FILE - The entrance of the Northrup Shelter, an emergency overnight shelter in Portland, Ore,. pictured Thursday, Nov. 27, 2025.
Saskia Hatvany / OPB
Portland’s largest overnight-only shelter is closing its doors Friday, a year after opening.
Northrup Shelter opened a year ago as a key component of Mayor Keith Wilson’s sweeping plan to curtail homelessness. The 200-bed Pearl District shelter, located at Northwest Northrup Street and Northwest 15th Avenue, was run by the Salvation Army and open 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Wilson announced its pending closure earlier this year as a way to balance the city’s budget.
“The Northrup facility is our highest cost facility,” Wilson said at an April press conference. “And in the kind of cut exercise we’re in, we have to focus on the highest cost parts of our system.”
Since its inception, the 200-bed Pearl District shelter has been a source of frustration for some neighbors, who feared the large shelter would make their community less safe and clean. In March, the owner of an apartment building near the shelter sued the city and Salvation Army, alleging the shelter has diminished their property’s value.
Kim Beeler, a spokesperson for the Salvation Army, said the shelter created “a place of safety” and community for more than 2,700 people in the year it was open.
City spokesperson Laura Rude said that nightly occupancy rates at the shelter had been declining, and that it had seen an average of only 98 guests nightly this month so far.
Beeler and Rude said shelter staff have been updating Northrup regulars about its closure for weeks, and will be stationed outside the building tonight to help people seeking shelter find an alternative place to sleep. But many of those options are also going away.
Northrup is the second overnight-only shelter to shutter this year, following the closure of a Centennial neighborhood shelter in April. Several other city-run shelters have seen the number of beds decline or close altogether this year due to budget shortfalls.
This has hampered Wilson’s campaign promise to swiftly reduce unsheltered homelessness in Portland. That goal began with a mission to open 1,500 new overnight shelter beds by last December. Wilson said he hit that goal, despite many of those beds still being inaccessible at the time.
According to the city’s shelter availability website, the city now operates 530 overnight shelter beds. The city stopped updating much of its online resources and data tracking related to overnight shelters early this year.
Meanwhile, according to Multnomah County data, the number of people living unsheltered in the county has continued to tick upwards.
The need is being felt by other shelter operators. Bethanie’s Room is a privately funded overnight shelter for women and nonbinary people run by the nonprofit Blanchet House and located just three blocks from the Northrup Shelter.
Since opening in February, the shelter’s 70 beds have been nearly full every night. Blanchet House Executive Director Steve Cook said staff have had to turn people away recently. He said he’s worried about this trend, because summer is usually when shelter demand is at its lowest.
“When it’s colder, more people want to move inside,” he said. “But there may not be any space. Especially with Northrup closing, there’s literally nowhere for people to go.”
The city has no immediate plans to open new shelters this year.
