Central Oregon recorded a nearly 20% drop in people experiencing homelessness compared to last year. That’s according to an annual Point in Time count that took place this year from Jan. 27 through Feb. 2 in Crook, Deschutes and Jefferson Counties and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.
Eliza Wilson is the chair of the Homeless Leadership Coalition in Central Oregon and the executive director of RootedHomes, an affordable housing developer based in Bend. Wilson says this has been the largest year-over-year decline she has seen in over 20 years of helping with the annual snapshot of people experiencing homelessness in the region. She attributes this unprecedented decline to opening new shelters and expanding shelter bed capacity in communities like Madras, Bend, Redmond and Prineville, while also providing rental assistance and case management to help people transition into stable housing.
Wilson joins us for more details on the progress that’s being made in Central Oregon to tackle homelessness and the work that still needs to be done.
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. The number of people experiencing homelessness in Central Oregon dropped nearly 20% this year. That’s according to data from the region’s annual Point in Time count, which was just released. It includes Deschutes, Crook and Jefferson Counties, as well as the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs.
Eliza Wilson is the chair of the Homeless Leadership Coalition in Central Oregon and the executive director of RootedHomes. That’s an affordable housing developer based in Bend. She joins us now with more details. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Eliza Wilson: Thank you. Thanks for having me on today.
Miller: It’s been a little while since we’ve talked about Point in Time counts. Can you just remind us the basics, first, of how they’re done?
Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. HUD, which is a federal agency, requires that every community across the country conduct a Point in Time count yearly – in the wintertime, imagine that. And communities really get to design how that looks in their communities. The basis of it is to count everyone experiencing homelessness in the community and provide that data to HUD so that they can provide it to Congress and make decisions about allocations every year.
In Central Oregon, we really emphasize working with each community. We’re a broad region. It’s 15,000 square miles, largely rural. We work with every community and develop leads that do the Point in Time count a little differently in each community, based on their needs.
Miller: This is really a snapshot, as the name implies, a “point in time” snapshot. How much can we trust? I mean, what kinds of conclusions can we draw from these counts, whether numbers are stable or go way up, or in your case this year, go way down?
Wilson: I think that really depends on the community and the efforts that go into the Point in Time count. In Central Oregon, we’re really fortunate to have all of our providers that work with folks experiencing homelessness – even our medical providers – conduct the count every year. We work with our McKinney-Vento liaisons. They’re the folks that work with unhoused students and families in the school district, and they also conduct the Point in Time count … the counties and their mental health departments.
So, we have a very robust Point in Time count. We’ve worked for years to develop that. We also count for a week. Some folks just do mostly observational counts, driving around, not really surveying folks. We do a full survey with folks, and it’s the people that work with them every day – their medical provider, their street outreach provider or the folks that are sheltering them – that do the count.
But it is important to look at it as a point in time and just a snapshot of that period of time. We know that folks are more accessible during the summer. We would likely get more surveys during that time. But it is important to compare it to other data points that we have. So, for example, we know it’s particularly difficult to count young people experiencing homelessness, and children and families. We also compare it or provide information to our community about the McKinney-Vento liaison list. They have the number of students that experience homelessness throughout the year.
Then we also have all of our providers locally enter data into a data system, just like it happens all over the country. We’re developing a dashboard so that we can provide more real-time data to folks.
Miller: In the big picture, how do you make sense of this nearly 20% decrease?
Wilson: We’re really fortunate in Central Oregon these last couple of years. We have a governor who, her first day in office, declared a state of emergency on homelessness. Oregon has really been under-resourced for federal funds, and Central Oregon has been underdeveloped for housing, and state and federal funds. Her first day in office, like I said, she declared the state of emergency. Funds were deployed to regions, parts of Oregon that have the most folks experiencing homelessness. Central Oregon was one of those communities.
We really believe that the drop in numbers has contributed to the fact [that], for the first time, [we are] getting dollars to provide housing focused case management, as well as expanding shelter beds to stabilize folks and to house folks. We housed more people in 2025 than any other year before, just because we had the access to resources. We really believe that people want to be housed. It’s just the access to getting housed that’s missing a lot of times.
Miller: You mentioned shelters there, but just to be clear, we’re not talking here, in that 20% drop, about a shift in the experience of homelessness, right? From, say, living in a tent in a national forest to living in a shelter. This is truly a shift from some kind of homelessness to housing.
Wilson: Yeah, that’s a great point that you make because in the 2025 Point in Time count, we actually saw, because of the increase in shelter beds, more people were in shelter than ever before. We actually had the beds available. This year, we believe folks were able to stabilize. They were able to access housing services, because in 2025, we had more housing services.
Yes, that drop is not folks going from unsheltered homelessness to shelter, it’s folks going into housing.
Miller: Do I understand you correctly that you’re saying that you’re actually … Because for years there has been, sometimes it’s been called the debate. It’s more like a question of the best allocation of scarce resources about housing versus shelter. And I’ve heard from plenty of experts saying, we need everything, don’t pit them against each other. But one of the theories has been, or the hopes has been, that shelters can lead to housing. It seems like you’re saying that in Central Oregon, that is the case.
Wilson: Yes, and the reason we can say that … Especially [for] the shelters that have more funds to provide robust case management to folks, we do track data every time somebody accesses shelter, every time somebody receives case management or other types of resources when they’re living outside. So we have that data accessible to us. And when we’re looking at data, we can look at, program by program, the exits to permanent housing.
So, in our community – and I’m sure this is pretty common across the country – when you see that robust housing-focused case management is paired with housing access, there’s a place for somebody to go, whether that’s paid for by the continuum, like us, or whether someone just needed a security deposit. Some folks have less need. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. But when you see those things paired together, we have more outcomes of permanent housing.
In Central Oregon, we just didn’t have the resources to send people to. So for the first time, we have had those, and it’s been highly successful.
Miller: One of the things about this count is it’s not just a top level, this is the number of people experiencing homelessness. There are other questions. And some details about demographics. What stands out to you, broadly, in the demographics this year?
Wilson: We opted in, as a community, several years ago to start asking folks – this is not a required question, it’s not one that the federal government asks us to ask folks – how long they’ve been in Central Oregon. Like many communities around the country, sometimes folks believe the myth that we only have people experiencing homelessness because they’re moving in from other areas, because we have resources available. Service providers know that’s not true, but we understand that the public is naturally a little skeptical about stuff.
So we started asking several years ago how long they’ve been in Central Oregon. In this year’s count, we saw that over 50% have been here for 10 years or longer, and the vast majority have been in Central Oregon for a year or longer. Also, the number of unaccompanied youth that are 18 to 24, and families, just looking at those demographics was pretty astounding [including] the number of folks who were 55+ experiencing homelessness in our community.
We know, just based on the state in shelters here, that there are folks aging into chronicity, to being chronically homeless, that are elderly and need a lot of medical support. And we’re seeing that in the shelters, that more and more folks are coming in. End-of-life care is needed. Oftentimes, significant support is needed that we just can’t provide. So we see that in the count this year as well.
Miller: You’re getting this a little bit, but there was good news overall. What do you see as the biggest areas of concern?
Wilson: I’m a person with lived experience of youth homelessness. Anytime we see a count that has children and youth in high rates experiencing homelessness … We know, in 2022, Central Oregon had the highest rates of unsheltered youth and family homelessness in the country. We were cited in a report to Congress as being one of the four top CoCs in the country for those two demographics – which is not a good thing to have, by the way. When you’re listed as the top four, it’s not always a good thing, we learned.
So, we significantly prioritize those folks when we’re building shelter, accessing housing. But we still see families and youth experiencing homelessness that account. We would love to get that to zero, as well as the elderly folks, like I mentioned. I think 22% of folks were chronically homeless, and we believe those are folks that are, again aging into chronic homelessness. They’ve just not had access to resources for a long period of time, so they’re becoming chronically homeless, just because of the length of time before they get resources.
Miller: I want to follow up on what you just said, that you experienced homelessness yourself as a young person with your family, when you were growing up in Central Oregon. How does that affect the way that you approach your work today?
Wilson: I think I bring a lot of empathy to my work and, oftentimes, more emotion than other people. Just seeing folks outside and knowing we don’t have enough resources to provide them, it really puts a fire in me to do more, and as a community, to continue to ask for more collaboration, more services, more support. But also, I think it really emphasizes, for me, the need for folks with lived experience or who are currently experiencing homelessness, because everybody has a different experience – and mine, thankfully, was years ago...
Miller: How much has changed? As you’re saying, yours was years ago. What has changed for homeless families from when you were experiencing that with your family as a kid, and kids and families today?
Wilson: When I was experiencing homelessness as a kid, there were no shelters in Central Oregon for families. They’re still in existence – there were two youth shelters. And thankfully, I ended up accessing youth shelter at 16 and lived there for three years, graduated high school. Then I went on to live in the maternity group home because I was a pregnant teen. But at the time, there were no shelters for families. So my family was sleeping – like a lot of families do, in Central Oregon, that don’t have access to shelter because the family shelters are full – in campgrounds, in a trailer in the Walmart parking lot.
I think what’s changed is that there’s actually some resources to point families to, and then just access to information. I think that people have greater access to information online. Back then, we didn’t. We didn’t have cell phones … People had cell phones, I’m trying not to age myself too much. [Laughs] But people had cell phones. We didn’t have cell phones. We didn’t have access to know what the resources were.
Miller: And so I think it seems like your choice when you were 16 was: be unsheltered with your family or be by yourself in a shelter.
Wilson Yeah, and I think I even had fewer … Before that, I experienced homelessness on my own because I wanted to stay in school. I had this goal. I really wanted to attend high school and finish high school. Previous to that, only my mom had graduated high school. Many of my other family members had not. And that was a big goal for me. I ended up actually camping out near my high school so that I could make it to school, and my counselor knew about that. He referred me to the youth shelter.
Miller: To go back to one of the details from the Point in Time count that stood out to me, it says that two-thirds of respondents have experienced homelessness for a year or longer. If I understood that correctly, my mind went to the other third. And I took that to mean that one-third of people in this year’s count were newly homeless, just in the last year. What are you doing in Central Oregon to prevent people, right now, from becoming homeless in the first place?
Wilson: That’s a really important thing to look at in communities. It’s really unfortunate in Oregon – we have had some budget cuts. I can say that we are doing less than we did last year because we previously had some access to prevention dollars around evictions, and we don’t have that anymore. So we do expect that the inflow to increase, as long as the legislator doesn’t allocate money to prevention. We had a really robust system before to kind of prevent folks.
It’s true. We were able to prevent a lot of the inflow. And I think that’s a good point in just looking at the system overall, a lot of people just look at the Point in Time count data. But people go into homelessness every day in communities and then folks leave. It’s the inflow and outflow, and understanding how that happens and how we can step in. So prevention is a big one: the eviction prevention.
Miller: And just briefly, I mentioned at the beginning that you work for an affordable housing nonprofit. How many new affordable housing units have actually been coming online in Bend or in Central Oregon more broadly?
Wilson: Central Oregon is number one – this is a good thing that we’re number one in – in housing development in the state. We, like I said, have been under-resourced for housing development, and we’ve been very proactive. The local jurisdictions, and then providers, like RootedHomes, Habitat, Thistle & Nest, and others like our local housing authority, have been building as much as we can get funding for. So a lot of units have come online. That also contributes to the count and folks being able to be stably housed.
That is something that’s a huge initiative locally, to continue to build and figure out new innovative ways to bring housing on the market.
Miller: Eliza Wilson, thanks very much.
Wilson: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: Eliza Wilson is the chair of the Homeless Leadership Coalition in Central Oregon and the executive director of RootedHomes. That’s an affordable housing developer based in Bend.
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