“Homelessness is not a political issue. It’s about human lives.”
What was once a battered Econo Lodge, a strip of rooms bordering a blacktop asphalt parking lot near downtown Hillsboro, is now a flagship rehousing project offering temporary transitional housing to homeless people. Washington County purchased the building for $6.15 million using Project Turnkey funds.
Jenny Aguirre, program manager for the Hillsboro Bridge Shelter, said the shelter doesn’t want to add any barriers to the challenge of getting rehoused.
“No one is ever going to be kicked out of here for actual substance abuse,” Aguirre said.
The shelter is part of Washington County’s rapid effort to deploy newly available funds to address homelessness and adopt evidence-based approaches to serving the unhoused. The county joined Housing and Urban Development’s House America initiative, a landmark national effort rallying cities to deploy federal funding for homelessness through rehousing and affordable housing development, with the objective of having affordable housing in the development pipeline by Dec. 31.
Aguirre led an Aug. 2 tour of the facility for Department of Housing and Urban Development staff members Richard Cho, senior advisor for housing and services, and Margaret Salazar, regional administrator. Members of the Washington County Department of Housing Services were also in attendance.
At the Hillsboro Bridge Shelter, Aguirre explains, the focus is on behavior. So while drugs and alcohol aren’t allowed, when someone violates that rule, the staff takes a solution-oriented approach.
“When we say it's behavior based, we do that in the sense of like, we just want to make sure we're in a safe environment,” Aguirre said. If a resident were to take drugs and become violent or aggressive, Aguirre says, “We're like, ‘Okay, we're at the next step. Now, let's think about rehab.’ We don't exit people into the streets. We want to exit them into another alternative.”
The county converted the 60 lower-cost motel rooms into a shelter offering individual dwelling spaces and sidestepping the problematic congregate living format. What was once a lobby serves as an office space where staff serve food, offer supplies and provide additional resources. Residents can access mental health support on-site, as well as a room dedicated to free clothes and bedding.
The Washington County Department of Housing Services deliberately organized the Hillsboro Bridge Shelter to avoid some common pitfalls of shelters. The typical intake is about an hour, and the facility doesn’t require drug screenings, a common requirement for shelters often deterring people who need shelter or resulting in staff asking people to leave if they test positive. Couples are permitted, and people can bring their pets with them.
The Hillsboro Bridge Shelter is part of a flagship effort in Washington County, which doubled funding for its housing services since January 2021 from $65 million to $130 million. The Washington County Department of Housing Services expanded its staff from 40 to 73 and now encompasses homeless initiatives, an affordable housing bond program and housing voucher program, in addition to owning and operating multiple affordable housing apartment buildings across Washington County.
Project Turnkey, which funded the purchase of the Econo Lodge, was part of the state’s $65 million effort to alleviate homelessness. Allocated by the Oregon Legislature in 2020, the program funded the purchase of motels and hotels for use as non-congregate shelters. In less than seven months, the project created 19 shelters in 13 counties, upping the statewide number of shelter beds by 20%.
“When you have more people falling into homelessness than exiting, you're going to have homelessness. That's just simple math.”
— Richard Cho, HUD senior advisor for housing and services
The early success of the project and ongoing need for homeless services prompted a second round of Project Turnkey funds. In 2022, the legislature allocated another $50 million in funds for additional emergency shelter and transitional housing.
As part of its effort to address homelessness, Washington County joined the House America initiative in January, a federal effort deployed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. The initiative rallies local and state leaders to proactively address homelessness while providing an evidence-based framework for solving it.
Since joining, Washington County housed 400 homeless people, distributed 3,177 housing vouchers, added 100 additional year-round shelter beds and added 40 housing case managers to its staff.
The county dedicates significant funds and resources to address homelessness, a testament to the depth of the problem. Since its launch in September 2021, membership in House America rose to more than 100, representing primarily cities, in addition to a handful of counties, regional government associations and the Cherokee Nation.
On Aug. 1, the state of Oregon and city of Eugene joined the initiative. (Portland has declined to participate so far).
A national crisis
Homelessness is a national crisis, and other overlapping crises — the pandemic and housing affordability — are making it worse. Communities across the country increasingly face an unprecedented rate of homelessness. According to HUD, homelessness rates were on the rise even before the pandemic, and according to HUD’s 2020 Annual Homeless Assessment Report Part 1 to Congress, on a single night in 2020, more than 580,000 people experienced homelessness in the United States.
People are becoming homeless at a higher rate than they are getting rehoused, Cho said.
“Between 2017 and 2020, about 908,000 people on average in each of those years newly entered homelessness for the first time ever, and 900,000 people in each of those years, on average, exited homelessness,” Cho said. “When you have more people falling into homelessness than exiting, you're going to have homelessness. That's just simple math.”
Cho was addressing roughly two dozen people gathered in a conference room in Hillsboro on Aug. 2. Washington County Housing Services staff were present to talk with Cho about efforts to alleviate homelessness in Washington County.
Cho was promoting the House America initiative, a self-proclaimed “all-hands-on-deck” response to a significant increase in homelessness across the country. The federal government recently released a flood of COVID-19 funds and money the Biden administration carved out to address housing and homelessness. House America launched alongside these funds to guide spending to be fruitful in the effort to prevent and alleviate homelessness.
The program zeroes in on affordable housing and rehousing programs and offers participants peer learning and support, technical assistance, data support and guidance.
“There was a 27% decline in chronic homelessness under the Obama administration and a 29% increase in the last seven years,” Cho said.
The response to social issues like homelessness, Cho noted, is generally beholden to ebbs and flows of political priorities. Funds for homelessness and housing efforts weather a pattern of fluctuating administrations alternately stripping, then flooding, their programs with cash, a back and forth pattern preventing programs from stabilizing and having lasting positive impacts. Cho emphasized the current influx of funds was an opportunity to demonstrate that supportive funds to transition people out of poverty and into housing are effective.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to demonstrate that when you have federal investments, and you coupled that with the kind of leadership that I'm seeing here in this community, and the collaboration between all partners, that's when you can actually show measurable progress,” Cho said. “And if we show that progress with the resources we have now, we make the case for continued investments. I am hopeful that we are not going to create a feast and famine situation.”
While funding is key in maintaining programs to lift people out of poverty and homelessness, Cho emphasized issues contributing to homelessness were more fundamental than rotating administrations.
“I don't think that's attributable purely to politics,” Cho said. "That gets attributed to the fact that housing costs are rising across this country and more people are being displaced.”
Still, Cho anticipates ongoing political division over social spending means the future of this approach isn’t guaranteed. If funds are stripped away, there is greater opportunity for proponents of more aggressive tactics to gain a foothold.
“There's increasing rhetoric about alternative ways to respond to homelessness, that call for increasing (criminal) penalties for people experiencing homelessness, that call for creating what amount to state-sanctioned internment camps … where people are sort of forcibly removed, jailed up,” Cho said. “This is literally the platform of some people.”
Efforts like these are gaining momentum in some parts of the country.
“(Criminalizing homelessness), unfortunately, is catching on in a number of states,” Cho said. “Texas, Missouri, Tennessee have all passed laws that essentially do this, that actually calls for redirecting state federal dollars to fund these (internment) camps for people experiencing homelessness. That is what we're up against.”
Cho, of course, supports the opposite tack, promoting a deep investment in social services, rehousing efforts and affordable housing. While the approaches are evidence-based, the ability to continue investing in them isn’t certain because of rapidly shifting politics.
“Homelessness is not a political issue. It’s about human lives,” Cho said. “In November, we have an election that might change the dynamics of Congress. And so we're worried that what we will end up doing is spending a lot of time answering questions on the Hill, as opposed to doing the work that we're supposed to be doing, which is to get more resources out.”
Editor's note: A previous version of this story erroneously stated the city of Hillsboro purchased the building for the Hillsboro Bridge Shelter. Street Roots regrets this error. Quotes in this story were also updated to clarify statements made by Richard Cho.
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