All hell broke loose in Polk County three years ago.
“The homeless” were coming — no doubt bringing drugs, crime, insanity and general unsightliness to the rural county some 60 miles south of Portland. Organizers of Salem’s nonprofit Church at the Park were looking at opening shelters in both Dallas and Monmouth.
Cue the clutching of pearls.
“They’re going to network,” Chad Basaraba warned a packed meeting of the Dallas City Council May 5, 2023. “All of them have cellphones. They almost have, like, a union. They can get together and tell what the buzzwords are going to be, and they’re going to be in those shelters like nobody’s business.”
And frightened townsfolk knew who the homeless would come for first.
“All too many times, from what you read, the targets for homeless people are young people and old people,” Thomas Farrell told an equally packed Monmouth City Council meeting June 6, 2023.
‘It’s so peaceful’
Three years later, Polk County residents young and old sleep safely in their beds. Both shelters are up and running, and all is quiet.
Maybe a little too quiet for Jess Widness, one of the dreaded “homeless” who Basaraba and many others feared would besmirch Dallas’ Norman Rockwell exterior. Widness lives in a house used to shelter two families on the outskirts of town.
“It’s so peaceful,” she said of the city of 18,000 people. “It can be a little eerie at times because it’s so quiet. When I first got here, it was super scary just because it’s super quiet out there. At first, I was scared to walk out of the house when it was dark. One time I opened the door, and there were deer right outside.”
The deer, however, were friendly. And so were the neighbors.
Widness said she hasn’t encountered any of the negativity expressed at the council meetings. Her neighbors across the street posted yard signs against the shelter but flipped them over when she and her 9-year-old son arrived.
“They actually came over and introduced themselves when I first came in,” Widness said.
Other neighbors across the street still have anti-shelter signs in their yard. One of the neighbors, who refused to give her name, said she has no problem with the two families who live in the shelter. Even so, she said, she still doesn’t want homeless people living in Dallas.
‘Back to the drawing board’
Of course, homeless people already live in Dallas. They just live without shelter. According to the 2023 count conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, some 100 people live without shelter in Dallas and the surrounding rural Polk County area.
Church at the Park bought the 1,600-square-foot Dallas home on Southeast Holman Avenue in 2023 for $317,500. Initial plans called for placing five trailers, including four microshelters, on the 0.76-acre property.
Dallas officials tried to stop shelter plans in their tracks three years ago. They required Church at the Park to widen the street, add sidewalks and make other improvements. D.J. Vincent, executive director for Church at the Park, told Street Roots those requirements would have cost up to $2 million.
Vincent said city officials’ decision was clearly a chess move, but Church at the Park didn’t want to play games.
“We questioned whether or not we should take it to court,” he said. “All the counsel we got from the state was that they didn’t like that idea. They wouldn’t like the big ol’ state coming in and forcing a city to do things and litigating against them. That would be a bad look.”
Instead, the nonprofit retreated and regrouped.
“We had to go back to the drawing board and do a house modification where we could serve some families,” Vincent said.
The group opted to renovate the house to provide shelters for two families with up to 12 beds at a time. That seemed to satisfy City Hall.
“The shelter project, in its infancy, raised considerable community input,” Dallas City Manager Brian Latta told Street Roots. “Church at the Park ultimately revised their plans and have renovated the existing home into a shelter that fits well with the surrounding neighborhood and the community.”
The multimillion-dollar street improvements are no longer necessary, Latta added.
“The applicant’s revised plans resulted in less impact, which meant less need for public improvements,” he said.
‘The law worked well’
The Dallas shelter opened in February last year. Meanwhile, another shelter 13 miles away in Monmouth (which opened in July last year) has been an entirely different drama.
Monmouth seemed an unlikely center of controversy. The town of 11,000 people is the home of Western Oregon University and is often considered a pocket of liberal progressivism in rural Polk County.
Board members at Christ’s Church in the community floated the idea of donating a half-acre of land to Church at the Park to build a shelter in March 2023. The idea quickly sank as townsfolk began picketing Sunday services. By May, before any formal proposal was drafted, the church’s board decided to drop the whole idea.
It was picked up by the landlord of a 6,000-square-foot building on Stadium Drive used until 2022 by the English Language & Culture Institute. The owner offered it to Church at the Park in late 2024. The building has been renovated to provide 10 bedrooms and four bathrooms to shelter 20 people. The building also includes a break room, reception room, kitchen and laundry room.
Shelter operators cut through local red tape by evoking the “super-siting” provisions of House Bill 3395 passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2023. Emergency shelters under the law are not required to comply with local land-use laws.
Suzanne Dufner, the head of the city’s Community and Economic Development Department, told Street Roots she thought the law worked well.
“It allowed everyone that wanted to review and comment on the application the opportunity to do so in writing before the decision was made,” Dufner said.
However, she said there is room for improvement with House Bill 3395.
Dufner said city officials want to review the facility annually and revoke their approval if the shelter falls short of its promises.
“There’s also no discussion in the bill about a process for modifying approvals and a change in shelter operators in the future,” she said.
‘Everyone is scared’
The new Monmouth shelter received none of the backlash the first proposal generated. Vincent said that’s because he learned his lesson. Shelter organizers met with small groups of no more than 20 supporters and critics, building consensus practically one living room at a time.
Vincent said he wishes they had done that the first time around.
“We would have met with every little community group and neighborhood group that wanted to meet in Monmouth,” he said. “We would have just shown up and never done the two big town hall meetings we did because those meetings were just explosive. They made it seem like the community was out against the shelter. Yes, there were 200 people at each of those. However, that’s not the whole community, and it creates a kind of mob mentality.”
Lisette Zamora, the shelter manager in Monmouth, said the process was much smoother the second time around. “It was a little more, for lack of a better word, palatable for people,” she told Street Roots. “They could more easily process in those smaller settings with a little bit of information at a time.”
Zamora said she doesn’t resent the critics of the shelter.
“It was shocking to see the NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) attitude and all of that around here, but to move forward with what I do every day, I have to have sympathy and empathy for those people as well,” she said. “We’re all living in these uncertain times. Everyone is scared. Nobody wants to give an inch.”
Matt Smucker, the chaplain at the Monmouth shelter, said he likes to think Church at the Park has earned local residents’ trust at this point.
“Everyone who has taken a tour of the site so far has been very impressed,” Smucker told Street Roots. “There are a lot of ideas of what a shelter is, what a shelter looks like and how shelters are run. We do things a little different from that common conception.”
Alyson Roberson, Dallas’ communications specialist, said there have been no police calls to the Dallas shelter this year. Lt. Matt Olefson, the public information officer for the Monmouth Police Department, said there have been six calls for service at the shelter’s address this year.
One was reporting an emotionally disturbed person Jan. 1. Another reported harassment Jan. 3. The rest have been minor traffic-related incidents except for one call where the person hung up.
‘It’s been pretty amazing’
All this is news to Vincent. He said he hasn’t heard of any major disturbances at either the Dallas or Monmouth sites.
“I haven’t heard a thing,” he said. “I haven’t gotten a complaint email. I haven’t had to do a meeting with a neighbor who has been disgruntled. It’s been pretty amazing. In the time those shelters have been open, we haven’t had neighborhood complaints.”
Maybe it’s not all that amazing. Vincent said Church at the Park traditionally deals with upset neighbors, only to have things simmer down almost immediately after people move into shelter.
“There has never been a neighborhood that has said, ‘Please come here,’” Vincent told Street Roots in 2023. “We do a lot of education. Once a shelter is active, we do weekly tours. A lot of neighbors come and see what is actually happening on the property. They sign up for our updates, and we hear good outcomes. Most resistance literally dissipates.”
Part of winning the communities over in Dallas and Monmouth meant assuring people that only “locals” would get shelter. Many critics couldn’t countenance the idea of people from outside the county getting a bed with a roof.
Zamora said shelter residents have to be local, but the definition of “local” is pliable.
“That could be: they have children who go to school here, they had a job here, they have family living here, etc.,” she said.
Church at the Park often changes people’s minds about what unsheltered homelessness means, she added.
“Some people have this hyper-individualized attitude that people experiencing unsheltered homelessness didn’t pull themselves up high enough with their own bootstraps,” she said. “We constantly have to combat this idea that a person needs to work to earn their living, to deserve a place to eat, to have a place to be.”
‘It’s nice to have a mandate’
Despite the name of the nonprofit, Zamora said Church at the Park is not explicitly religious. “We’re offering you shelter because you need shelter, not because you need Jesus.”
Church at the Park started in Salem in 2007 to connect people with shelter resources. For 11 years, it has been offering warming centers. When the pandemic hit, the organization built its first shelter in 2020 and its second in 2021. Its third Salem shelter opened in 2023.
The process of opening a new shelter usually follows a similar pattern, Vincent said.
“The reality is there’s all this concern when you’re going to put something in, and once it’s actually operating, those concerns never materialize.”
Church at the Park eyed Polk County in the first place because Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and state lawmakers flagged a need for more shelters in rural areas in 2023 and backed it up with $200 million. The Salem nonprofit came with $2.58 million of that money.
“It’s nice to have a mandate — whether it’s from the city, county or state,” Vincent said. “With the federal environments of cuts and more cuts and pullback, we’re not getting those kinds of mandates, so we’ve been working a lot harder on projects that take more time like housing.”
‘Real people, fully engaging’
Vincent said he doesn’t know where the next shelter will be.
“I do know it will encounter resistance, and it does take a lot of upfront funds and continued operational support,” he said. “Unless there’s a government behind it, it’s hard to push that at the local nonprofit level.”
In the meantime, he and the rest of the 100 or so people who work at Church at the Park (many of whom have experienced mental health challenges, unsheltered homelessness and similar situations themselves) have a mission to pursue with their existing shelters.
One of those staffers is peer support counselor Ruth Krueger.
“As a peer, I’m someone who has some lived experience similar to theirs,” Krueger said. “I have had my own struggles with mental health, and I have a lot of experience and education in the field. Those who struggle, and many do, come to me off the street with PTSD. I can relate to their experiences, and though I’m not a mental health counselor, I can help them.”
Helping people sums up Church at the Park, Vincent said.
“Our mantra is, ‘Help people feel safe, seen and supported,’” he said. “They’re in the spot they’re in usually because of a series of broken relationships and trauma with people and systems. We literally have to put healthy people in their pathway all the time. It takes real people, fully engaging.”
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This article appears in February 3, 2026.