According to Multnomah County, nearly 3,000 more people are living unsheltered in the county than there were when Mayor Keith Wilson took office. The mayor says that data doesn’t match what he’s seeing, and that disconnect doesn’t help when the city and the county share responsibility for the region’s homeless response. OPB’s Alex Zielinski joins us to talk about her latest story.
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. Nearly 3,000 more people are living unsheltered in Multnomah County than when Portland Mayor Keith Wilson took office – that’s according to recent county data. But the mayor, who has made responding to unsheltered homelessness the centerpiece of his administration, says this new data does not match what he is seeing on the street and he’s calling into question the methodology behind these numbers.
OPB’s Alex Zielinski joins us to talk about the new tensions within the governments of Oregon’s largest city and largest county as they try to coordinate their response to homelessness. Welcome back to the show.
Alex Zielinski: Great to be here.
Miller: So when did you first hear that the mayor does not believe in the homelessness data provided by the county?
Zielinski: So I heard rumblings that there were doubts from his staff, but then heard him bring it up himself at a public meeting last month with city and county officials, and folks who worked in the county’s data office. He started the meeting by urging county data staff to make sure their numbers were solid because it didn’t appear to match what he had been seeing on the ground.
Miller: I want to take a step back here. Can you remind us what Multnomah County actually does now to try to count how many people are experiencing homelessness in the county?
Zielinski: So in the last year-and-a-half, the county changed the way it tracks the number of people experiencing homelessness. Basically anytime someone interacts with a social service – like uses a shelter, talks with a social worker, has a talk with a street medic, moves into supportive housing – information on where they slept the prior night goes into a database. They share it with that provider, and that goes into a larger database that the county can access and tabulate. So it reflects when people are living outside and then moving into housing, or vice versa, or just people who have newly entered the region and are starting to use services. It’s able to kind of track the data in these ebbs and flows.
Miller: We’ve heard a lot and we actually followed along, at one point, in a Point-in-Time Count – the one we did was in Clark County, I think two years ago. How is what Multnomah County is doing, what you’ve just described, different from the Point-in-Time Count?
Zielinski: So the Point-in-Time Count is the name of this biennial census of sorts, where volunteers collect information on where people sleep on one single January evening, and they put that all into a database in a report that they share publicly but also send to the federal government. This is a census that’s required by the federal government for any metro area that receives federal housing funding. So the new way that I just explained of collecting data, it’s tracking people over months as they enter and exit different systems. It’s not just a one-night snapshot. So that’s the big difference.
Miller: What does the most recent data show from Multnomah County and how is it different from the year before?
Zielinski: So over the past year or so, the data show a significant increase in the county’s unsheltered homeless population and way higher than recent years. Currently, the county estimates that nearly 18,000 people are experiencing homelessness in the region, with about 9,000 people considered unsheltered. And a reminder, that means living outside or in a car, just not in a shelter or sleeping on someone’s couch.
When Wilson entered office in January 2025, that number [of people considered unsheltered] was roughly 6,000. There is a bit of a caveat to that data that I want to mention because the way the data is collected has changed, like I said, so it could falsely inflate the numbers a little bit. There are way more entry points into this new data system. So it’s naturally going to be larger than the Point-in-Time Count information. For example, the number of people experiencing homelessness in 2025 appears to be 67% higher than 2023, which seems alarming. But a lot of data analysts smarter than me that I’ve spoken with say it’s largely based on just the way that we collect data.
What I said earlier about the number of folks living outside increasing, that is based on the same data set. But when you look at comparing Point-in-Time Count to the new data, it looks pretty big.
Miller: This is an important point, because so much of the debate is about the 3,000 or so person increase. That is apples to apples, because a little more than a year ago, that was the new methodology, and within the last month or so, that was also the new methodology. So that is apples to apples.
Zielinski: Right.
Miller: So one of the things that Mayor Wilson told you is that “the data as a whole isn’t matching up with what we’re seeing anecdotally.” What does he mean by that?
Zielinski: Remember that Wilson entered office with a really clear directive from voters to end unsheltered homelessness. And to do that, he put resources toward opening up a bunch of overnight only shelters, and hundreds and hundreds of people are using those new shelters, with more than 50% occupancy most nights in these different shelters. For him, that data point doesn’t square with the news that unsheltered population is increasing. If a ton of people are moving indoors, why isn’t that reflected in the data? That’s his big question.
He also has pointed to some anecdotal evidence from service providers like hospital workers, shelter staff, who have told him point blank that they’re seeing fewer people needing their help and services. And of course he’s looking out the window in downtown Portland. It’s true, it does look like there are fewer people sleeping on sidewalks.
Miller: What did you hear from experts who work on homelessness about the use of these kinds of anecdotes to call the data into question? It does seem like the exact opposite of the way we normally talk about the relationship between data and anecdotes.
Zielinski: I’ve heard that this feels less about numbers and more about politics, both from data experts and from others familiar with the city and county homeless system. It’s interesting, I can think back to just a few years ago, when the city said the county’s data was inaccurate because it was undercounting the number of people experiencing homelessness. And that was at a time when city leaders wanted to open more shelters and looked to data for their reasoning. Of course, it was also a time when unsheltered homelessness was a lot more visible in Portland, so it felt like a much bigger crisis. But it does kind of mimic that pattern.
Miller: Aside from anecdotes, what specific issues did Mayor Wilson bring up to buttress his contention that we cannot trust the county homelessness data?
Zielinski: His office has raised a few specific concerns. One is that they’ve heard from some shelter providers that people are giving nicknames or aliases instead of their real name, and that could lead to duplicative names in the database, which could inflate the numbers.
Another is an idea that people might be using homeless services despite not actually being homeless, another example that has come from some anecdotes that could inflate the numbers too.
Miller: How did county officials respond to these specific assertions?
Zielinski: So the county’s data team argues that these concerns, if true, would have a very tiny impact on the data, not enough to skew the numbers that deeply.
But they also take the concerns seriously. One thing I didn’t include in my reporting is that people who run city and county shelters, and may be reporting that there are folks giving fake names or these other things to the mayor’s office, they should be receiving training to catch this and fix it. That’s one thing I heard from county folks that, if this is happening, it’s on us to address it at the source. Maybe let’s focus on training instead of just scrapping all of the data.
Miller: What’s at stake in these numbers for the mayor? Why is he so focused on this argument now, that unsheltered homelessness has gone down, not up, in the last year?
Zielinski: Well, that was his campaign promise. This is the biggest priority of his office. He’s been laser focused on it for 14 months and he’s taken a lot of heat for it. He’s had to make budget cuts to keep shelters open, he’s fought pretty hard. And I can imagine that after putting that kind of work in and then seeing the challenge grow, that’s frustrating. He wants to show success.
And now we’re entering another budget shortfall and cycle where Wilson is probably going to make some unpopular decisions to keep his shelters running, and he needs the public in his corner. So it’s not surprising that this is something he’s taking seriously.
Miller: You’ve noted that this is not just about that central campaign promise, but it’s also about funding and policy disagreements. What’s happening budget-wise?
Zielinski: Since 2016, the city and the county have jointly overseen the region’s homeless programs. That means they both pitch in money to keep programs running and they play an advisory role on how that money is used. It’s never been an easy partnership. There have always been disagreements on where to spend the money and who is accountable for what. And like I said, we’re approaching budget season, both for the city and the county, and both governments have big funding shortfalls which could threaten shelter closures.
Right now, each government believes they’re owed money from each other, under the contract that sets the term of their partnership, around $30 million each. But neither has handed money over to each other in the standoff. Wilson has proposed a change to this contract that would just let each government hang on to their own money to run their programs, not having to enter this bureaucratic Venmo loop. Whether that’ll move forward isn’t clear yet.
Miller: So that’s the money side. But what about potential changes coming to the cities and counties’ overall partnership – often uneasy partnership – in responding to homelessness?
Zielinski: Well, the city and county will need to renegotiate its agreement to oversee homeless programs and services next year. It expires, I believe, in July. And that’s always an opportunity for elected officials to propose some major changes or, like in the past, threaten to leave the contract entirely.
Wilson told me he has no intent to end the agreement, and county officials tell me the same. But there’s a real interest in being more explicit about the roles of each government and the financial expectations, and how data is shared and collected. I do expect the city will propose having more access to the county’s database next year. And that’s where I see this conversation around data coming up again.
Miller: Alex, thanks very much.
Zielinski: Thank you.
Miller: Alex Zielinski is OPB’s Portland city government reporter.
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