For the last month, Christina Smith has been in a lot of pain. Each day, she has to pack up everything she owns from a spot just outside Portland city limits, where she pitches a tent. After packing up, she strains to lug all her possessions onto the MAX and into the city center to look for work, food and other necessities.
“I cry a lot because it hurts,” said Smith, 47.
Smith makes the physically punishing trek because she and her partner are trying to avoid getting caught in the city’s ban on living outside that’s central to Portland Mayor Keith Wilson’s plan to end unsheltered homelessness.
Coupled with the ban is the goal of adding 1,500 overnight shelter beds to offer to people like Smith. Wilson announced Dec. 1 that the city had met that goal, despite only 890 beds available that night with the rest expected to come online later.
But after six years living outside, Smith isn’t interested in shelters. She described them as punitive environments that haven’t brought her any closer to permanent housing. She’s not alone. City data shows that, so far, three out of six overnight shelters central to the mayor’s plan have gone months with half their beds left empty.
Even if full each night, the additional beds aren’t enough for the increasing number of people living outside in Multnomah County, which county data puts at about 7,400.
Now, doubts are intensifying about whether Wilson’s plan will accomplish his campaign promise of addressing the city’s persistent homelessness problem without criminalizing people for having nowhere to go. Members of City Council, who were previously open to giving the plan a chance after Wilson was elected with nearly two-thirds of the vote, are souring on it.
“I think you have to follow the evidence of your own eyes,” Councilor Angelita Morillo said. “And I think that I have seen a lot of unhoused people still on our streets. His promise wasn’t just to add an additional 1,500 beds, it was to end unsheltered homelessness. And I have not seen that promise fulfilled.”
She said getting someone into a shelter “removes them from public view, but that’s not actually ending their homelessness.”
Portland City Councilor Jamie Dunphy wrote in a Nov. 9 Bluesky post that ending unsheltered homelessness is different than just ending visible homelessness downtown. He added that the mayor’s strategy was “forcing the problem into the neighborhoods that are already suffering the most.”
City data shows the overall total number of people using the shelters has steadily climbed since July. Speaking in a video posted online Dec. 1, Wilson said his new shelters had provided more than 49,000 nights of safe sleep as of Oct. 1 and his administration would shift to increasing housing production.
“Every unique person we reached, every night a safe sleep is a chance to change a life and maybe even save it,” he said. “But let me be clear, 1,500 beds was never the finish line. It’s a milestone. It’s our beginning.”
‘As undesirable as outdoor spaces’
On the day before Thanksgiving, Smith stopped by Trinity Episcopal Cathedral for lunch and a visit to the Street Books cart — a mobile library where volunteers handed out sanitizer, wipes, flashlights, heavy blankets and books.
Smith and her partner, William Washam, also regularly stop by Ground Score Association, an informal recycling collective, to inquire about getting a job for the day. They also visit the library so Washam can work on his online bachelor’s degree in psychology with the goal of becoming a social worker.
A woman dropped a pint of melted ice cream onto the sidewalk. Smith’s dog, Shea, rushed over to lap it up.
While staying in a shelter, something spooked the normally friendly dog who wouldn’t stop barking, Smith said. That resulted in the couple getting kicked out at 2 a.m. The couple is looking for a new home for their dog.
The couple has stayed at other shelters where they said staff enforce rules selectively and a pecking order exists. Smith recalled how, at one shelter, staff told them not to talk to a group of people living outside nearby. They were reprimanded for saying hello to a friend in that group, while another couple regularly hung out there with no consequence, she said.
“It’s a lot of drama and politics,” said Washam, 45. “It’s like high school.”
Wilson has argued that the new overnight emergency shelters offer people experiencing homelessness a safer place to rest than sleeping outside. The six shelters central to his plan, with a seventh expected to open in December, are located throughout Portland. Guests are guaranteed a reservation for the following night once they stay in a shelter.
But the shelters are congregate settings, with rows of beds or mats. They also require people to leave early in the morning.
A report in October by advocacy groups Sisters of the Road and the Welcome Home Coalition found that people experiencing homelessness saw living in shelters “as undesirable as outdoor spaces.” Researchers at Portland State University and Oregon Health & Science University helped produce the report, which is based on 429 surveys with people experiencing homelessness.
City data shows that three of its new emergency overnight shelters have had multiple months with more than half of their beds unfilled.
Rob Layne, spokesperson for Portland Solutions, said those rates don’t tell the whole story. He said it takes time for word to spread that a shelter is a safe space to spend the night. He also pointed out that the Safes Shelter added roughly 50 beds in July, which pushed its utilization rate lower.
Data is not yet available for a shelter operated by CityTeam on Southeast Grand Ave., which opened in November.
The organizations operating the shelters mostly did not respond to requests to visit them. The Salvation Army, which operates three shelters, declined Street Roots’ request to visit.
After picking up batteries, body wipes and hand sanitizer from Street Books, the couple gathered their possessions. That included a bag of cans to redeem for their deposit, a rolled-up tarp and a backpack with frayed ends. Washam carries the tent they have to pack up every day.
“It’s tiring,” he said. “Everything takes 10 times longer than it should.”
‘Someone took your house’
Sheamus Kirk said that earlier in November, he returned to his encampment to find his tent was gone.
“It’s almost worse than a burglary,” Kirk said. “It’s not just that someone got into your house. Someone took your house.”
Starting Nov. 1, the city resumed enforcing its ban on setting up tents or other structures on public property after Wilson paused it earlier in the year while his administration added shelter beds. With more beds open, Wilson announced it was time to enforce the ban.
The city removed 579 encampments in November, according to official data. That’s 100 fewer than a year ago. The decrease may be partly due to the Oregon Department of Transportation terminating its agreement with the city in June to remove encampments near freeways in Portland. Under the agreement, the department paid the city up to $2 million each year as well as added expenses.
Kirk, 33, said that after he lost his tent, he wandered around while trying not to pass out from exhaustion on the street. Friends let him “tent surf,” and someone gave him a new tent, he said.
When asked why he didn’t go to a shelter, Kirk paused and chuckled. He said people who operate shelters understand little about “street people.” Kirk, who has been homeless for 12 years, said shelters have constantly shifting rules. He said he was kicked out of one earlier this year for defending himself after he was assaulted.
Critics of removing or sweeping encampments say they further destabilize and traumatize people living outside when workers hired by the city take their possessions — often including medications and important paperwork.
Opposition to Wilson’s approach to homelessness was front and center when the Portland City Council met Nov. 12 to make adjustments to the city’s budget. Morillo sponsored an amendment that would have removed $4.3 million from the city sweeps program while redirecting the money toward rent assistance and other programs.
Morrillo noted during the confrontational meeting that she voted to support Wilson’s shelter plan. But she called shelters “a temporary respite at best, and a cruel excuse to displace and dispossess at worst.”
However, the amendment failed after members of the public expressed concerns that it would affect the program’s other functions, such as garbage removal and responding to community complaints.
Open beds, open warrants
As the Dec. 1 deadline approached, Wilson said in interviews with The Oregonian and Oregon Public Broadcasting that having open beds meant there was always one available for anyone who needed it.
It also means police have a freer hand to enforce the city’s ordinance prohibiting people from setting up tents or other structures in public. The ordinance states that it can only be enforced when there is access to shelter. Violating the ordinance can mean a $100 fine as well as seven days in jail.
Scott Kerman, executive director of Blanchet House, a social service provider known for offering free meals, said in an email that staff hasn’t heard a lot about the ban. He said some meal guests reported being cited and one spent a night in jail for an open warrant.
Wilson, as well as law enforcement officials, have said they don’t want to prosecute people under the ordinance and instead plan to steer them towards services and off the street. How they intend to do that remains unclear. Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez didn’t answer Street Roots’ request for information by press time. City numbers show that over a dozen people have been cited for violating the ordinance and over 70 have “accepted services” of some kind.
Nearly 90 people have been arrested for outstanding warrants, according to city figures. Wilson told city council last month that those warrants involved not registering as a sex offender, as well as meth and firearm possession.
“We’re leading with compassion and outreach,” Wilson said. “And, yes, that does involve arrests for open warrants.”
Grant Hartley, Multnomah County director for Metropolitan Public Defenders, said that police being able to go into encampments is an “ancillary benefit” of having more shelter beds. He said that it’s hard to keep a schedule when you’re sleeping outside, leading to missed court dates and open warrants.
While there have not been many citations for violating the ban, Hartley said he expects that to change.
“People will not consider this viable shelter, and the citations will increase,” he said.
A familiar bottleneck
Smith and Washam said they became homeless gradually. For Smith, it began after a “nasty divorce.” Washam said it was also a divorce and the loss of his business after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We all used to be something,” said Washam.
The number of people experiencing homelessness in Portland’s tri-county area rose to more than 12,000, most of whom were in Multnomah County, according to the 2025 federally required point-in-time count. That’s an increase of 61% from 2023, despite more than $1 billion being raised by the Metro regional government’s Supportive Housing Services since 2021.
The report by the Welcome Home Coalition states that expanding congregate shelters runs counter to the Supportive Housing Services tax approved by voters in 2020, which aims to help counties fund programs that prevent and reduce homelessness.
A week before Wilson’s Dec. 1 deadline, Multnomah County released a report showing that 2,599 people left homelessness for housing in the 2025 fiscal year through Supportive Housing Services programs. Just over half of those were supported with “rapid rehousing,” a short-term subsidy designed to help individuals cover rent shortly after losing their housing.
The remainder were housed with permanent supportive housing, which is geared toward people who’ve been chronically homeless or have severe disabilities.
Anna Plumb, the county’s interim director of homeless services, said that housing includes a subsidy to cover the costs of rent and “wraparound services,” which she said are often provided by nonprofits and can include getting people to medical appointments, helping them manage medications or keeping their apartments clean.
“Part of it is helping that person stay in that housing with a housing subsidy, and then the other part is helping people deal with the issues that might have prevented them from staying housed in the past,” she said.
There are more than 3,000 units of shelter funded through a mix of city and county funding. Plumb said they include congregate settings, outdoor “pods,” motels, and shelters that are open 24/7. Those that are open around the clock allow guests to talk to case managers during the day, she said.
Shelters offer a safer place to sleep, particularly for women and children, she said.
“Ideally, the shelter is also a pathway to housing,” she said. “And I think that’s what we’re struggling to figure out as a community because it’s a constrained resource.”
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This article appears in December 10, 2025.