At the edge of Delta Park in North Portland, an old red-and-blue Motel 6 sign still stands over the property, a remnant of its former life as a roadside motel. Today, it is something different: the Delta Park Motel Shelter, a county-funded site where 67 people (and a few pets) live in private rooms with lockable doors, while they work toward permanent housing.
It’s a far cry from Portland Mayor Keith Wilson’s proliferating overnight-only congregate shelters created in an effort to “end unsheltered homelessness” by Dec. 1.
Here, residents have space for their personal items, beds to themselves and on-site case managers helping them move toward more stable jobs and housing. They don’t have to wait in line every night for a spot or leave early every morning with all of their possessions.
It is one of several motel conversions in Multnomah County, and has shown some of the highest success rates in moving individuals from shelters into homes of their own.
The catch? State budget cuts and a lack of buy-in from the city leave its future up in the air.
A different kind of shelter
The Delta Park Motel Shelter opened in June as part of an expanding “suite” of shelter options in Multnomah County, in addition to traditional congregate shelters. This includes family shelters and sleeping pod villages that provide a temporary place to sleep and advertise access to onsite services. These models differ from the more traditional congregate shelter, where residents sleep in a larger room with multiple people, providing less privacy and safety, but more beds.
At Delta Park, as well as the county’s five other motel shelters — Banfield Motel Shelter, Chestnut Tree Inn, Roseway Inn, Rockwood Bridge Shelter and Stark Street Motel Shelter — residents have private rooms, bathrooms and doors they can lock.
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Sunstone Way, a nonprofit organization running low-barrier shelter programs throughout Portland, manages the Delta Park site. As its newest site, Delta Park became one of Sunstone Way’s most successful operations, housing more participants in its first three months than some larger congregate shelters managed in a year.
“We’ve been really successful,” Mike Fields, Delta Park team lead, said. “We have an amazing team at Delta Park.”
While the numbers for the fiscal year are not publicly available yet, Fields said Delta Park is Sunstone Way’s most successful site this year, as far as housing numbers are concerned.
Despite such success, motel shelters, along with the region’s broader homelessness response, remain complicated by fragmented funding and responsibilities. Within this, funding and management responsibilities for homeless shelters in the region are divided among the city of Portland, Multnomah County, the state, and the regional government, Metro, which oversees the Supportive Housing Services measure that funds much of the county’s shelter and housing system.
While the city and county share responsibilities for homeless services, Multnomah County has traditionally overseen most shelter operations and employed more outreach staff, evident in the 100+ positions currently in place, compared to the city’s 14 outreach positions funded in the 2025-26 fiscal year budget. Until about 2022, the city did not consistently run shelters, though it funded some services.
Both governments administer different forms of rental assistance programs, including vouchers, direct cash support and subsidized housing to varying degrees, but the city has increasingly focused its investments on housing developments affordable to average-income renters and has sharply reduced its spending on programs that house low-income people and homeless Portlanders.
While the county is expanding a model that consistently moves people into permanent housing, the city is cutting from the very programs that make those exits possible, and instead, funding sweeps and high-turnover alternatives.
The contrast between city and county approaches is stark. Since 2019, the city has reduced its spending on programs that directly house homeless Portlanders by 75%, from about $20 million in 2020 to $5 million this year.
“The city does not operate motel shelters, and there are no plans to add them,” Robert Layne II, a Portland Solutions office spokesperson, said. “The county is responsible for housing and rental assistance. The city of Portland, at this time, does not provide housing and rental assistance.”
Those priorities leave motel shelters, which require both on-site services and pathways into permanent housing, primarily in the county’s hands. Records show city funds currently help keep one of the six motel shelters in operation.
While the city does not run motel shelters, it does operate a network of 17 shelters, including pod-style “micro villages,” “safe park” sites where residents sleep in their vehicles and congregate shelters.
This year alone, the city budgeted $40 million for alternative outdoor shelters and another $42 million for its sweeps program and congregate shelter system.
These spending decisions have fueled criticism that the city is doubling down on short-term responses, such as sweeps, policing and high-turnover shelter beds, over evidence-backed models that reliably move people into permanent housing.
A proven track record
The motel model began gaining traction in 2020 with the launch of Project Turnkey, a statewide motel conversion program that allowed municipalities and nonprofits to buy motels and convert them into emergency shelters during the pandemic.
A 2024 Portland State University evaluation of Project Turnkey found that motel shelters outperformed other shelter types statewide in housing placements, stability and participant outcomes. Among other things, private rooms, trauma-informed design and on-site case management contributed to higher transition rates into permanent housing.
While Multnomah County already had a few motel-based shelter programs prior to 2020, Project Turnkey accelerated the approach by proving the model at scale, investing tens of millions into motel purchases and producing statewide data illustrating motel shelters’ proven success.
That evidence influenced the county’s own expansion of motel shelters beginning in 2022–23 and has continued with Delta Park in 2025.
Safety and dignity, at a cost
Compared with congregate shelters, where dozens of people share one large open space, the motel model offers privacy and autonomy, qualities that staff emphasize are critical for people with trauma or health challenges.
“People feel safe here,” Delta Park Program Manager Nicole Mena-Diaz said. “They are not worried about their belongings. They can sleep.”
Fields agrees that the privacy of motel shelters creates stability, sometimes for the first time in years.
“You can definitely be more successful at a hotel shelter than at a village or a congregate site,” Fields said. “Being comfortable gives people a taste of what could be, and that motivates them to take the next step in their life.”
That transition, however, must now happen within a system under immense strain. This year in particular, the county’s Homeless Services Division, formerly the Joint Office of Homeless Services, faced a $28 million budget cut after the state Legislature reduced funding allocations. As a result, the county has reduced rental assistance and housing vouchers — key tools used by many to transition into housing that were already scarce.
Just last week, Portland City Council rejected a proposal to cut more than $4 million from encampment sweeps and redirect the funds toward housing and food assistance, highlighting a deeper tension. While the city continues to invest heavily in housing development unaffordable to low-income and homeless Portlanders, its role in funding more effective shelter and housing pathways remains in flux, leaving the county to carry motel shelters almost entirely on its own.
“Our motel shelter programs are primarily a lease model,” Anna Plumb, Multnomah County Homeless Services Department interim director, said. “We enter into agreements with property owners to lease the entirety of that property for a set period of time. That allows us the flexibility to keep the shelter as long as we need it, but it also gives us the flexibility to exit out from our property if we no longer have the funding or if that program is no longer needed.”
Each lease, she confirmed, is supported through an assortment of city, county and regional funds, the largest of which comes from the voter-approved Supportive Housing Services measure.
Delta Park costs the county about $3.3 million per year to operate, placing it among the county’s more expensive shelters. Of that money, $1.7 million covers the annual lease, while the rest pays for programming.
Based on data from the 2024 fiscal year, on a per-bed basis, motel shelters cost about $49,000 per bed per year. By comparison, the city’s outdoor alternative shelter network costs an estimated $55,000 per bed per year. The county allocated about $16.8 million in Supportive Housing Services funds for motel-based shelters in 2024, which is less than 6% of the county’s Homeless Services Department’s roughly $290 million annual budget.
While seemingly a high expense, motel shelters are not a unique cost outlier. Individualized, effective and staffed shelter models cost more than congregate shelters.
Plumb said that as budgets tighten, the county faces tough choices, as less money means leaders must decide how to balance immediate shelter needs with long-term housing goals.
“We have to make sure we’re not over-investing in any one strategy,” she said. “We need to make sure we have shelters to provide people with safety off the streets, but we also need to have resources to help folks exit those shelters into housing.”
The path to housing
Delta Park uses a self-referral system, in which individuals can refer themselves or can be referred by a case worker for admission to the shelter. Its popularity is evident through the high demand when spots open up, contrasting with Wilson’s new shelters that have maintained relatively high vacancy rates. Phone lines open for Delta Park intakes weekdays at 9 a.m., and rooms are typically filled within 10 minutes.
“We give everyone a fair shot,” Mena-Diaz said. “If too many people call at once, we pick numbers from a hat. It keeps it equitable.”
Once inside, participants meet with case managers and behavioral health staff, set goals, and undergo a needs assessment within 30 days. Many stay about 90 days, though extensions are common.
Mena-Diaz measures success at the Delta Park shelter not by numbers, but by growth: whether residents gain the skills and confidence to sustain housing beyond the shelter.
“We try to give everybody the opportunity to try,” Mena-Diaz said.
She emphasized the mission that guides Delta Park: helping people take meaningful steps toward independence.
Fields, who previously helped residents secure housing, described the process: completing applications, negotiating with landlords, and helping with issues such as rental debt or criminal history if they come up. Sunstone Way covers move-in costs, including first and last month’s rent, application fees, and an Amazon “move-out package” for essentials.
But since accessing a housing voucher has become far more difficult, the county’s new assessment-based “priority pool” now determines who can move directly into permanent housing.
This assessment prioritizes those who do not receive temporary or transitional placements until long-term housing becomes available.
“We’re just trying to roll with the punches,” Fields said.
Fragile success
While motel shelters expanded significantly across the United States during the pandemic — with an Urban Institute scan finding that about 70% of Continuums of Care used hotels or motels for emergency shelter — their long-term trajectory is mixed. Some jurisdictions have continued or formalized motel shelters, citing strong outcomes, while others have wound down or started phasing out their pandemic-era programs. Further, most sites still rely on short-term leases and annual funding renewals, leaving the model vulnerable to financial uncertainty and shifting political priorities.
“It’s a wonderful model,” Plumb said. “It’s also very expensive. So we’re actually thinking about, as our resources are constrained, is there another way to provide that privacy and that autonomy? What potentially could be more efficient and a little bit more flexible?”
Plumb said the county is exploring a new approach: allowing providers to rent individual motel rooms rather than entire properties.
“It’s our new way of providing that motel sheltering of privacy, autonomy and safety, but doing it more flexibly and more efficiently,” Plumb said.
Next steps
For staff and residents alike, the biggest concern is whether the program can continue to survive, especially as responsibility and who will pay is passed around.
As Portland approaches Wilson’s self-imposed Dec. 1 deadline to end unsheltered homelessness, those who rely on places like Delta Park will be holding their breath, waiting to see the city’s next steps in the struggle against homelessness.
“We want to be here next year,” Mena-Diaz said. “We don’t know what that looks like, but at least for the time we’re here, we’re going to try our hardest.”
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This article appears in November 26, 2025.