The Portland area is headed for a dramatic housing and homelessness funding cliff that could cause thousands of people to lose their housing and would leave the tri-county region with billions less to house the growing numbers of people experiencing homelessness regionally.
That’s the big takeaway from a year of polling and other public opinion research commissioned by Metro that Street Roots obtained through a public records request.
The research shows people in Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties currently don’t support new ballot measures to fund fighting homelessness enough for Metro to put a new measure on the ballot.
Last summer, The Oregonian reported the already sobering results of the first of three public opinion polls Street Roots obtained.
Now, two newer polls the tri-county government commissioned found people in the area view local governments even less favorably than last year. That includes the city of Portland, the counties, Metro and the state.
Their reasons have become clearer, the research shows. A June draft memo by FM3 Research summarizing the past year of non-public research it conducted for Metro explained the trend among likely voters is a “lack of confidence that local and regional governments are effectively addressing top issues, including homelessness, in the Portland region.”
That could be devastating for the region because Metro’s 2020 Supportive Housing Services measure is set to end in 2030. (SHS is a 1% marginal tax on profitable businesses and individual income above $128,000 for single tax filers and $205,000 for joint filers.)
That expiration would leave a roughly $331 million yearly funding hole in the region’s housing and homeless budgets, forecasts show. Currently, SHS tax funding makes up 61% of Multnomah County’s homelessness budget, about 90% of Clackamas County’s and over 90% of Washington County’s, officials at the counties told Street Roots.
The measure has so far provided $1.6 billion to house and fund support services for some of the most vulnerable people experiencing homelessness since voters approved it. It has already smashed its 10-year goals.
To make matters worse, money from Portland’s 2016 Housing Bond is all but spent, and the vast majority of funds from Metro’s 2018 Affordable Housing Bond are either spent or committed to existing projects.
Both ballot measures helped to build thousands of units of affordable housing. Portland’s bond exceeded its targets, and Metro is on track to significantly exceed its goals.
The situation leaves regional governments scrambling to highlight the ballot measures’ significant successes to an increasingly skeptical and economically anxious public in order to prevent what officials describe as a “catastrophic” collapse in homelessness and housing funding.
“Right now, what we’re doing in terms of contingency planning is trying to advocate for funding at all levels,” said Nathaniel VerGow, the recently appointed head of Multnomah County’s Homeless Services Department.
The most recent count of people experiencing homelessness in the tri-county area found a total of 12,034 people on January 22, 2025. Widely considered a significant undercount, the number still shows a large increase in all three counties.
While the SHS tax’s 2030 sunset may seem far away, opportunities for Metro to get a replacement measure for funding continuity approved by voters are limited and shrinking.
“If SHS gets turned off, thousands of people will lose their homes,” said Liam Frost, Metro’s Housing Director. “For them to lose their homes means the likelihood of homelessness again. That’s what’s at stake.”
Two changed lives
At the age of 24, Caylynne Lapp was already deep in the work of rebuilding her life after being substance-dependent and homeless since her late teens when she found out she was pregnant.
That was in 2022, when Lapp was living in transitional housing and working a new job at Safeway. She noticed smells like spilled milk in the walk-in cooler and a customer’s Irish Spring soap had become unbearable. Her boss suggested a pregnancy test.
“I took like three tests between four and like seven in the morning, and I fell asleep on them. I woke up, and they were all positive,” she recalled with a laugh.
Facing transitional housing age limits and an imminent due date, she moved back in with her mom. It didn’t take long, however, for Lapp to know she had to make another change.
“I called 211 just for resources,” she said. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to continue to raise my daughter in the same household I was raised in. That is not happening.’”
She fled to a family shelter and a few months later, she secured a two-bedroom apartment through the call.
Today, Lapp and her 4-year-old daughter live in that small apartment in a large Southeast Portland building that was constructed thanks to money from Portland’s 2016 Housing Bond.
Lapp works part time service industry jobs and at nightclubs, but since she found out she was going to be a mother, her daughter has been her main priority.
The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the Portland area is now more than $1,800 each month. And an average month of child care for a preschool-aged child in Portland costs about $1,325, a 2024 KGW investigation found.
But funding from Metro’s Supportive Housing Services tax covers the majority of Lapp’s rent, allowing her to focus on giving her daughter the love, stability and support Lapp didn’t receive herself.
“My own life was very dysfunctional. So I took it upon myself to not repeat old patterns, and to break those generational curses,” she said. “You can make your own village, you can create your own family. Blood doesn’t always mean everything.”
Tens of thousands of changed lives
Lapp and her daughter are one of the 10,468 households funding from the SHS tax has placed in housing around the region.
The majority, 5,556, are in Multnomah County, Metro’s SHS progress dashboard shows. An additional 3,148 are in Washington County and 1,763 are in Clackamas County.
On top of that, funding from the measure has prevented another 21,823 people from becoming homeless so far, with things like rent assistance and a case manager.
A spokesperson for Metro said the tax has provided $185 million for rapid rehousing and eviction prevention, on top of $130 million for regional long-term rent assistance.
SHS funding has also created and sustained 3,216 shelter units around the region.
Laura Golino de Lovato is executive director of Northwest Pilot Project. The half-century-old nonprofit connects low income seniors with housing in Multnomah County. SHS funding has been transformative.
“For us, it meant that we (were) able to triple the number of very low income older adults that we were providing services to to help them out of homelessness and into housing or to help them stay in housing and not be evicted,” she said.
The nonprofit has gone from connecting about 500 seniors a year to housing before the funding to 1,500 last year.
Northwest Pilot Project’s story is not unique.
All around the tri-county area, the tax has enabled a vast increase in the number of people service providers can house — especially the very low income, chronically homeless people with disabilities that SHS targets.
Dependence and risk
In just five years, SHS funding has come to make up the majority of the counties’ homelessness budgets. That’s especially true in Washington and Clackamas counties.
SHS funding — especially on top of money from Metro’s Affordable Housing Bond — has allowed those counties to basically build a homelessness system from the ground up.
“Prior to SHS, Clackamas County had no year-round shelter capacity for single adults, no street outreach programming and few permanent supportive housing opportunities,” said Shannon Callahan, director of Clackamas County’s Housing & Community Development Division.
Jes Larson, assistant director of Washington County’s Housing Services Department, told Street Roots before SHS, the county used to give homeless people a bus ticket and send them into Portland for services because there was almost nothing available in Washington County.
Molly Rogers, director of Washington County’s Housing Services, said SHS funding now provides shelter, transitional housing, affordable housing, case management and rental assistance for thousands of people.
“Without continued funding,” Rogers said, “Washington County would lose the foundation and infrastructure that makes our current system possible.”
Thousands of evictions in the making
The scenario Rogers’ described — one where voters allow the SHS tax to expire in 2030 with nothing in its place — would result in a similar large-scale housing system collapse all across the region, officials said.
It would mean, for example, everyone receiving rent assistance in 2030 would either have to scrape together the money or leave their housing. In the 2025 fiscal year that was more than 17,000 people.
Nearly 80% of them were either children living with their families, seniors or people with disabilities, The Oregonian reported.
Golino de Lovato said the loss of their SHS rent vouchers would almost certainly mean that at least 300 of her clients could no longer pay rent.
“You are talking about thousands of people losing their housing or their shelter bed, so unsheltered homelessness will get worse if that were to happen,” said Jillian Schoene, director of the joint Multnomah County and City of Portland Homelessness Response System.
“Exponentially,” added VerGow after her. “And the balance between the inflow and the outflow that I was talking about will become that much more dramatic.”
VerGow was talking about “churn,” which is the ratio of people the government houses compared to the number of people that worsening economic conditions push into homelessness who seek services for the first time.
Frost, of Metro, said for the region’s social safety net to be working, the churn ratio has to be one to one. The most recent Metro data shows the ratio is one person for every three who enter homelessness.
What the public doesn’t see, it doesn’t understand
The Metro polling that Street Roots obtained showed liberals and moderates have swung increasingly rightward and grown skeptical of local governments.
That shift has meant Metro hasn’t been able to hit the 60% support threshold it needs to move forward.
Street Roots also obtained an FM3 Research presentation on focus groups Metro commissioned in March to understand skepticism among “moderate women voters, suburban liberal/moderate voters, high-income ($125K+) moderate voters and urban liberal/moderate voters.”
The research found “strong concern about waste and mismanagement in local government” that partly stemmed from “a flurry of headlines that some have seen.”
It specifically cited news stories about a controversy over unspent funds, which participants recalled totalling sums ranging from $22 million to “over $200 million.”
The research also found voters’ understanding of the state of homelessness doesn’t generally go far beyond the unsheltered homelessness they see firsthand.
“Many regional voters,” the June research memo said, “including those who live in suburban areas, saw conditions in downtown Portland as a barometer for the problem. No amount of data or storytelling will substitute for the impact of visible change to these conditions.”
Homelessness worsening was especially frustrating to them, the research found, because it was happening “despite” significant public investment.
Regional housing officials told Street Roots that is understandable. But many added that understanding doesn’t take into account two key factors:
The measures have actually exceeded their success metrics — often substantially.
The forces that push people onto the street have gotten far worse than they were in the second half of the 2010s when the measures were crafted.
Indeed, the region has suffered the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting recession, President Biden slashing the pandemic safety net, cheap synthetic drugs flooding in, rampant inflation and huge cuts to key social programs like Medicaid and SNAP by the second Trump administration.
Those cuts, on top of additional budget cuts Multnomah County was forced to make earlier this year, led the county to project in May that homelessness will rise no matter what in the near future.
A dedicated pool of funding to address these issues is more important than ever amid so many funding cuts, said Marisa Zapata, director of PSU’s Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative. That’s especially true with more cuts expected from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said VerGow, Frost and others.
Building support, brick by brick
All this is set to come to a head in the lead up to the 2028 election.
That’s partly because if a new ballot measure fails then, the governments will have time to begin ramping down services before 2030. And some feel it stands a better chance of passing during a presidential election year.
“A lot of voters come to the polls because there’s a lot on the ballot that they care about,” said Larson, the Washington County official. “And that’s an opportunity to talk to them about something else we think they’re going to care about.”
But what will be on that ballot is far from decided, officials including Metro’s Frost told Street Roots. Frost added that long-term rental assistance is the “crown jewel” of SHS.
There are other potential indicators too. In 2025, Metro abandoned an effort to extend the SHS tax through 2050 due to polling showing it wouldn’t have enough support, a spokesperson for the body said. It also tested the viability of a new affordable housing bond this January, which it found was not likely to pass.
And it appears some of the same powerful business and civil interests that propelled SHS to a safe victory in 2020 have grown disillusioned.
Andrew Hoan, president and CEO of the Portland Business Alliance and the Portland Metro Chamber, said business interests supported the SHS tax “because it was presented as a historic, once-in-a-generation investment to end homelessness.”
“But,” he added in a statement, “that historic spending has not produced historic results. The implementation and outcomes of the program do not match the scale of investment, and that demands a major course correction.”
A spokesperson did not answer Street Roots’ follow-up question if the chamber would support a new ballot measure to continue fighting homelessness after SHS ends.
Officials at the counties and Metro stressed the importance of regaining public trust through a mixture of highlighting the measures’ successes while owning their shortcomings and fixing things that could be running better.
But officials and service providers were also unequivocal that SHS funding must continue. Street Roots asked Multnomah County’s VerGow what a ramp down of SHS would look like.
“I’m challenged by the notion of an ability to responsibly cut housing assistance for thousands of households,” he said. “I don’t know how one responsibly causes homelessness. I take issue with the premise that can actually be done.”
If the county tried to offset the impacts, VerGow added, it would cause profound cuts to core services and functions.
Building the village
While all this plays out, thousands of people whose housing depends on officials’ efforts to win back voter support are continuing on with their lives.
Lapp — the previously homeless mother living in a Portland Housing Bond building with support from the SHS tax — has made use of the stability the housing and services have provided.
She’s in therapy, set to start college in the fall and getting an Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission permit to expand her job prospects.
“Ultimately, it just gives you something to cherish,” she said about the housing. “I’ve worked really hard at trying to make a better version of myself and make a better version of my life, and I’m finally at a point where I have everything that I need.”
Three women from the shelter where she used to live also ended up in her building, and two of them just had children of their own. Lapp raved about the crew and let a grin take over.
“I’m always passing down the old toys and passing down all the hand-me-down clothes,” she said, “I’m always giving out the snackies, you know, make sure that they’re fed.”
This article appears in July 22, 2026.
