, people use it as a park. They see it as an open grass field and they think it’s just a park. I mean, somebody sent me the deed for the property from like 1950-something. And somebody basically sold the church for next to no money and said use this for some sort of church thing. People use it as a baseball field. People use it as a soccer field. I had somebody email me and say, “Oh, this is definitely a baseball field. It’s definitely a baseball field.” It’s really not, because part of it is if you’re playing baseball and you get hurt on it, it’s the church’s land, so the church is at fault for it. The church never kicks anybody off of there, but people use it for that kind of thing and they just assume it’s part of the community, as a park, and it’s not. There’s a park a couple of blocks away.
Miller: But there was some sense of community ownership that this was a public park, which seems like, among other things that that’s complicated, an already complicated situation. There was a lot of backlash for this microshelter idea when it became public. Can you give us a sense for the arguments that you heard?
Poehler: Well, the backlash came before the church really even had the information that they needed. And that was a big sticking point. I mean, I was out there with the pastor, Steve Mitchell. We’re standing out there at the field with one of my photographers, Abigail Dolan. And we’re looking at this, this woman who has a child in the preschool, and the preschool that operates at the church, they rent space there. And she comes out and says, “Hey, I want some answers. Are there gonna be people, sex offenders here? Are there gonna be, how are we gonna keep them separate from the kids who are playing here?” And the church didn’t, Pastor Steve just didn’t say anything, because he didn’t have the answers. People, they just assumed that this is going forward, we have to fight this, we have to fight this.
There was such backlash that people are going to the City Council. Realistically, the City Council had nothing to do with it, at that point, and they still don’t. Even if they apply for citing, basically, there’s nothing that the City Council has to do with it. But the City Council they said, oh yes, we want to engage people in this. They didn’t really have a role in it and people just… I mean, just the negative backlash. I did hear from some people on the positive side too, saying yes, this is good. We need this. But truthfully, most of the people who said yes, this is good, we need this, they’re not the ones who live there. People who live around it were just upset as all get out. They just assume that this is happening, that they’re just gonna do this tomorrow and that wasn’t the case. The church was still in really, really, really preliminary discussions about it.
Miller: And then after those preliminary discussions, as you reported just about two weeks ago, the church board backtracked after initially voting to move forward with the process and to look into it, they then said, no, we’re not going to go forward with this microshelter. What was their reasoning?
Poehler: Well, part of what I heard from the pastor was that it was a lot of the backlash, because a lot of that came in really heavy and people attacked the church, they attacked the church board, they attacked Pastor Steve Mitchell in particular quite a bit. They’re saying, oh, you’re money grubbers, you just want the, whatever it’s gonna be, $60,000 from renting out this piece of property. They were making all kinds of claims about all the things about the church and I think they just saw that there was too much opposition to this here and it’s not gonna end well. I mean, even if they wanted to fight this and keep going, it was gonna create a lot of pain in their community. I think that was a big part of why they backed out and said, “OK, we’re done” and that was the funny thing, they never committed to doing anything. They just committed to listening and talking about this.
Miller: It was a Salem-based group called Church At The Park that was going to be running the microshelter. They already are doing that at two different similar sites in Salem. How are those sites working?
Poehler: From what they tell me it’s working pretty well. They had two sites and then one of them closed and then another one is opening. But their program is more all encompassing than some other ones that I’ve seen through the years, like pre-pandemic ones. I saw one out in Silverton where they didn’t have all the wraparound stuff, like the transportation and the, basically the infrastructure, the helping people with life plans and helping people figure out, OK, here’s how you get to the next step.
They have all these wraparound things, that it’s done very well. I mean, I’ve heard statistics thrown out about how well they’ve been helping move people into, I’m not gonna say permanent housing, but it’s more support to like either assisted housing, or something like an apartment or Section 8 housing or something like that. And it’s been something like 72% - if I remember correctly, but I probably don’t remember correctly - that they’ve got that they helped move in. Oh, here it is. Well, they had 592 people in 2022 and of them, 271 moved into permanent housing, assisted living or rehabilitation centers, according to the Church At The Park. So it’s been pretty successful so far. That’s why this was the group that was chosen, that they would have been the ones operating this.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the timing and the options now for this state money to be spent and some kind of new shelter to be up and running, given that the plans for the one run by this particular church have fallen through?
Poehler: So the money is still there. It’s still 1.6 million bucks from that, out of that $200 million allocation that’s sitting there for this project. Obviously it’s not going there, it’s not going forward in Monmouth, but the money is still sitting there. That money has to be spent by January 10th of 2024. So it’s pretty quick you gotta spend that money.
And the thing that really made Church At The Park go forward pretty quickly with this whole proposal was House Bill 2006 from the 2021 session. And that, from my understanding, it would basically bypass some of the land use stuff. And if you hit certain benchmarks, like providing restrooms and complying with building codes and that, and being in the urban growth boundary, you would have gotten to skip a lot of that. And the design of that, as I understand it, was to speed things up so much, just as long as you make the decisions, you don’t have to go through the whole [thing], you can’t appeal it. You don’t have to go through the public hearings and all that.
But from my understanding that has now sunsetted, that basically went away July 1st, so now if somebody wants to build one of these, they’re gonna have to do some land use stuff and that’s not easy in this state. But it’s still the goal and if they don’t find one of the sites in rural Polk County, they could still go do this, say in rural Marion County or it has to be spent in one of those, but that $1.6 million is still sitting there. Now, my understanding is that they have some sites that other people came forward with. And after Church At The Park had already said yes, we’re willing to go ahead and because Church At The Park is willing to go ahead, that’s how they were able to allocate the money. So they’ve got other sites, they’re not really ready to announce it tomorrow but it’s not like the problem’s going away.
Miller: Bill Poehler, we’re out of time, we’ve got to leave it there, but thanks very much for joining us. That’s Bill Poehler, reporter for the Statesman Journal. We’ll be back after a short break.
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