Portland City Councilor Candace Avalos speaks at a rally outside of City Hall on December 3, 2025. Avalos is one of three councilors calling for a new spending plan on programs that could keep people from becoming homelessness.
Alex Zielinski / OPB
Portland City Councilors have spent the past 11 months allowing Mayor Keith Wilson to roll out his solutions to the city’s homeless crisis without criticism or impediment. But just days after Wilson’s self-imposed Dec. 1 deadline to end unsheltered homelessness, several councilors are calling for a change of course.
“Right now in this moment, our responsibility is simple: stop people from falling into homelessness,” said Councilor Candace Avalos at a Wednesday rally outside of Portland City Hall. “I believe we can choose a future where housing is a human right, not something you earn by surviving impossible odds.”
Avalos represents East Portland’s District 1 along with Councilors Jamie Dunphy and Loretta Smith. The three councilors introduced a proposal Wednesday to redirect $21 million in recently-identified, unspent city housing dollars toward programs that keep people from becoming homeless.
That includes rent assistance for tenants at risk of eviction, legal defense for people faced with an eviction and financial support for people at risk of losing housing subsidies due to looming cuts in federally-funded housing programs.
At a Wednesday city council meeting, Smith criticized Wilson’s homelessness plan, which centered on swiftly opening 1,500 overnight-only shelter beds.
“It’s one thing to give people a place to stay at night, but when those folks have to leave at 6 a.m., they don’t have nowhere to go,” Smith said. “The reason why our shelter system is not working is because those folks have to wander around for hours before they can get back into our system.”
Councilors and local homeless advocates have panned Wilson’s plan for largely focusing on building shelters, not programs that move people into housing or keep them from being homeless in the first place.
In a statement, Dunphy pointed to data that show roughly 1,100 people in Multnomah County experiencing homelessness find housing each month, while 1,400 new people become homeless.
“At the same time, federal and state governments both have eviscerated rental assistance dollars, meaning this problem is going to get significantly worse next year,” Dunphy said. “These dollars aren’t enough to stop the hemorrhaging, but they are an incredible opportunity for Portland to help control the bleeding.”
The city administrator’s office shared news of the unspent $21 million in Portland Housing Bureau funds last month, shocking councilors who have used much of their first year in office battling over how to patch budget shortfalls.
The news came the same day that then-Housing Director Helmi Hisserich resigned after being asked by her manager, Deputy City Administrator Donnie Oliviera, to step down.
Hisserich has refuted any suggestions that the unspent dollars led to her exit.
In an email to councilors Thursday, Hisserich explained that she stumbled upon the unspent funds earlier this year after auditing the bureau’s handling of rental registration fees between 2021 and 2024, before she was hired. Landlords must pay those fees on each unit they lease.
Hisserich said she told Oliviera of the full $21 million in unspent and unaccounted for rental service fees in August. She had wanted to share news of these unspent funds earlier with councilors, she said, but Oliviera told her not to do so, as it would be a “big PR problem.”
“Instead of supporting my efforts to daylight the problem,” Hisserich wrote, “the city administrator delayed the release of this information to coincide with their plan to displace me.”
Magan Reed, a spokesperson for Oliviera, challenged the allegations. Reed told OPB that Oliviera was only aware of $12 million in unspent funds, and did not become aware of the full $21 million until last month. Email records Hisserich shared with OPB show this sum was only shared internally among Portland Housing Bureau staff in August — not with Oliviera.
Hisserich was hired by the Portland Housing Bureau in 2024 and worked for more than two decades on housing issues in Los Angeles.
Little has been made public about why Oliviera asked her to step down. In her Thursday letter, Hisserich opined that it was because he wanted to derail her council-approved work on new publicly-owned housing programs.
Interim Housing Director Michael Buonocore has put forward a few suggestions on how to spend some of the extra cash, many that align with the District 1 councilors’ proposal. But some ideas reflect Wilson’s interests, like a $500,000 request for a “home share” program Wilson has pitched. That program, geared to help property owners lease out rooms in their homes, has gained skepticism from Avalos and other councilors for being short-sighted.
With their proposal, the District 1 councilors have signaled their distrust of Wilson’s plans. Dunphy hinted at this strategy in an October interview with OPB.
“The mayor has until Dec. 1 to do what he’s gonna do, and then the council is going to take the lead Dec. 2,” Dunphy said. “That is the moment where I’m ready to pivot and start working on a solution.”
Cody Bowman, a spokesperson for Wilson, said the mayor has been “in close communication” with councilors about these funds “and remains committed to helping move people out of homelessness and to prevent homelessness before it occurs.”
“The mayor looks forward to engaged and thoughtful discussions with City Councilors over the coming weeks,” Bowman told OPB.
Councilors will discuss the new housing prevention proposal at the Housing and Homelessness Committee on Tuesday.
