Portland’s mayor wants to end unsheltered homelessness with shelters. Is it working?

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson made ending unsheltered homelessness central to his policy agenda. He’s leaned into one kind of shelter to do that, overnight-only shelters. And he’s successfully opened five of these this year, as part of his plan to provide an additional 1,500 beds by Dec. 1. Last month, the mayor announced plans to open what will eventually be four centers where homeless Portlanders can access services during the day. But Multnomah County estimates the number of people who are unsheltered in the county - most of them in Portland - to be more than 7,500. Mayor Wilson is also facing skepticism and concerns among homeless service providers, neighborhood associations and Portland city councilors about his plan to end unsheltered homelessness as his December deadline approaches.

This week, the mayor sent out a plea to an email list of approximately 17,000 people, urging them to donate to or volunteer their time at one of the city’s shelters - and seemed to warn that the Trump administration might choose to send in National Guard Troops as it did in Washington D.C. if Portland did not “address the humanitarian crisis on our streets.”

Reporter Lillian Mongeau Hughes covers homelessness and mental health for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She joins us to share more about the recent opening of another overnight-only shelter despite opposition from a Pearl District neighborhood association, and the progress the city has made toward the goal of ending unsheltered homelessness.

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

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Portland Mayor Keith Wilson made ending unsheltered homelessness the centerpiece of his agenda. He promised to open enough new overnight shelters that there would be an additional 1,500 beds by December 1. With under three months to go, we thought we would get a progress report on where that effort stands right now.

Lillian Mongeau Hughes joins us to talk about this. She covers homelessness and mental health for The Oregonian. I should note, she is also a former OPB editor. It’s good to see you again.

Lillian Mongeau Hughes: Thanks for having me. I almost said “welcome back.” [Laughter]

Miller: Well, it all works. [Laughs] I want to start with some of those high numbers as I just mentioned. The mayor’s central campaign and post-election promise is to create 1,500 additional overnight shelter beds. Why 1,500, since the estimated number of people who are living on the streets in the Portland area is more like 7,500?

Mongeau Hughes: Yeah, that’s a great question. To give the mayor some credit here, he based that 1,500 number – which he came up with when he was running – on numbers that were available to him at the time. The 7,500 number came out. It’s a number from the county and is a pretty accurate count. We believe that came out in April. So it’s updated regularly. It’s at 7,500 now and that’s like a new monthly update. So the mayor didn’t have that number when he made this plan. He’s stuck to 1,500, I think because it’s feasible and it’s what they have money to do.

Miller: Feasible. OK, but it’s now September 5. So let’s talk about feasibility.

Mongeau Hughes: Let’s talk about feasibility.

Miller: Less than three months from the mayor’s self-given December 1 deadline, how many new shelter beds are in operation, exist right now?

Mongeau Hughes: Tonight, the answer to that is 470. The city will tell you 630, because the newest facility they opened in the Pearl District has the capacity to have 200 beds, but those aren’t all currently open. So at a max, I would say 630. But really tonight, it’s 470.

Miller: Ok, around a third or so.

Mongeau Hughes: That’s right.

Miller: Maybe a little bit more if you sort of pre-grandfather in the ones that are in the works.

Mongeau Hughes: There aren’t any more in the works.

Miller: Sorry. In the works, in the one that was just opened that could open there.

Mongeau Hughes: You’re right

Miller: What can you tell us about the one that just opened though, the Northrop shelter in Portland’s Pearl District.

Mongeau Hughes: So it’s in a repurposed office building. It’s kind of a big lofty space with beds laid out on metal cots. It looks kind of like an army barracks. There’s some shiny material on the floor that’s, I think, for easier cleanup. I’m not sure, but that’s what it looks like inside and it just started operating this week.

Miller: Even if that hits full capacity, the total number of new shelter beds, as we’re just talking about, it’s going to be less than half of the mayor’s 1,500-bed goal. You wrote three days ago that no additional planned shelter locations have been announced by the city. Is that still the case?

Mongeau Hughes: That’s still the case.

Miller: OK, so given that it takes time to do siting, to do community engagement, to have people yell at you about, like in the case of the Pearl, “we don’t want this here,” is it fair to say that it would take an extraordinary effort for the mayor to meet his December 1 goal?

Mongeau Hughes: Yes, I honestly think it’s probably next to impossible at this point. Even if he kept up the same pace, which, to be fair, has been pretty fast, right? This is like a lot of new beds have opened in a pretty short period of time. Even if he kept up this exact pace though, we’re still nine months away from doubling it, which would get you to 1,500.

Miller: I appreciate what you were also talking about there because we should acknowledge a distance between where we are now and the goal, but it is worth reflecting on what the mayor, what the city [have] accomplished. What has it taken to open five new emergency overnight shelters in eight months?

Mongeau Hughes: Yeah, I’d love to talk about what it’s taken and also what has been accomplished with these overnight shelters. So it’s taken a laser-like focus, I will say, absolutely from the city, the whole city staff pulling together in the same direction. It’s taken finding shelter providers who are willing to step up quickly and to work with the rates that the city is offering. The mayor really wants these to be fast and inexpensive places to run. And he’s rated those accordingly. The per-night cost per person is much lower than, say, the 24-hour shelters that the county runs.

Also, there are a lot fewer services. So you get about nine hours of a place to sleep. There are no showers at most of these shelters. They don’t offer full meals, though there is food provided to some extent, like sort of more snacks and coffee type of a thing. They don’t have service providers on site so that you can meet with somebody and say, “oh, I’m really looking for housing.” “Oh, I need mental health support” and they have a way to connect you. That’s not provided at these overnight shelters.

So they’re a pretty bare bones operation. They are, as the mayor likes to say, a warm bed. And they’re only open for sleeping from 9 [p.m.] to 6 a.m., at this point, so they’re pretty short.

Miller: Are they being used? Are people going to these overnight shelters?

Mongeau Hughes: Yes. I think the usage rates have become pretty high. The most recent numbers … they just opened a bunch of new beds in the last month and that probably brought the usage rates down overall because they are new places that people don’t necessarily know about. Yeah, they’re told me like 75% to 80% of beds are being slept in per night. So that’s not quite as high as the county numbers, which are closer to 90%, but certainly they’re being used.

Miller: One of the big knocks on the mayor’s plan from the very beginning was that overnight shelters, they can get people off the street overnight, but they don’t end homelessness. They end unsheltered homelessness on a nightly basis. Is there any good data right now about the outcomes for people who are going to these new sites?

Mongeau Hughes: Not really. There is an effort to collect that data, but it’s just gotten started and it’s been a little rocky. The longest open shelters have been opened nine months and that’s only like 200 beds worth. So no, there’s not great data on that now. I’m hoping to see some better, firmer data in the fall.

I want to highlight what you said about shelters not ending homelessness. Even somebody in a 24-hour shelter is still considered homeless. The number of people who are staying in shelters on a regular basis are counted as being sheltered. So the 7,500 is people who are actually sleeping outside. So we’re still tackling that 7,500 number. The 3,000 shelter beds that the county runs are full and those people aren’t in the 7,500 number.

Miller: I want to turn to a recent email that the mayor sent to something like 17,000 fellow Portlanders. Among other things, it invoked the threat of the National Guard coming into the city. Can you describe the mayor’s message?

Mongeau Hughes: Yeah, so basically in this email, he said the Trump administration uses “bulldozers and mass arrests by masked agents to deal with homelessness,” which is indeed what we’ve seen in recent weeks in Washington D.C. And he said, let’s volunteer more and donate, like us Portlanders should volunteer more and donate to sheltering services here in the city to “prove that such heavy-handed tactics are not needed in our city.”

It was a kind of stunning thing to say, actually. I haven’t seen a mayor say something like that before. Look, I have no idea how the Trump Administration, like how likely they are to send some sort of homeless crisis SWAT team to Portland. If it’s on their minds, I’m also not sure if extra volunteering will prove to them that it’s a bad idea. And I just want to acknowledge that this is a crazy conversation we’re having, like, what is the mayor supposed to say when there are cities around the country and the federal government is going in with masked agents? That’s not something that we’ve dealt with before in the history of the country.

Miller: Even separate from the either implicit or maybe explicit threat of Trump sending in federal troops if things don’t get better, have previous mayors said, hey, Portlanders, please support our homeless response efforts by donating your time or giving money to these nonprofits?

Mongeau Hughes: Not to my knowledge. And the money requests were pretty explicit. If you click through the links that were in that email, he was asking for everything from lawn games to be at the day centers to shower trucks, which was listed under like a major giving option. And no, that’s pretty unique. I’ve asked around about this and nobody I’ve talked to, either the government or homelessness services, has seen anything like it before.

Miller: The threat of the National Guard could be looming in our future, but what are other ways that the administration’s actions could or have already affected the provision of services for people experiencing homelessness in the Portland area?

Mongeau Hughes: Yeah, well, earlier in the show, people were talking about federal funding cuts, too. Those are going to affect homelessness too. About a quarter of funding in our Portland area is federal funding. So that includes money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It includes Medicaid funding. It includes funding from a bunch of smaller federal funds, but if all of that were to go away or even a chunk of it go away significantly, the problem that we’re seeing right now, which is already getting worse, would get worse even faster. And there’s honestly not anything any mayor could do about that.

Miller: Lillian, thanks very much.

Mongeau Hughes: Thanks for your time.

Miller: Lillian Mongeau Hughes covers homelessness and mental health for The Oregonian.

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