Think Out Loud

What comes next for Portland-area homeless services tax

By Sheraz Sadiq (OPB)
July 1, 2025 1 p.m.

Broadcast: Wednesday, July 2

The Oregon Metro Regional Center on Southeast Grand Avenue in Portland, Oregon, Saturday, Jan. 5, 2019.

FILE - The Metro Council decided it would not ask voters to extend a regional homeless services tax.

Bradley W. Parks / OPB

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Last week, the Metro Council decided it would not ask voters to extend a regional homeless services tax on the November ballot. The Supportive Housing Services tax, which is set to expire in 2030, applies to residents in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties making more than $125,000 a year (or more than $200,000 for couples filing jointly). Businesses making more than $5 million annually are also subject to the tax which helps fund programs in the tri-county area to help people experiencing homelessness move into housing.

But a poll the Metro Council recently commissioned suggests that voters in the region appear to be questioning its effectiveness to help combat a crisis that has only gotten worse since the tax went into effect four years ago. The poll found that 53% of respondents said they would vote “yes” to reauthorize the tax, while 43% said they would oppose it.

The Metro Council is now exploring how to reform the tax, starting with a recent vote to index income thresholds to inflation and remove quarterly payment requirements for most high earners. Joining us to discuss the future of the Supportive Housing Services tax is Metro Councilor Christine Lewis.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Last week, the Metro Council – that’s the regional government for the Portland area – decided it would not ask voters to extend its homeless services tax in November. As it stands, the Supportive Housing Services tax is set to expire in 2030. It’s paid by high earning residents in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties, along with businesses that have gross receipts over $5 million a year. The money from the tax goes to programs in the tri-county area to help people move from homelessness into housing. A poll commissioned by Metro found weak support for the tax, leading counselors to make some immediate tweaks and to pause their effort to extend it.

Christine Lewis is a Metro counselor from Clackamas County. She joins me now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Christine Lewis: So nice to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Miller: The council decided not to push for this extension yet, not to do it right now after this weak support that was identified in this polling. What stood out to you most in that polling?

Lewis: Yes, thanks for the opportunity to talk about the polling. I will also say, as an elected official, I’m out in community every day talking with folks, and I think the polling really does reflect where the general electorate is and the general public is.

Miller: So it didn’t tell you something you hadn’t been hearing by your constituents?

Lewis: That’s right. And there is support for the program. Portlanders and people across the region want to help our neighbors who need the help the most. Our homeless neighbors need help. But there’s a substantial part of the electorate that doesn’t have confidence in the program as it’s currently being performed or constructed.

So it’s a close call. We do barely have a majority who would have said yes, but we don’t have the excitement. We don’t have the coalition that’s necessary to really get us to the point where I can ask to extend beyond 2030 right now, where we have so many people who say, “you have problems you need to fix right now.” I’m going to focus on some reforms before asking voters to give us trust of the tax well beyond 2030.

Miller: And we’re gonna talk about those reforms, those changes. But why do you think that a tax that passed with 58% of the vote just five years ago now has, in this poll, 46% of people who said that they were either definitely or likely going to support it?

Lewis: People are frustrated. We see tents and encampments, and it’s hard to feel like we’re making progress. But what you can’t see is that we’ve done a lot of work and there’s more inflow than there are people whose homelessness is being resolved. So we have to acknowledge the reality and we are going to lead continuing to focus on what we can do. We are so lucky to have this tax, because as we see federal support and state support lower in this region, we have a precious resource and we need to make the most of it.

Miller: So let me just put you simply then: Why should this tax be extended?

Lewis: We need to keep working to solve our homeless crisis. And ending homelessness is a short campaign slogan, but it’s not how we really talk or think about what we’re doing on this issue. Can we end mental illness, substance abuse and the financial problems that lead people to homelessness? No. But can we set up programs in a system across the whole region that is funded and is right sized to address those challenges? Yes, that’s doable and that’s what I’m committed to. So I believe that if we actually have enough runway and we’re looking at a program that’s going to last beyond just the next five years, we can make a significant dent in our homeless population focusing on chronic homelessness.

Miller: What are the specific critiques that you hear when you talk to your constituents?

Lewis: Folks are frustrated by paying the tax. And they’re particularly frustrated because they still drive by that same intersection, that same corner where there’s a tent village. And from what they can tell, those folks aren’t receiving help. So that’s the main frustration.

Miller: From high earning individuals or business owners who are, themselves, paying this tax … They say, “you’re making me pay this tax and I don’t see any evidence that it’s doing any good.” What do you tell them?

Lewis: That’s a hard conversation to be in. Because I want to say “trust me, we’re doing work.”

Miller: And it would be worse if this weren’t in effect?

Lewis: It would be way worse if this wasn’t in effect.

Miller: Is that a persuasive argument in your experience, when you have said that?

Lewis: When I tell people that in the past five years we’ve put 8,100-something people into housing and we’ve prevented 17,000 folks from falling into homelessness, those are big numbers, those are real numbers. And I have to put into context. Every month in the region there’s over 1,400 eviction notices. The inflow is outdoing what we are doing. And people understand that. They understand that we passed this measure in 2020. We’ve constructed the framework of the measure before a pandemic, before fentanyl blew up on our streets, and quite frankly, right in the headwinds of systemic change at the national level.

Miller: You could also say that homelessness has gotten worse all around the country over those same years. But I guess it seems like politically, I’m not sure that it matters if you tell somebody that.

Lewis: That’s right. And making the connection to other large West Coast cities that face the same environment we do with expensive housing, that doesn’t help. Because people say, “we’re paying more here, we want to see more than in other cities.” They expect results.

Miller: So that does lead us to the more political side to this. As I understand it, it’s not like you and other Metro counselors are saying, the public doesn’t like this, so we’re never going to ask them to extend this tax. You’re saying, we’ll make some changes now – last week, and we’ll talk about those changes – and in the coming years, we hope to do more changes to build public trust. That’s a short version, but is that accurate?

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Lewis: That’s absolutely accurate.

Miller: So what do you think it’s going to take to increase public trust?

Lewis: I think public trust will be gained two ways. One, they want to hear politicians, leadership say what’s actually happening, and first admitting that I understand many voters are paying this tax and they’re not seeing results. And then also, they want to see a system where we’re not just pointing fingers at each other across different agencies. To really be able to get at the root of this issue, there are three counties and 24 cities within Metro’s jurisdiction. And it shouldn’t matter where in the Metro region you are, if we have this tax in place, we need a system that if you’re falling into homelessness in Gresham you have the same set of resources you might have in Beaverton or Oregon City. And that’s going to require more coordination than this measure was originally constructed.

As the measure was referred to voters, Metro collects the tax and then we send the tax funds to the three counties based on who pays into the tax. So each of the three counties has their own local implementation plan. Those don’t talk to each other, they don’t coordinate with each other and it’s not one regional system. So one of the biggest reform efforts we can lead is regional performance indicators, regional metrics that every single program that’s funded by SHS dollars, they need to be performing towards those metrics or they don’t receive these funds.

Miller: Are you talking about exerting more control from the Metro side? How is the accountability or coordination truly going to work? What does Metro want? And after that, we’ll talk about how you’d get buy-in from county commissioners in three different counties or all those different cities.

Lewis: Right now, we have a complicated system. If you have a complaint about what’s happening in the homeless system, you might go to your Metro counselor, you might go to your county commissioner, you might go to Metro’s oversight committee. And we actually have, in some ways, two oversight committees. We’d like to streamline the oversight committee. We’d like to make sure that the oversight committee includes elected officials, as well as folks from the business community, the community that’s providing services and those with real lived experience of homelessness.

So if we put together that oversight committee, we expect that that’s where they will have the conversation about what regional standards different programs and different providers are able to achieve through their work.

Miller: Does that mean that you’re actually going to be more prescriptive in terms of what the counties can and can’t do with this money? I’m still trying to figure out what is going to be different on the street. And folks may remember, for example, there was a big brouhaha not that long ago when Metro said, “Multnomah County, how come you’re not spending this money quickly enough?” So how would that, for example, be different in the future?

Lewis: I can’t speak to spending money fast or slow. But what I can speak to is we’re gonna have to actually see results. And we’re gonna be measuring folks who are forming connections with social workers and moving through a system towards stability. So it’s not just wanting to pay for these services, because we know people who come into homelessness come in for every number of reasons, and they need specific services tailored to them. So we’re not going to be putting limits on which services one person or another might get. Instead, we’re going to say, what outcome is that person trying to get? Are they trying to get stabilized in temporary housing? What services do they need to achieve that goal? So we’ll actually start counting people who are stabilized in housing. We’ll actually start counting, it’s not just one touch with a social worker or a street outreach person. So instead of counting that one touch, how many relationships are moving that person towards stability?

Miller: I can’t help but think that the solution you’re talking about here feels a little bit different from where we started. We started by saying that there is a lot of public frustration at the pace of improvement. And instead of improvement, we’ve seen backsliding, we’ve seen more people experiencing homelessness. And I guess I’m still wondering, if part of the issue here is how you build public support for the extension of this tax past 2030, how a focus on better coordination with these different governments is going to resonate with Portland area voters?

If your constituents are coming to you and saying, “I’m paying for this tax and I see a tent on the sidewalk,” and if you come back to them and say, “yes, but we’re going to do better coordination with all these regional partners,” do you think that they’re gonna care about your answer?

Lewis: Well, I don’t think that it’s just better coordination, I think it’s better results. And if we actually have a set of standards that every program who receives this money have to be aiming towards, they’re no longer content to just fund a provider who’s gonna go out, stand on the street corner, and hope people come and talk to them. Instead, they’re going to feel the responsibility for every single person they work with, helping them resolve their homelessness. And some people, that’s a shelter bed. Some people that’s straight into temporary or permanent housing with a voucher.

Miller: What is the timeline that you’re thinking about right now?

Lewis: I’m excited that we are in summer in Oregon, so I don’t expect that Metro will be taking action in the next month or two because we’re all out exploring the beauty of our state. My hope is this fall, we actually start reconvening and restructuring our oversight, and setting our KPIs, our performance indicators.

Miller: In the conversations that you’ve already had – and there have been conversations, some of which are public [and] I think many of them probably are not yet, between all of your partners going back for a while now – how much appetite do you hear from your county partners when you start talking about this different level of coordination and oversight?

Lewis: I feel like the conversations I have, particularly with my county commissioners in Clackamas County, they’re proud of the program they’ve built. And Clackamas County, Washington County, before this measure was in place, they spent less than $10 million a year of all of the funds combined. This measure sends them $40, $50, $60 million a year. So they’re truly reliant on these funds to meet the level of need in their communities. They want to see this extended beyond 2030. They’re excited to show what they’ve done, they’re showing their work. And I’d give those two counties very good grades. They’ve built good systems.

It’s Multnomah County that I think is really lagging. They have a lot of other funds involved, they had a larger system to begin with and they obviously have the concentration of folks in one or two parts of town that they’re really working on. So there’s different levels of support from county commissioners, but they’re all committed to seeing this program beyond 2030.

Miller: Nobody wants this pot of money to go away if they’re the ones who are getting it and spending it. Can you explain the two changes that the council passed last week?

Lewis: Yes. Our council voted unanimously on a resolution that looks pretty boring on paper, but I think it’s very responsive to some of the things we’ve been hearing, particularly from folks right on the edge of the threshold of paying this tax. One is we’re indexing those thresholds to inflation. It’s intended to be a high income tax. As we’ve seen inflation since 2020, we know that we’re starting to hit the upper middle class and folks who are paying for preschool, paying for daycare for their kids during the summer, and all of a sudden we’re no longer just looking at the highest 10% in the region. So we’ve indexed those thresholds to inflation going forward.

And then the other thing is we’re no longer going to have penalty for taxpayers who are right on the margin of paying if they don’t do a quarterly withholding up to $5,000.

Miller: Those are just for the personal income taxes. No changes were passed last week for the business income tax filers. Why not?

Lewis: I haven’t heard any change requested out of the business tax. In your opening segment, you said it was $5 million in gross receipts. It’s actually $5 million in profit. So in most of these cases it’s folks who are operating with significant profit and they’re a little bit more stable.

Miller: Thank you for that correction. I thought I grabbed that from the Metro site itself, although maybe that was …

Lewis: We’ll double check that. The computer gremlins!

Miller: What do you say though to high income earners and on the personal income tax side who question why they alone should have to pay this tax?

Lewis: I think that in Portland we talk a lot about being progressive. But when you look at a progressive tax structure, we’re looking at folks who actually do have the ability to pay. And for folks who, in their everyday lives, see people who are experiencing homelessness, who are in crisis on the streets, they feel compassionate, but they also feel like they want those people to have a resource to go to. So we’re providing a solution. We’re meeting that need through the services of this measure.

Miller: I’m sure you’ve also heard that many of those households are also households that have the ability to move away. And there are plenty of people in the last couple of years, with a kind of crescendo, who say that that’s exactly what’s happening, and it’s having, in the end, an overall net negative effect on business generation and on income tax revenues in the Portland metro region. In other words, having the opposite effect overall of what you’re hoping to see. What’s your response?

Lewis: I do think that we have to be responsive when people say, “why don’t we make changes so that the tax structure doesn’t penalize me for living in the community that I live in, work in?” And at the same time, we need to take care of our communities. So when I look at what other cities across the country are doing, we were one of the first measures like this. There are other cities that have instituted measures. So I don’t think it’s a matter of just choosing another city. And we have to make sure that Portland is a place that we choose to live, that people can stay rooted here, stay in their community. That’s why we did what we did last week with the indexing for folks who are starting to think about where they live and what county they live in, if they live or work within the metro boundary.

Miller: Christine Lewis, thanks very much.

Lewis: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Miller: Christine Lewis is a Metro councilor who represents District 2 – that includes much of Clackamas County, with a portion of Southwest Portland as well. The Metro Council recently decided not to ask voters to extend its tax that supports homeless services. That tax, right now, is set to expire in 2030.

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