Oliver Lecture – November 17, 2013

by Susan Emmons | 21 Nov 2013

Charles was homeless and looking rough. He was pushing a shopping cart and living under the Burnside Bridge when he was referred to Northwest Pilot Project. He was 56 years old. He had been an unofficial apartment building manager for fifteen years. He lived in the building, was the handyman and did repairs to the plumbing and electricity. He collected the rents for the owner, and received a free apartment and a modest salary. When the building was sold, the new owners told Charles he was no longer needed. They were renovating the building and he would have to move. He found an efficiency studio apartment. He thought with his savings he would be fine until he found another job. He didn’t find another job. His savings depleted. He knew from his years of experience that it would be terrible to have an eviction notice on his record.

He found the smallest least expensive storage unit he could find, moved his belongings into it, and left his apartment. Charles had been living outside for over a year when he was referred to Northwest Pilot Project. He had developed some serious health problems. We vouchered him into a motel. We helped him to move into a very small studio apartment in downtown Portland. He got a haircut, and shaped his beard. He looked like a different person. He was so grateful for his housing that he told us some times he would get up in the middle of the night and reach his hands out to touch the walls to make sure they were really there. Charles wanted to work. He was referred to a job training program. Today he is employed and paying his own rent.

Bonnie is 59 years old. She became homeless with her husband three years ago after he lost his job. They lost their house due to foreclosure, and lived in an RV together for a while, and then he suddenly left her. She thinks he was deeply depressed and ashamed that he couldn’t provide for her. She lived in her car in the Walmart parking lot for 8 months. She shared how scared she was every night and went days on end with very little sleep, due to her fear. She has no income, and very little job history after being married for many years and not working outside of the home. We helped Bonnie get into a homeless shelter for women until we had funds available to place her into transitional housing where she lives successfully waiting on employment income or subsidized housing. Bonnie found seasonal work during the holidays in retail and worked for 6 weeks last year. She felt she was headed towards a permanent position, but was laid off after the holiday season. She is now working with other programs in the community to learn computer skills and build her resume. She is hopeful that she will be able to work and live in an apartment she can afford on her income.

These stories are two of many. Just like all of us who are housed, each homeless person we meet is unique. Some need supportive services to maintain long-term housing stability. Some really only need an affordable place to live.

Today our community has waiting lists at all of our publicly funded homeless shelters. Northwest Pilot Project has 10 beds reserved at the Clark Center homeless shelter, operated by Transition Projects. We currently have 25 men aged 55 and over on the waitlist for our 10 beds. They will call in day after day to find out if a bed is available in the shelter. It is currently taking 6-8 weeks for each of these men to get a bed in a homeless shelter. Can you imagine being the worker who has to respond to these daily calls and continually tell an older individual we have no place for them to go?

On any given night in Portland there are 2,000 men, women, and children who are homeless in our community. We do not have an adequate supply of housing for everyone who needs it, and so we have increased numbers of people camping in public places, sleeping in doorways, living in their cars, and under bridges. This is disgraceful. It does not need to be this way in Portland.

I moved to Portland in 1965 to attend Lewis and Clark College. In 1965 we had no publicly funded homeless shelters in Portland. People seem to think that we’ve always had a homeless problem in Portland — that is not true. In 1965 we had people who were transients — but we did not have a publicly funded system of services for people without housing. We did have a lot more housing affordable to very low-income people.

I joined the staff of Northwest Pilot Project in 1985. At that time our organization was the agency of choice when a building was condemned or when low-income seniors needed to be relocated.

In 1986 the Governor Hotel was sold to an out of state developer. Northwest Pilot Project was asked to re-locate the residents. It was my first experience with a relocation. In October 1986 we found 110 very low-income residents – most of them seniors – living at the Governor, paying $125 per month for a small studio apartment. Some of them had lived there for over 20 years. We had thirty days to move them.

Estelle was 82 years old and had lived in the building for 23 years. She had coffee every morning at the Ritz Sisters in the Galleria – at that time a vibrant shopping center across the street. She used the downtown library, shopped at the Safeway, it was her neighborhood. When we found her an apartment in NW Portland – she said - what am I going to do in Northwest Portland? She refused to move. On the last day she was carried out by the police, and died in a nursing home. It made a huge impression on me, and I started keeping a map of the central city, recording every building we lost where low-income people had lived. There were others at the Governor we moved multiple times as buildings kept closing and being converted to another use. Mr. Christiansen had been a school custodian. We moved him from the Governor to the Hamilton Hotel. When that building closed to make way for the new federal courthouse, we moved him to the Ben Stark. When that building was converted to the Ace we finally were able to move him to a subsidized building. He was 84 years old. He asked us if we thought he would have to move again. We told him the building had a 60 year affordability requirement. His response: that should last me.

In 1988 – Portland’s City Council adopted the Central City Plan acknowledging the loss of housing for poor people and setting a goal to get back to the number of units we had in 1978 – 5,183 units.

Some wonderful things happened in the central city as a result of this plan – 1,000 units were preserved or developed for very low-income people including the Sally McCracken, the Shoreline, the Bridgeview and the Twelfth Avenue Terrace. But in spite of these efforts, we continued to experience a net loss of buildings and housing for poor people.

In 1994 NWPP began publishing an annual inventory of housing to measure how we were doing towards achieving the goal set in the Central City Plan. In 2013 we are 1,893 units short of our goal set in 1988. With our inventory and map we track one neighborhood – but this has been happening in all of our neighborhoods – buildings are taken down or converted to another use. There’s been gentrification, conversion to condominiums, and there have been rent increases all across the city that have displaced our low-income neighbors from their traditional neighborhoods.

In addition to our housing inventory, I keep a map of downtown Portland, showing an X at the address of every building that has been lost since 1978. One of our long-time supporters was looking at this map and said to me: “It’s like an aerial surveillance map during a war where you can see which buildings have been eliminated.” In this case, what has been eliminated is housing for the poor.

In 1992 I was asked to Chair the newly created Housing and Community Development Commission, a citizen’s commission with representatives from the city of Portland, Multnomah County, and the city of Gresham. I chaired this group from 1992 to 1995. I was really excited about being asked to do this. At NWPP I knew I could have an impact on 3,000 lives a year, but at the commission I thought we’d have an impact on 100,000 lives. I thought we would re-shape our housing delivery system – that was our charge – to set public policy, to see that housing dollars were connected to this public policy, and to create a seamless housing delivery system. We had some really smart people on the commission: Sam Galbreath, Mickey Ryan, Jim Winkler, the amazing Donna Beegle, Doug Blomgren.

In Portland we love to plan and we’re good at it. We are required to do annual needs assessment to be eligible for federal funds and we do an A+ job every time. We would do the needs assessments year after year, and they would always tell us the same thing – the greatest need in our community was rental housing for our poorest citizens. When I took on the job of chairing HCDC I was very interested in defining the problem and coming up with a solution. I didn’t want yet another big plan that would sit on a shelf. I wanted a 10 page document that would be read – that would name the problem and put a price tag on the solution. And we did that. In 1993 we published the Comprehensive Housing Affordable Strategy (CHAS) Update – a ten page paper that documented we had a shortage of 10,000 rental units county-wide for the lowest income families and individuals in our community – those at 30% of median family income or less. The cost of fixing it was $500 million dollars. We researched Housing Trust Funds and I became convinced that this was the answer. At that time I was doing a lot of speaking to business groups, churches, community groups – and wherever I went I would talk about the drastic shortage of affordable housing we had in our community, and I would talk about a Housing Trust Fund being the answer and how we would fund it. It was a prosperous time – we had researched a levy. But the figure of 500 million was just too big a number for most people to swallow – it was overwhelming – we flinched.
City Club – 2002 I was invited to speak with Steve Rudman, director of our Housing Authority, and Erik Sten, City Commissioner. The City Club had just done a thorough study and published a very thoughtful report on affordable housing. By 2002, our deficit county-wide had grown to 12,256 units. Again, I talked about a Housing Trust Fund as being the solution.

So fast forward to 2013 - there’s a shortage of 20,000 rental units for the poorest households in Portland, a shortage of 23,000 units county-wide. You’ll be able to see on the chart we have included in the program that we’re talking about an individual with an income of $14,604 per year or less, and for a family of four - $20,796 a year or less. A deficit of 20,000 rental units city-wide. 20,000 is the population of Ashland, Milwaukie, Klamath Falls, Forest Grove.    Imagine a whole city that has no homes that are affordable to its families, couples, elderly poor.

So where are all these people living? We don’t have 20,000 homeless people in Portland. No we don’t. But we have families and couples and individuals who are doubled up, who are paying 60, 70, 80% of their income for rent, leaving them with inadequate resources for food, medications, clothing and transportation – who are only able to make it through the month because of church food box programs or the Oregon Food Bank. One event – lost hours at work, or a health emergency – could send any of these individuals or families into homelessness.

The housing crisis for poor people in our community is demonstrated to us in so many ways. When Home Forward (our county-wide Housing Authority) opened the waiting list for Section 8 housing for ten days November 1-10, 2012, 21,000 people applied. This only qualified the 21,000 to become part of a lottery system where 3,000 names were chosen. A year later, no one from the 3,000 has been given a voucher due to sequestration and a decline in federal funding.

It doesn’t have to be this way in Portland and Multnomah County. We know how to create stable decent housing that is permanently affordable to people. One example is the Twelfth Avenue Terrace. At NWPP we spent seven years advocating for this building and it opened in August 1994. Describe why we became involved in advocacy for buildings It’s located at S.W. 12th & Market and has 118 studio apartments. It is owned by REACH Community Development, Home Forward has provided 118 project based vouchers so it’s subsidized housing – where people pay 30% of their income for rent. It’s permanently affordable to very low income people. It was designed for people aged 55 and over, who are homeless or at risk of losing their housing. Of the first 118 people we moved into the building – 48 came directly from homeless shelters. Who are these people? A former longshoreman, a nurse’s aide, a man who had taught English as a second language, a school custodian, a hairdresser, veterans of the Second World War, a cook, a displaced farm worker. A 84 year old man named Jack – living in a residential hotel – cockroach story. Nineteen years later some of the original residents are still living there. Design issues – 265 square feet, struggled to keep costs down – most cost effective design – issue of two sinks – asking Emma at Chaucer Court.

This housing works. At NWPP we follow people over the long term to determine their stability in housing. Our Housing Placement Program shows that 88% of the people we place in housing are still in that housing a year later, and two years later, and many years later. Beyond this success rate it’s important to talk about what decent stable housing allows people to do. People we have placed in subsidized housing like the Twelfth Avenue Terrace volunteer in our parks and take care of the rose beds across from the Art Museum, they volunteer in the SMART Reading Program, they usher at the Performing Arts Center, they serve meals on wheels, they’re active in their churches. There’s a transformation for people when they no longer have to worry about their housing. They can become involved citizens in their community.

At NWPP we pioneered in measuring outcomes over the long term, we wanted to know if what we were doing really worked for people and created long term housing stability. When we started publishing our outcome statistics other service providers came to us and wanted to learn how we followed up with people and how we measured housing stability and today we have a whole social service system that does this. It’s important to say that we have many collaborative partners – landlords, churches, synagogues, and other social service providers that make our work possible. The list is too long to mention here.

So we measure outcomes and here are our numbers: From July 1, 1997 through June 30, 2013, NWPP staff helped 7,287 people to find and keep permanent housing.

I think recently we’ve gotten into a contentious, deeply hurtful conversation in our community that seems to be demonizing people for being poor, for being without housing, for camping in public places, but I think we have to honestly ask ourselves the question – if we have waiting lists for all of our publicly funded shelters, if we have a deficit of 20,000 units for our poorest citizens in Portland, compounded by one of the lowest vacancy rates for rental housing in the country – where do we expect people to be? Talk about being at N.W. 23rd & Burnside at 7:30 in the morning waiting for the 15 bus and seeing people with their packs coming out of Washington Park to start their day. It’s spooky and it’s heartbreaking. We’ve developed some wonderful housing for poor people throughout our county, but not enough for the poorest of the poor – not nearly enough.

So we have a serious shortage of housing in Portland and Multnomah County and it doesn’t need to be this way. We need to start treating affordable housing as infrastructure, and as a fundamental part of what a healthy city requires. Just like we need bridges, well maintained streets and public transit, we need housing for all of our citizens. It’s fundamental. We need to establish creating enough housing for everyone as one of our top priorities. We need to adjust our priorities for how we spend existing resources.

I don’t think we can solve a problem of this magnitude with one idea – we will need multiple ideas, and we will need significant resources.

We need a local source of funding to solve the problem. The solution is not going to come from the federal government. We need a solution that is economical, that is permanent, that is doable. We need to involve our business community as an integral part of our solution. I was delighted when Deborah Imse agreed to introduce me today. She’s a leader in her field and a deeply compassionate person. I feel so strongly that we need to involve our business community in our solution to our housing crisis. We need a public private partnership to solve this problem. And we need to create a sense of urgency in our community about the magnitude of the problem.

I think we need to do in 2013 what we were either unable or unwilling to do in 1993. We need to establish a local Housing Trust Fund that will provide ongoing funds to eliminate our affordable housing shortage for our poorest citizens. The fund can be used to build new housing for people at 30% of MFI or less.

The fund could also be used to provide rent subsidy funds for our poorest citizens so that they can afford existing rental units that are available – run our own local rent subsidy program. For example, if an existing apartment rents in the market place for $600 per month, and the low income senior on a fixed income can afford to pay $300 per month – this fund would provide that gap rent.

Like any other major community commitment it will take a lot of money. We need to be realistic about what it will take to solve a community problem that has been years in the making. It is not possible to create housing for extremely low income households simply by mandate: sources of subsidy for these households must be found to either lower the cost of development or increase the amount of operating income, through rent or otherwise, that the building receives. Often both methods are necessary. I think we need to set a goal of $50 million dollars a year over the next twenty years to fund a local Housing Trust Fund. $1 billion dollars. That’s a lot of zeros – my calculator could barely handle it.

So this is the point where all of you in the audience scratch your heads and say “Where does she think that kind of money is coming from?” And my answer is – I’ve been working in this community for 38 years and observing how we spend money. We always find the money for the things we really want to do. And here are some examples:

The CRC studies cost $175 million – we still don’t have a bridge

$57 million for an aerial tram in South Waterfront

$198 million for an Oregon Convention Center Hotel ($118 million in private investment - $80 million in public funds)

$147 million to extend the streetcar to the east side

Yes – a lot of this money was federal funding, but we used 27 million in urban renewal dollars at a time when we hadn’t met our goal of housing for people at 30% of MFI for the River district – Pearl district. We never asked as a community – here’s $27 million – should we spend it on housing or the streetcar? We just spent it on the streetcar. I’m a fan of the streetcar – but I think people who are concerned about homeless campers in Old Town could reflect that if we had chosen to spend this money on housing, we would have many fewer campers.

$613 million to fund the Portland Bicycle Plan for 2030

The City Council adopted this plan in February 2010. If fully funded it would build 681 miles of new bikeways by 2030. 30 million a year for 20 years. This plan hasn’t been fully funded but the vision is a big one. Will we do the same for housing?

We need a local housing trust fund. If we don’t ask for what we really need in our community – we’re never going to get it. If we continue to use public resources to build housing that is not for those with the greatest need – we will continue to have too many people who are homeless.

Here are some other ideas:

I think we should explore using existing city resources to “draw down the debt” on existing rental properties owned by Home Forward and non-profit community development corporations so that rents can be decreased to make them affordable to the poorest of the poor in our community. I understand this is doable. Consider the Pearl Court, 920 NW Kearney – right on the streetcar line – across from Jamison Square. 199 units owned by Home Forward – a current rent range of $461-$903. When the initial planning was going on for the River District in 1997, Portland City Council adopted public policy that dictates in newly developed urban renewal districts, housing being built in the district would reflect the diversity of incomes in the City of Portland. 14% of our citizens in Portland are at 30% of MFI or less. We’ve never achieved our goal of having 14% of the housing in the River District or Pearl district affordable to this income level. Can we get some of these rents lowered?

I think we should invite local apartment building owners to donate one apartment per building that we could refer a homeless individual or family to. NWPP would be proud to “pilot” this project. Again – we would be asking apartment owners to make that one unit affordable to the individual or family on their income. We would provide supportive services and guarantee the referral. There are 140,980 apartment units occupied by renters in Multnomah County. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could get 1% - 1,409 units donated.

Another idea is that private owners of property are donating their apartment buildings to community foundations that sell the property. Is there a way to get the word out publicly that donations could be made to some of our wonderful non-profits like REACH Community Development, N.W. Housing Alternatives, Innovative Housing, Hacienda, Central City Concern, Human Solutions, ROSE CDC who would then keep them affordable to very low income folks?

We need to be open to new models. Portland Habilitation Center plans to build 500 units over the next 5-6 years in East Portland. Can we find out if other funds could be used to draw down those rents to be affordable to families at 30% of MFI or less?

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church located at S.W. 13th & Clay wants to take down their church building and are willing to build housing for formerly homeless people. Can you imagine a church willing to give up its stained glass windows and its sanctuary? All they want in the new building is a community space where they can worship on Sundays and continue the week day program of Clay Street Table which will have served more than 60,000 meals and groceries to hungry people in the downtown area this year. They own the land. They have worked for years with a reputable non-profit developer who could not identify the resources to make the project work. Is there anyone in this audience who would like to work with the members of St. Stephen’s to make this happen? They will have a table at the reception downstairs in Fellowship Hall following this talk, and they will be waiting to talk to you.

We have wonderful planners, developers, architects, community development organizations, thoughtful and concerned for profit developers in our community. We have great bankers, and lawyers, and accountants. It’s hard for me to imagine that we can’t provide housing for everyone if we set our minds and hearts to it.
You’ve probably all read or heard about Phil Knight standing up at a fundraising event for Oregon Health Sciences University at the Nines on September 20th and offering an astonishing gift and challenge. He announced that he and his wife Penny would donate $500 million to OHSU for cancer research if they can raise an equivalent $500 million in the next two years. I could perfectly imagine this scene, and I know, as a community, we will not leave $500 million on the table. The money will be raised. Already they have individuals and school groups making contributions towards the challenge. Phil and Penny Knight are investing their wealth in a proven model that has been successful with cancer research. Most of us have lost someone we loved to cancer. Who wouldn’t want to invest $1 billion to research treatments that will eradicate it?

Would we do the same for housing? At Northwest Pilot Project, we believe we have a proven model for successfully housing formerly homeless people long-term. We are the laboratory where we’ve tested models, measured results, have been interested in long term outcomes. In all of our research and evaluation, and years of experience we have found that the greatest predictor of long-term success and stability in housing is having an apartment that is permanently affordable to the individual or family. We have a whole social service system that is working towards this same goal. If you ask any case manager or housing specialist at any agency in Multnomah County working with homeless people – what is the most important tool we could give you to be successful in your work – they would answer with one voice – apartments that are affordable to our clients on their incomes.

I’d like to thank all of you for coming today, and I’d like to thank First Congregational Church for inviting me to present the Oliver Lecture. Along with Trinity Episcopal, First Congregational was one of the first churches to support Northwest Pilot Project from its early days.

If I could leave you with anything today it’s a sense of the urgency I feel, and the very real possibility of solving our housing problem. As Portlanders we have a lot to be proud of, and some things that we still need to be ashamed of, and yet I’m convinced from the speaking I’ve done, that people universally understand how important housing is, how fundamental it is, and that all of us want to live in a city where everyone has decent housing.

We have to work faster. We need to be smarter about the way we do this work, and we need to hold each other accountable about whether we’re meeting the goals we’ve set. We need a collective sense of urgency. But most of all – we need more resources. There are yellow response cards in the pews that you can fill out if you’re interested in getting involved in this effort. People will be collecting them at the back of the sanctuary, or you can bring them to us at our literature table downstairs during the reception.

On January 20, 1937, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke these words at his Second Inaugural address: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished. The test of of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Portland is at a defining moment in its history. There’s a choice to be made here. We live in a beautiful city. It could be a great city. I envision a Portland of the future that has decent housing for all its citizens. I believe with all my heart and soul that we can make this a reality.

I’d like to end my comments today with a brief story. As I had said earlier, in 1993 I was doing a lot of speaking throughout our community about a Housing Trust Fund. Sometimes these talks would be televised and I didn’t even know it. One day a package was dropped off at my office for me and there was a note with it and the note read:

Dear Director Emmons:

I saw you on television and you are right. Everyone deserves housing. When my Mom and Timmy and me were in the shelter we were sad and scared. It was hard to go to school. Things are better now that we have our own apartment. I wanted to come and work with you on the trust fund but my Mom says I’m too young. I’m nine. She said it was o.k. to give you this. It’s all my savings for a bike. Please use it for housing.

Your friend, Chelsea

And in the package was her world bank and it was filled with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters totaling $23.74. I kept the world bank – I still have the money. I always said if we ever did get a trust fund in this community I wanted Chelsea’s money to be the first money in.

Thank you

Tags:

Susan Emmons, Northwest Pilot Project, Oliver Lecture, Ending homelessness, foreclosure, Clark Center, Comprehensive Housing Affordable Strategy, Housing Trust Fund, REACH Community Development, Home Forward