New leader of Multnomah County Homeless Services Department on heading up the agency

The Multnomah County Homeless Services Department was first established in 2016 as the Joint Office of Homeless Services — an office overseeing services provided to people experiencing homelessness in Portland and Multnomah County. The agency faced turnover as it transitioned from a joint office to a formal county department in 2024, and its newest leader, appointed in April, is Nathaniel VerGow, who comes from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

VerGow begins his new position following Portland Mayor Keith Wilson’s campaign promises to end unsheltered homelessness in Portland, which have raised questions about what goals can be realistic for the city and what services do the most good. He’s also heading up the agency as it faces a $67 million funding gap. VerGow says the agency has the current job of learning how to “do as much if not more with less,” as the department adjusts to its new fiscal norm.

We’ll hear from VerGow about his plans for the agency, and how his work with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority can inform his new role with Multnomah County.

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

Geoff Norcross: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB this is Think Out Loud. I’m Geoff Norcross. Multnomah County’s Homeless Services Department is dealing with a lot right now. Homelessness in Oregon’s largest county appears to be going up, while the budget for dealing with it is going down. It’s also an election year, and homelessness will undoubtedly play into the governor’s race in Oregon again. This is the environment that Nathaniel VerGow is stepping into. He is Multnomah County’s new Homeless Services Department director, and he joins us now. Nathaniel, welcome to Think Out Loud. Good to have you.

Nathaniel VerGow: Thank you for having me.

Norcross: You’ve been on the job for three months now. Any surprises?

VerGow: No, no large surprises. I think, as I shared with you outside the studio this morning, it’s been like drinking water from a high pressure garden hose, but I pretty much expected that.

Norcross: What’s different from Los Angeles that you can see immediately?

VerGow: Much of what I see is actually very similar. The circumstances that we’re facing here in Multnomah County are similar to communities across the country right now, with budgets being slashed. We’re all facing the end of the COVID era funding and the bubble that that created, with one-time funding that both required homeless services to pivot what they were doing in terms of emergency response and life saving activities, rather than just a rehousing system. But it also created a lot of opportunities for growth in what we’re able to do. But that bubble has popped, and so we are on the downside of that. And nationally we’re seeing challenges with economies across the country, especially local governments, and so what we’re seeing here is not unique.

Norcross: Do you anticipate a time when we might see a federal infusion, federal support like we had during the pandemic?

VerGow: Unfortunately, I don’t see that in my crystal ball when I look in, but I’m certainly hopeful for it, and I think it’s important, one of the things I’ve been trying to say in every interview is how important it is for the listeners out there to be involved and to be advocating with their elected officials, because funding for homeless services as well as all of the upstream things that impact homelessness are essential. And we’re seeing budgets for education, for healthcare – all the things that impact homelessness in the end – being slashed, and as a result homelessness will, if we continue to cut, especially, the impact is that homelessness will rise.

Norcross: Your appointment was not unanimous. It was 3-2 in your favor. Do you feel like you have some convincing of the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners that you have to do?

VerGow: I think in a role like mine, there’s always convincing to do. Even if I had been approved unanimously, I would need to convince them on an ongoing basis that what I’m doing is adding value to the county, and most importantly, I think right now, is ensuring that the voters understand what we’re doing and the value of what we’re doing.

We’re approaching the potential renewal of the Supportive Housing Services tax, which, as your listeners will know is a tax on high income earners in the county that goes directly to pay for services and housing. That will expire in 2030, and without the renewal of that we’re gonna be in a lot of trouble, so one of my key goals initially is focusing on accountability and being able to show the public what they’re getting for those tax dollars and the essential nature of those funds.

Norcross: I’m glad you mentioned the Supportive Housing tax because you had something similar in Los Angeles. It was a 0.5% sales tax in the county and it funded things like affordable housing construction and services to support those who are experiencing homelessness, and I’m wondering about your experience with working with that tax in L.A. and what lessons you can take with you on operating with something similar here?

VerGow: Well, I think one important difference that’s important for listeners to understand is that the tax in L.A. was a sales tax and it was paid for by every citizen who bought anything in the county. Here the Supportive Housing Services tax, as I said, is a tax on high income earners and so it’s not impacting every resident of the county.

Norcross: We just don’t do sales tax here, you may have noticed.

VerGow: Absolutely, and I appreciate that. However, it’s not regressive in that fact and it’s not actually impacting every resident of the county, just the high income earners, so it’s not gonna be felt by everybody. In terms of the lessons learned, I think it’s important to have that base revenue locally that allows for flexibility that’s not part of federal funding. There are a lot of restrictions on how federal funding can be used, and unfortunately right now there’s also a lot of uncertainty of federal funding as well as state funding, so having a durable revenue source locally to provide a base from which to work is really important. It’s very challenging to plan large systems like homelessness response with one-time dollars that you’re not sure will be there the following year. So setting budgets for programs becomes exceptionally challenging when you’re doing that year-to-year with potential significant variants.

Norcross: And you’re operating at a deficit right now. I think the last number I saw was a $67 million hole? Is that the latest number? Do I have that right?

VerGow: We’re not operating at a deficit. We actually received a cut of roughly $67 million, so we are having to reduce services.

Norcross: OK, what services are you going to reduce?

VerGow: Through a lengthy community budget process, the county as a whole came to a conclusion that the greatest value had to be placed on keeping people housed, folks that had been housed through the services here in the county, ensuring that they would be able to maintain that housing rather than being forced to return potentially to the streets or to shelters. So in the end, the largest cuts are happening at the shelter system, and that is informing a lot of the work that we need to do, which is focusing on ensuring that folks flowing through our system can do so as quickly as possible, because the less time that somebody has to spend in a shelter bed on their path to permanent housing, the more people can be served by each shelter bed.

Norcross: It’s interesting, because California and Oregon are both in the 9th U.S. Circuit, which for a long time operated under a federal ruling that said you can’t enforce anti-camping ordinances if you don’t provide enough shelter beds, and the Supreme Court effectively overturned that ruling a couple of years ago. But even with the cuts to shelters that you just laid out for me, do you still operate with that as a guiding principle? You just have to have shelter space.

VerGow: Shelter is an essential part of the homelessness response system. I would be negligent to say otherwise. The impacts of unsheltered homelessness are vast, on people’s health, on their mental health, and just, I forget exactly what the statistic is, but the life expectancy of somebody who’s experienced unsheltered homelessness is dramatically lower than those who’ve never experienced that.

And so, yes, shelter is an integral part of the response system. However, we don’t want to necessarily make all of our investments just in shelter. In New York City, for example, because New York has a right to shelter within the state Constitution, the vast majority of their budget goes to shelter, leaving it exceptionally challenging there to actually pay for folks to access permanent housing, so folks end up in shelter for much longer stays, which also is not particularly healthy.

Norcross: We asked people, Nathaniel, on Facebook, how they think Multnomah County should prioritize homeless services, and we got – as you might expect – a lot of comments. Finkbiner Donald said, “Psychological triage, then housing first. I’m a fairly sane non-drug addict who is homeless, and if I had that option almost two years ago, I would still have a home now.”

We had a number of comments that fell along those lines, and they point to housing first, just as a basic fundamental thing that you should provide as a priority. What is your feeling about that?

VerGow: I agree with that absolutely.

Norcross: Permanent housing, I mean complete permanent housing that people can live in forever.

VerGow: Yes, there’s a significant amount of stability that folks find as soon as they have a roof over their head and a door that they can lock and where they can feel safe and secure and know that it’s not gonna be taken away from them tomorrow. So, yes, that is essential, but housing is not the only piece of that. There have to be services that accompany folks in housing as they move, either directly from the streets or through the shelter system, and those services need to be tailored to the individual.

We’re doing a lot of work right now at the county, trying to integrate the services of mental health and substance use treatment better into our homelessness response. Part of the challenge with that is, quite frankly, the health system in Oregon and the availability of those resources. But we’re working collaboratively with Health Share and other organizations, including our county departments, to better integrate services at all points of the shelter system, of the homelessness response system.

Norcross: Mayor Keith Wilson campaigned on ending unsheltered homelessness in Portland. You’ve been working closely with these systems in L.A. County for almost a decade, and now here in Portland, here you are. Do you view that goal as realistic?

VerGow: Absolutely. We saw through the investments in veteran homelessness that, if you make priority investments and as a community, as a society, you deem valuable the people that you’re gonna be serving with those resources, and therefore provide real pathways into permanent housing, you can have a dramatic impact. So absolutely, if we as a community, if we as a state, if we as a country, decided that we could no longer tolerate having our fellow citizens experience unsheltered homelessness, we could end it.

The federal government just found significant amounts of money to ensure that there’s housing for the National Guard in D.C., and they’re putting billions on the table for the war in Iran. If we took those billions and invested them in an appropriate housing market that balanced affordable housing, we absolutely could end homelessness.

Norcross: It’s an election year. The homelessness problem will supercharge the state races. What is your sense of how committed Oregon’s elected leaders are to helping you in your role?

VerGow: I’m still learning that, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been on the job for three months and really been focused locally, and ensuring that I get to meet the folks who are operating the programs here, and ensuring that I understand how the system here in Multnomah County works. So I’ve not spent enough time yet, time, really learning our state electeds and their priorities. I think my experience is similar to my experience in California. It’s always exceptionally challenging balance to work through what the investments, particularly in housing and homelessness, are gonna be, versus other issues that also impact housing and homelessness.

Norcross: Another comment on Facebook on how Multnomah County should prioritize homeless services, Carrie Sisson said, “They need to be willing to go into recovery programs with education programs that give them the tools to become self-reliant. You can throw endless amounts of money into housing, but if they are not clean, sober, and mentally fit to handle the responsibility, it is pointless.”

Nathaniel, you spoke very clearly about the need for housing, but how about the commitment of your office to those recovery programs that Carrie mentioned?

VerGow: Well, as I also just mentioned with Housing First, to do it appropriately, you have to include services. It’s actually been shown through data over the years that setting barriers to housing of requiring sobriety or medication compliance just extends somebody’s experience of homelessness. But I do think that it is essential to ensure that the access to treatment resources are available and integrated into the experience of service provision at housing programs.

Norcross: What are some realistic expectations that Portlanders and residents of Multnomah County can have for the work from your office for the next few years?

VerGow: Well, I’ve been telling everybody that my focus initially is on accountability, and that is on a multi-pronged approach. It is that we as a department have to be accountable to our service providers, that we can get contracts out to them in a timely fashion, that we can work collaboratively with them to address any issues that they’re having, both in terms of service provision as well as how they’re managing their contracts, and that we’re providing appropriate technical assistance and training. We need to ensure that we are holding our providers accountable to being appropriate stewards of public funding, that they are providing services most efficiently and effectively as possible, and that collectively, we as the system are accountable to our elected officials and the general public.

As I said, as we move towards the SHS potential renewal, we need to be able to show the public that the work is happening, that it’s having an impact, even though, and I acknowledge this myself, it’s hard to understand that on a day-to-day basis when you continue to see encampments at the end of your block or off the side of the MAX train as you’re commuting to work. It’s hard to understand that work is happening and that progress is being made when homelessness is still visible, but we’ve housed tens of thousands of folks, and that work is continuing.

Norcross: Tens of thousands of folks since when?

VerGow: Let me make sure I’m not getting the data wrong, but under the support of housing services funding, 10,468 households have been placed into housing regionwide, through SHS funding, and more than 21,000 households have been prevented from experiencing homelessness.

Norcross: OK, thank you for those numbers. I have some more for you. The recent data that we have is Multnomah County reported 10,500 people experiencing homelessness in January of 2025. That’s a 43% increase from the previous January. There are questions about how we count the homeless population, and we can get into that, but let’s for the moment assume that that’s accurate. Is the data surprising?

VerGow: No, it is not surprising. As I said, we’re seeing rents over the last ten years have skyrocketed, incomes have not kept pace. We’re seeing an economy where being able to afford basics like food are becoming harder and harder for everybody, where gas is astronomical and so commuting to work becomes challenging. So with constant pressures on folks, especially at the lower end of the economic spectrum, no, I’m not surprised to see that folks are struggling and are eventually falling into homelessness.

Norcross: There’s been a lot of turnover in the county department, and it’s a department in transition, because there used to be a joint office between the county and the city. What do you see as your barriers, or your challenges, I should say, in leading a new department that’s really in a state of flux right now?

VerGow: I think that’s one of my primary goals is to actually be here, and be here for an extended period to be able to provide that stability. It’s hard for any organization, especially going through the growth that the organization has gone through financially with the SHS funding, as well as the COVID funding, and have significant changes in leadership and even the placement of the work – moving from the city to the joint office to becoming a county department. That much transition without executive leadership that is consistent makes the work exceptionally challenging.

So, A, I plan to be here for an extended period to provide that stability, B, I think, again, the focus on accountability is essential. With budgets shrinking, we are going to have to figure out how to do more with less, so being able to account for how we’re spending every dollar is gonna be essential to ensure that we are maximizing the use of every penny that we have. I think we’re gonna have to get creative and scrappy in the way that we look at providing services, so that we, again, are doing everything in our power to meet folks where they are, in their encampments, on the street corners, in our shelters, and that we are moving them as quickly as possible into housing and ensuring that they have the services that they need to be successful in that housing.

Norcross: Is there a community anywhere, either in the country or in the world, that you feel is doing it right, is balancing the services that are necessary, the permanent housing that is needed, and the very real concerns about budgets?

VerGow: Yeah, Finland has really, from a national standpoint, taken on Housing First as their approach, and has seen homelessness drop dramatically, and so I think there’s a lot that could be learned there. We’ve seen some communities across the country get to functional zero around chronic homelessness and veteran homelessness. So yes, there are examples across the globe of countries that are addressing homelessness effectively.

Norcross: Are there some benchmarks for success that you would like to hit soon, that you can point to?

VerGow: We are currently working on key performance indicators for the homelessness system through the Regional Policy and Oversight Committee for the Supportive Housing Services tax measure at Metro is a body that is empowered to oversee how we’re implementing the funds across the three counties, so there’s currently discussion about what the key performance indicators should be for how we are measuring the progress of the use of those funds.

Similarly, we have the HRAP – Homelessness Response Action Plan – there’s a steering and oversight committee for that that includes representatives from the city and the county, and they’re doing a similar exercise and we’re trying to make sure that those metrics align so that regardless of funding source we’re working towards the same goals.

And those really are focused on reducing the length of shelter stays, improving the number of folks that we get into shelter who exit to permanent housing as opposed to exiting back to the streets or to unknown destinations because they leave in the middle of the night or leave in the morning and don’t come back. Really wanting to make sure that we have strong engagements with participants so that we keep them engaged in the system and can make sure that they move into permanent housing, and also that once we get folks into housing that we can help them retain that housing.

Norcross: How did you get into this work, and why do you care about it?

VerGow: I blame my parents. I grew up in a house that prided… pride is not the right word, but, inculcated in us the notion that, with every ounce of privilege that one has, one has a responsibility to give back. And while I did not grow up wealthy, my parents were very clear about the privileges that I had relative to other folks in our town and across the globe. And so I learned through the example of my parents that service is important, and that really shaped, as I was going through college and thinking about what I was gonna do, that had a tremendous impact.

And my first real job out of college was working at an AIDS service organization in Boston. My goal had been to focus on reducing the impact of HIV and AIDS and reducing the spread, and this was the mid-’90s, and I ended up working in a program that provided rental assistance to people with HIV, and saw in that how much of an impact housing had on the stability of one’s life. It impacted the clients that we worked with, it impacted how they could access their medical care. At that time, there were a lot of medications that required refrigeration, so if folks were going to lose their housing, they were going to lose their ability to continue their treatment regimens. So housing, it became clear that that was the bedrock for recovery and stability. And as I moved on to work in substance use and mental health treatment, the same thing – housing and homelessness were essential in the recovery process. So for the last 25 years, housing and homelessness has been my focus.

Norcross: Nathaniel, thank you for coming on the show, and best of luck to you in what is going to be a challenging role. I appreciate you taking the time.

VerGow: Thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Norcross: Nathaniel VerGow is the new director of Multnomah County’s Homeless Services Department.

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