Challenging the idyllic image of Corvallis are the more than 500 people experiencing homelessness in Benton County

Paradise.

Corvallis City Council President Paul Shaffer gushed as he spoke at the groundbreaking of an $84 million hotel and residential complex May 29.

Paradise.

Corvallis is no less than that, Shaffer told the crowd as they enjoyed their refreshments. Such luxury developments will only make it more so, he said.

Just across the street from the construction site, a woman wrapped in a blanket huddled against the wall of the Corvallis Post Office. For her, and the more than 500 people experiencing homelessness in Benton County, Corvallis is perhaps a paradise lost.

‘Let’s just say it. They’re snobs.’

Ask Donna. She has lived in Corvallis her entire life and has spent most of it camping wherever she can until men with guns, clubs and authority tell her she has to move on.

“Corvallis is a snob town,” she told Street Roots. “Let’s just say it. They’re snobs. We’re neighbors. Just because we live in tents doesn’t mean we aren’t neighbors. We’re not different from anyone else.”

Corvallis, like so many Oregon cities that market themselves as picturesque, is perpetually a tale of two cities. The city of 60,000 people is 80 miles south of Portland and home to Oregon State University.

On the surface, it may appear to be the paradise its city council president described.

Yes, there are the college students struggling through their salad days. Yet it remains a progressive college town with enough upper middle-class and affluent residents to keep it in wine and cheese.

Lurking below the posh floorboards, however, is an imbalance in supply and demand in the rental market that makes Corvallis the most rent-burdened city in Oregon.

And while hundreds of unsheltered people may seem small compared with the thousands in the Portland metro area, Corvallis has limited shelter beds and other resources.

Homeless residents there are usually dependent on the kindness of strangers — and churches.

‘We don’t have the structure’

Unity Shelter offers 100 beds for both men and women. Community Outreach Inc. provides shelter for veterans and families, but it has higher barriers and fewer beds than Unity.

“We don’t have the structure that other cities have, like Eugene where St. Vincent DePaul provides housing,” said the Rev. Jennifer Butler of the First Congregational United Church of Christ Corvallis.

Butler serves on the board of Unity Shelter and also started 31 microshelters (roughly 18-by-15-foot dwellings) through her church.

“I enjoy the fact that the sheltering services we have in Corvallis and the organizations that exist to counter extreme poverty are sort of home-grown entities,” Butler told Street Roots.

“We can provide some better service and real connection — people-centered focus — to the human beings in front of us rather than picking up a blueprint from some other place and placing it over the unique individuals we have here,” she said.

However, home-grown services pose unique challenges.

“We have to figure out how to raise funds,” Butler said. “How to get money when we don’t have a very large organizational structure supporting us.”

Eugene has the highest per capita rate of unsheltered homelessness in Oregon, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. At least 2,000 people are reportedly experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Lane County.

HUD numbers are traditionally low because of the difficulty of getting an accurate headcount of people living outside.

Butler said she envies Eugene just a little.

“I’m not sure what it’s like this minute, but the way the city of Eugene has worked with the providers and social service organizations in the city has seemed much more hospitable and generous than it has here,” she said.

‘They’re obstructionists’

Corvallis city officials are friendly enough, said Shawn Collins, executive director of Unity Shelter.

“We get a lot of vocal support and not a lot of votes,” he said. “I’d like to see more creative thinking on the part of the city.”

Corvallis Mayor Charles Maughan has said on the record that the city is not in the shelter business but does what it can to help existing resources.

That’s not much, Butler said.

“My experience with the city is that they have actively blocked efforts to help create change,” she said.

For years, advocates for the local homeless community have sought a place where people can camp undisturbed. In lieu of that, advocates pushed for a rolling moratorium in 2022.

People could camp in one spot for a set amount of time before moving to another. In theory, they would then know where and when they’re moving.

“Let’s stop shuffling people around in this constant, chronic cycle that we spend a lot of taxpayer money to do and do what other communities have done — identify places where people can stay for longer periods of time and have wraparound services,” Butler said.

Every service provider and the county was in agreement.

“It was the city that decided no, that they wouldn’t allow that to move forward,” she said.

The city attorney nixed the idea, arguing the city couldn’t afford the insurance.

“That’s one way I’ve seen the city shut down services time and time again,” Butler said. “I think they’re more savvy about how they’re doing it now, but they’re obstructionists.”

‘There’s no spot for us.’

Local police and public works employees also spend a great deal of time rousting people from their tents and sweeping camps, Butler said.

“A lot of the folks I talk with at public works say that’s not the job they signed up to do,” she said.

“And not only is it frustrating for them to do the job they didn’t sign up to do, then they have no education or training on how to interact with a population that is often very desperate and on the verge of so many things,” she added.

Donna said she knows all about sweeps.

“We get a lot of sweeps, a lot of sweeps,” she said. “They did one here just about two weeks ago. There were only four of us in the trees right here. There’s no spot for us. It’s illegal for us to camp. We have to pack up our stuff. We’re supposed to gather up all of our stuff every morning and pack it around with us and then put our stuff down at night. Then we have to do it all over again the next day.”

Donna spends much of her time camping on property owned by the Oregon Department of Transportation rather than the city. That buys her time.

“ODOT came in, like, two weeks ago and said we had 30 to 90 days — provided that people keep this area clean,” she said. “I’ve been coming here to this spot for years. This is like sanctuary for me.”

‘From $1,200 to outrageous’

Donna said she has a housing voucher, for all the good it does her.

“The rent is too high, anywhere from $1,200 to outrageous,” she said. “No one out here can afford that. Some of us are on disability. I only get like $900 a month.”

Corvallis city officials often pride themselves on their efforts to increase the stock of affordable housing in the community.

“Within the last two years, Corvallis has created more than 350 units of affordable rental housing,” read an April 23 press release. “New affordable rentals in the pre-development pipeline are expected to add more than 250 new units on top of that in the coming years.”

City officials said the construction can be traced to creating additional high-density residential zones, financial incentives and regulatory reforms.

The hype falls short of reality, said Kasey Haxton of Corvallis’ Housing is a Human Right campaign.

Haxton told city councilors Oct. 6 that he took a closer look at rents in so-called affordable housing projects.

The latest such development, Union at Pacific Highway, opened in South Corvallis this spring with 174 units. The cheapest rent is $1,100. The highest income a resident can have is $45,400 per year for a single individual.

That means roughly $2,900 in monthly take-home pay with 40% of the person’s income spent on rent.

That’s just the lowest rent with the highest income, Haxton told councilors. “Most people who live there, there is no income minimum,” he said. “They’re paying a lot more of their take-home pay.”

Affordable housing in Corvallis is not a dream, said Haxton, especially when city officials are already contemplating $200 million for a new City Hall and police headquarters.

“All we need is a city council with the political will to do it, to build public housing as much as they have the political will to put up a new police station and City Hall,” he said.

‘There you are with men’

Meanwhile, Unity Shelter is hurting. Thanks to money from Oregon Housing and Community Services filtered through Benton County, the shelter has enough money to operate. For now.

“Ostensibly, it’s for 12 months of funding,” Collins said. “Realistically, it’s about seven months of funding at the rate we were spending for the first half of the year.”

Unity usually offers 100 beds for men and 100 beds for women in separate shelters. Financial problems led to the closing of the men’s shelter this summer. The shelter now offers 50 beds for men and 50 beds for women in what used to be the shelter exclusively for women.

“We have to figure out how to close what is essentially a $600,000 gap,” Collins said. “This is going to involve some cost-cutting and hopefully replacing some staff shifts with volunteer shifts. The alternative is to end up doing another shutdown or going back to a co-ed shelter with fewer beds.”

Donna said she hates the idea of men and women sharing a shelter.

“If someone’s in trouble and you need a safe place to go, there’s no place to go because they have men in the women’s shelter, and there’s a lot of women escaping domestic violence, and there you are with men,” she said.

The men’s shelter will reopen as soon as a construction project is completed to bring the 58-year-old building, originally a tire warehouse, up to code with more toilets and showers, as well as a new roof.

Assuming good weather, the men’s shelter could reopen next month.

‘Take a breath and spread out’

Aside from Unity Shelter, another place people can turn is the Corvallis Daytime Drop-In Center on Southwest Fourth Street.

The center started as a nonprofit called Circle of Hope in 2001. It was a peer-to-peer nonprofit designed for people with psychiatric disabilities. It evolved into the Corvallis Daytime Drop-In Center in 2012.

“In the spirit of the original mission, we’re continuing to be a person-centered, human-to-human support network,” Executive Director Allison Hobgood told Street Roots. “How do we show up for each other in the world, help each other and witness each other in our struggles and successes?”

The center offers a one-stop gateway to local addiction services, housing resources and harm reduction.

“Basically, we believe that we should all see one another, value one another, and make life a little easier for one another,” Hobgood said.

The center just moved this month across the street from its original location to an empty business complex.

“You can just see people take a breath and spread out,” Hobgood said. “We have just a little more space to move. We have more windows and light.”

The private nonprofit draws on a diverse portfolio of state and federal funding as well as private grants.

“Local governance structures are what they are, and it’s a pretty unique and challenging place to try to get distinct systemic support,” Hobgood said.

The Drop-In Center’s most vital role might be simply giving people a place to spend the day.

“The federal administration is making it Herculean difficult and worse for people every day,” Hobgood said. “We’ve just been trying to be really present because there are so many unknowns. We feel safe, but how safe can anyone feel in a tumultuous time?

“Especially in a time when like this, under a Trump administration, what we can do is triple down on caring for one another. That’s been our plan — to continue to show up.”

‘It’s the same small handful of people’

Another local success story revolves around the microshelters Butler started through her church in 2019. Of the 31 microshelters, six are located at the church.

The program started when Benton County sheriff’s deputies cleared people out of the neighboring property following complaints.

People moved to the church property, and Butler received a midnight call from deputies.

“They assumed the church wouldn’t want people sleeping on the property,” she said.

They assumed incorrectly.

When Butler began welcoming people, nearby residents complained. She received warnings from city and county law enforcement. Police told her the church was violating Corvallis code. Another incorrect assumption.

“We were in the county at the time, and the county didn’t have any kind of ordinance around camping,” she said.

“Because of how contentious that was with the neighbors, and I didn’t know enough to back down, I just kept telling the city and the county that I was just going to keep doing what I was doing,” she added.

Neighborhood complaints never really bother her, Butler said.

“When you get to the nitty-gritty, and you actually find out who is really raising the ruckus, and who is really resisting, writing the letters to the city or applying pressure, it’s the same small handful of people over and over again,” she said.

‘They treat us like shit’

Donna said she never feels welcome, even in her hometown.

“They treat us like shit, they really do,” she said. “The police do, the city does, all the way around. We can’t cut a break. Where are we to go? I want to know where the hell we go.”

The way Corvallis often treats its homeless residents makes things worse, Butler said.

The sweeps are dehumanizing, she said, even for the people who enforce them.

“I think those workers shut down, almost because they have to, their sense of compassion and humanity when they have to do something so dehumanizing to people over and over again,” Butler said.

“I’ve been out in Corvallis over the past six years,” she said. “I’ve visited camps where folks live almost every week. I’ve been on the ground when public works or ODOT or the railroad is sweeping and clearing properties. It is a terrifying and traumatizing experience to have bulldozers coming at humans.”

Donna said she can’t understand why the bulldozers are coming. “We’re people too. We have rights too. But it seems like we don’t have rights.”

‘Breakdown of the human soul’

In many ways, Butler said, Corvallis is no different than the rest of America.

“I’m a preacher, so I think a lot about the breakdown of the human soul,” she said. “Somewhere along the way, with capitalism and liberal capitalism and the focus of the self and autonomy, we have broken our soulful sense of what it means to be in a community and take care of each other.”

Everyone just needs to stick together, Hobgood said.

“When the apocalypse comes, we’ll plug in a generator and figure out how to grow some vegetables.”

Correction: Due to a technological error on Street Roots’ part, Corvallis city officials did not receive emails from a Street Roots reporter for this story, as originally reported. Street Roots regrets this error.

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This article appears in October 15, 2025.