OPINION | County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson announces plan to begin housing homeless Multnomah County residents
Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson announced a planned $14 million investment to begin housing homeless Multnomah County residents Feb. 3. The plan, funded by previously non-budgeted Metro Homeless Services Tax Measure dollars, directly connects homeless neighbors with supportive housing.
This announcement should be regarded as much more than a passing blip in the news cycle.
Vega Pederson put forward housing-focused outreach to people on the streets, starting in Old Town and downtown Portland and then moving to East Multnomah County. The housing? An expansion of a pilot called “Move-in Multnomah,” which guarantees a year’s rent to landlords and provides services to the person who moved into the apartment, depending on what support they need.
Here are three reasons why this announcement is so significant:
1. Housing is the goal, thank goodness
Last summer, the New York Times spotlighted Houston’s success connecting people in camps to housing. Allowing for the fact that Houston has more favorable conditions to quickly house people because of relative costs and vacancy, there was a big takeaway: unrelenting focus.
“The people living in the encampment would not be consigned to homeless shelters, cited for trespassing or scattered to the winds, but, rather, given a home,” Michael Kimmelman wrote in the article.
There must be an unrelenting focus on housing — producing it, redesignating it, freeing it up, making it cheaper — and connecting people to that housing.
Our region needs to “screw its courage to the sticking place,” as Shakespeare said, and that sticking place is housing.
Vega Pederson’s strategy resembles Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s strategy rolled out after declaring a state of emergency in Los Angeles last month.
The newly elected mayor’s “Inside Safe” strategy focuses sustained outreach in particular Los Angeles neighborhoods, connecting people to some form of housing or motel rooms — something with more safety and privacy than congregate shelters. Bass has described how it is rare for people to refuse actual housing if it is offered through sustained outreach.
Vega Pederson pointed this out Feb. 3, too. When asked whether people would be forced to move, she referred to successes she saw in Seattle.
“Normally what happened in the experience of Seattle is that people move most often into housing, and sometimes they move into shelter,” Vega Pederson said.
Or as my grandmother would say, “don’t borrow trouble.” First, try to solve the problem.
2. Yes, ‘housing first’ can be quick housing
You may have heard attacks on the philosophy of “housing first,” which Kimmelman described as “a practice, supported by decades of research, that moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a 12-step program or find God or a job.”
Our region is set up well for housing first because voters passed the Metro Supportive Housing Services measure in 2020, which provides funds for both rent assistance and other supports, whether that be mental health, addiction treatments, life skills, job training and more.
But housing first has been under attack by the right-wing Cicero Institute, which has written legislation that’s been introduced or voted into law in states like Tennesee, Missouri, Texas, Wisconsin and Georgia.
Locally, both Mayor Ted Wheeler and Commissioner Dan Ryan voiced skepticism about the resolutions City Council passed in November 2022, citing the slowness of construction as a reason to build camps.
But housing first can be about quick housing, too.
Move-in Multnomah — that program about working with landlords, guaranteeing rent assistance and providing wrap-around services — is about housing first.
If we are going to screw our courage to the sticking place — housing — emphasis needs to be on housing anywhere, everywhere. The Portland Housing Bureau can buy existing apartment buildings and motels.
For example, Bass’ state of emergency in Los Angeles accelerated spending on housing and various city processes, focusing all bureaus on this directive. Commissioner Carmen Rubio is now in charge of the Portland Housing Bureau, the Bureau of Development Services, the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability and Prosper Portland. We need to see streamlining, urgency and focus.
3. Watch what happens with the MAC Team
Significantly, the county plan sets up a “multi-agency coordinating group,” or “MAC team,” coordinating deeper cooperation between the “Joint Office, behavioral health providers, shelter providers and culturally specific organizations.” This borrows from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority up north.
That expression — “MAC team” — might sound familiar.
That’s because the governor required a MAC team in each region in which she called for a state of emergency. The state is setting up a MAC team for the Portland metro area, beyond just Multnomah County, but by setting up a mini-version, the county is aligning the best it can. And that’s significant because Kotek has called for $130 million to be distributed to the MAC teams.
So this isn’t just another bureaucratic acronym — it’s designed to get stronger and align with state efforts at the time when Kotek is asking for a billion dollars in housing funding from the Oregon Legislature.
This plan, then, is about aligning, coordinating, scaling up and focusing on the sticking place — housing.
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