Advocates and officials agree: investment required beyond temporary shelter
Sandra Fairbank has been unhoused for seven years, becoming homeless after leaving an abusive marriage. Since then, she has moved from camp to camp in different parts of the city with a trusted group of friends. But she’s never fully felt at ease.
Even though she has stayed with a group, Fairbank said she is constantly on guard for dangerous situations like shootings happening near her campsites. If she finds a place to settle in that feels relatively safe, she said she still can’t relax, knowing that she could easily have to move again if law enforcement decides to sweep the area.
Fairbank is now staying in an indoor space where she has her own bedroom and bathroom, though she doesn’t know how long she’ll be able to stay there. She said that being able to live inside with some privacy and access to basic necessities — like a shower and a bed where she can get an undisturbed night of sleep — has been a game-changer for her.
“Leaps and bounds, that’s what a shower will do for you,” Fairbank said. “You get a little bit of dignity.”
Fairbank has been wary of staying in traditional homeless shelters. But after she has to leave her current space, she is willing to temporarily reside in an alternative shelter, like an outdoor site with individual tiny home pods, until she finds a permanent place to live.
RELATED READING: City can’t say when they will plan, build Safe Rest Villages
Portland Commissioner Dan Ryan is spearheading a project to build more of these alternative shelter sites, ostensibly to help people like Fairbank. These sites — dubbed Safe Rest Villages (SRVs) — are intended to provide privacy in the form of individual pods or tiny homes as well as hygiene services like showers and access to social workers to provide wraparound care.
But activists, unhoused Portlanders and city officials are concerned about the timeline of this project, which Ryan initially intended to complete by the end of 2021. The SRV plan hasn’t yet been able to overcome hiccups like the apparent difficulty to secure sites for these shelters: less than two months before the end of the year, Ryan’s team has still only announced two of six shelter sites.
Project leaders retracted their announcement of a third site after realizing it was located on a floodplain, a backtrack that has cast further doubt about when the SRVs will come to fruition, if at all.
With the consensus that something needs to be done to address homelessness in Portland — despite disagreements about what addressing it should look like and concern that some parties aren’t operating in good faith — people across the ideological spectrum are getting tired of waiting around for this project to be completed.
And although Ryan’s team has stated the ultimate goal is to help SRV residents transition into affordable, permanent long-term housing, without a dual effort to ensure the existence of such housing — or the funds necessary to help people pay for it — this project can appear more like a bandage than a real solution.
Housing for all?
The cost of living in Portland has rapidly increased in recent years. A July report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition found renting a two-bedroom apartment in the Portland metro area would require an almost $30 an hour wage for it to be affordable, which is more than double the area’s current $14 minimum wage. Across the whole state, the discrepancy between wages and housing costs has risen during the pandemic.
This discrepancy has been met with scant federal assistance, a continuation of the Reagan era dissolution of HUD funding for subsidized housing. Affordable housing advocates say this is a problem that cannot be solved with projects like the SRVs alone.
Anna Kemper is a member of the board at Portland: Neighbors Welcome (P:NW), an advocacy organization aimed at helping all Portlanders access and keep permanent, stable housing. Kemper said the housing crisis in Portland is much larger than the scope of what projects like the Safe Rest Villages can possibly address.
“If they treated housing like SNAP, where if you qualify for food assistance you get it, we would not have homelessness like we have it right now."
“Portland simply does not have enough homes that everyday people can afford, and the shortage is especially severe for the poorest people in the city,” Kemper wrote to Street Roots in an email statement on behalf of P:NW. “We can blame the housing shortage on nearly a century of racist, classist exclusionary zoning that blocked lower-cost homes from being built, and on 50 years of federal disinvestment in public and other affordable housing. So we’re in a cutthroat game of musical chairs where everyone is fighting over a handful of available homes, everyone pays more than they should, and way too many people can’t afford any home at all.”
According to the Portland Housing Bureau, there are dozens of affordable housing projects recently completed or currently in development. But the physical availability of housing is not the only barrier preventing people from accessing affordable homes.
Denis Theriault, communications coordinator for the Joint Office of Homeless Services, said temporary shelters like SRVs can help lift people over the barriers that make it difficult to find permanent housing. He said a key benefit of sanctioned shelters that offer wraparound services is residents are able to access providers who can offer direct support to unhoused people that, hopefully, will result in access to permanent housing.
Those working at the nonprofits running the wraparound support services at these shelters can get to know the residents and help them navigate accessing services like social security or veteran’s benefits, as well as provide clean clothing and help developing job-hunting skills.
“Those are services we fund through the Joint Office, because that’s what helps get people into housing,” Theriault said.
But even if someone is completely ready to move into permanent housing, there may be one thing missing: the rent. The Joint Office received relatively substantial funding for extra rent assistance in Multnomah County’s 2022 budget through the Supportive Housing Services tax to house hundreds more people currently experiencing chronic homelessness, including many who will need long-term rent subsidies.
But echoing P:NW’s sentiments, Theriault said there is just not enough money to help everyone else leave shelters or the streets for housing without an infusion of ongoing federal rent assistance, and he suggested people earning below a certain income should automatically receive that help.
“If they treated housing like SNAP, where if you qualify for food assistance you get it, we would not have homelessness like we have it right now,” he said.
A transitional state
Theriault said another beneficial element of shelter programs like SRVs is the stability they can provide. While they’re not a permanent fix, Theriault said the Joint Office sees permanent housing and temporary shelter, especially shelter like the planned SRVs utilizing tiny homes or pods to allow people to have their own private space, as both meaningful, connected elements of addressing homelessness.
“It allows people to have a kitchen, a bathroom, a shower, a door that’s their own,” Theriault said. “It’s not the same as an apartment or a home. But it’s something that’s secure.”
Fairbank is involved with an organization called Cultivate Initiatives (CI), a Southeast Portland-based nonprofit that opened in 2020 to advocate for unhoused Portlanders and help provide them with job opportunities and resources. She runs a shower truck program that serves the local homeless population and helps with CI’s other projects, like trash cleanup.
Fairbank said she’s benefited a lot from the work experience and the dignity she’s gained from being able to live indoors. She still thinks she will be more comfortable living in something like an SRV for a period of time before moving into permanent housing, to ease the culture shock of transitioning from living on the streets to having a permanent place of her own.
“When you start making a wage and being able to afford a place again after you’ve been homeless for seven years, it’s almost like you have to retrain your brain,” Fairbank said. “I need that transition period.”
Other people on the CI team who have experienced transitioning from the streets to permanent housing or are looking to help other people with that process, agree that staying in alternative shelter can be invaluable. But they say it’s vital that the sites provide a community-oriented approach and that the residents are treated with respect.
“It’s a place to grow, to develop something different than what you get from being on the streets,” Chris Vachon, CI’s property steward and development lead, said. “The main point is to create connections with people and show them a different way.”
On Nov. 1, Mayor Ted Wheeler, Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury and Ryan announced the city and county will combine portions of their surplus budgets to fund a $38 million homelessness response package. The majority of this funding will be spent on shelter beds, including in traditional congregate shelters, which homeless people and activists say have a lot of downsides when compared to alternative shelters.
Y’Ishia Rosborough, CI’s executive director, said that the negative parts of traditional congregate shelters can trump people’s concerns about living on the streets. Alternative shelters can provide a more humane space where people are able to have some independence and privacy.
“A lot of houseless people don’t want to be in (congregate) shelters,” Rosborough said. “It’s good to be able to change the narrative of what a shelter is. You’re sheltering, but you’re not in a room full of people you don’t know. You’re not getting retraumatized.”
Congregate shelters became increasingly problematic during the pandemic because of the risk of COVID-19 transmission between people staying in close corridors. There were outbreaks of the virus at congregate shelters across the country, including in Portland. Given the increased likelihood of health problems among the homeless population, people were at a higher risk of serious illness or death.
But the efficacy of the congregate shelter model was debated before the pandemic, too. Activist groups like the National Coalition for the Homeless say that these large shelters, which might be staged in a gymnasium-size room with little to no privacy offered for residents, “often strip people of their dignity.”
“I would never stay in a shelter, they’re not safe,” she said. “It’s different when you have your own space, your own doors.”
A Nuanced Perspective
Ultimately, there is a demand for shelters like SRVs. The cold and rainy season is here, and people in unsanctioned outdoor encampments continue to live with the possibility of police sweeps, threats from their housed neighbors and a lack of basic resources like showers, public bathrooms or garbage pickup services.
“There needs to be immediate action,” Caleb Tel Coder, who runs community operations for Cultivate Initiatives, said. “We’re approaching another winter; the necessity and immediacy is there.”
But the well-being of homeless people is an issue that can be addressed from multiple sides at the same time, and affordable housing availability and long-term success needs to be just as prioritized.
“We need to look at the 50,000 foot view,” Tel Coder said. “If we don’t have a holistic picture, and we’re just putting people into boxes or structures and calling that good, then we’ve missed the point.”
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