OPINION | Responsibilties of the state in addressing the homelessness crisis
Steel your gaze on the state.
Gov. Tina Kotek signaled she is prioritizing housing and homelessness by issuing three executive orders on her first day in office, Jan 10.
Think of it as a braid woven from these three strands: the need for more housing, the need to connect people experiencing homelessness to housing, and the need to quell evictions and prevent people from falling into homelessness.
These executive orders aim to solve homelessness or, with the goal of housing in sight, improve conditions for people experiencing homelessness. That might seem obvious, but too often, action discounts their lives, instead focusing on moving people away from eyeshot. Not in this case.
Without public vigilance, though, such aims could be undermined.
So, steel your gaze on the state, and get ready to act.
Kotek could be the right governor at the right time to make a significant impact. She comes in with years of focus on issues around homelessness while wrestling with policy. Her decade as Oregon Speaker of the House means she understands how to work with the legislature, and she is immediately building on the work she led as Speaker.
Take her executive order to build more housing. In the 2021 session when she was Speaker, the legislature required an Oregon Housing Needs Analysis, prepared by the Department of Land Conservation and Development and Oregon Housing and Community Services, to recommend how Oregon cities and counties plan for "affordable, fair and equitable housing outcomes."
The agencies issued those recommendations, perfectly timed for Kotek to issue her executive order with both a long-term goal — about 360,000 homes over 10 years, split into increments of 36,000 homes a year — and the next steps, creating a Housing Production Advisory Council to craft the budget and policies to get this done. The deadline to create the budget and policies is a year away, so the council needs to be pressured to proceed with urgency.
On the other hand, thankfully, the second executive order is about getting things done faster by declaring states of emergency in areas where unsheltered homelessness rose by more than 50% since 2017 — Salem (Marion and Polk counties), Medford and Ashland (Jackson County), Eugene and Springfield (Lane County), Central Oregon and the Portland metro.
This executive order calls for each area to create a “multi-agency coordination team,” or “MAC team.” Pointedly, the state will create the MAC team for the Portland metro area — there’s no use in getting tangled in dysfunction — while providing technical assistance for other areas in the state.
This is all organized around federally defined regions of coordinated services, and much of the rest of the state gets lumped together, whether that be the Oregon Coast, the Umpqua Forests or towns along the Snake River.
The final executive order requires the entire state to prioritize “reducing sheltered and unsheltered homelessness.”
Kotek proposed the Oregon legislature commit $130 million to immediate actions sheltering people currently on the streets and, as we know locally, there will be contention about how this happens.
These principles should guide policies pursued by the Oregon legislature:
- Does this policy make conditions better, not worse, for people experiencing homelessness?
- Does this policy create better options for people, rather than forcing compliance?
- Does this policy move people closer to housing?
- Additionally, ask how a policy impacts communities disproportionately impacted by homelessness. Black and Indigenous Portlanders are overrepresented. The same is true for people with disabilities. Consider whether the new policy harms communities.
The public has to be loud in its participation — writing letters, holding actions, contacting legislators and testifying, testifying, testifying. I keep a memory close to me. When I took this job five years ago, the late then-Portland Commissioner Nick Fish advised me from his vantage point. Legislators — whether local, state or federal — need to be pushed. It’s by creating the outcry, or the outpouring of advocacy, that legislators have the space to act.
Street Roots advocacy will be calling attention to legislative bills. The Oregon Legislature convened this week, and I’ll devote more column space to what’s ahead.
Keep up a clear-eyed dedication to real solutions, and be loud enough it reverberates in the Oregon Capitol, way past our season of bare branches when the governor issued her executive orders, past the brightening of tulips and then daffodils on the Capitol grounds, past the cherry blossoms that pile up and get raked away, the marigolds of summer, the mounding leaves of the fall.
Kotek issued a clear vision for dealing with housing and homelessness, and in the four years to come, year-round, the public needs to stay engaged.
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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