The story of ending people’s homelessness in our community and around the country over the past 30 years is so dysfunctional it’s hard to explain to the general public what’s worked and what hasn’t worked.
A little history might help. Between the years of 1979 and 1983 more $54 billion were cut from federal affordable housing projects. We never got that money back. In fact, the cuts just kept coming, forcing local communities to carry the burden of ending homelessness for 30 plus years now.
Mayors and elected officials who campaign on ending their city’s homelessness come and go. Bureaucrats and advocates working to end homelessness come and go. National strategies to help build the political will to end homelessness lay strung out in political graveyards from Washington D.C. to Portland. It’s frustrating, to say the least.
I’m not saying we should all throw our hands in the air and stop working to end homelessness. Anyone who reads this column and Street Roots knows we’re constant optimists regardless of the challenges we face. We know housing equals opportunity. We also know it’s cheaper to house someone than it is to let individuals or families remain homeless.
Homelessness is the result of outside forces related to numerous realities. The recession, the war, the health care system, a broken foster care, mental health and justice system, domestic violence — the list goes on and on. Regardless of what your crazy uncle might have told you about people choosing to be homeless — that’s simply not the case. I’ve never met anyone in my life that woke up one day and said, “I want to be homeless.” It simply doesn’t happen.
Our community is in the process of unveiling Home For Everyone: A United Plan to End Homelessness for Portland and Multnomah County. In layman’s terms, it’s a plan to bring together the community to oversee an array of complex services to help deliver the best outcomes for ending individual and family homelessness in our region.
Before the Home For Everyone plan you may remember the Bush Administrations 10-year plan to end homelessness. Before that there was the Clinton five-year plan to end homelessness. The reality is that there have been a lot of plans to end homelessness since the 1980s.
Needless to say, I’m a bit skeptical about the new plan. Call me crazy, but it’s one of the reasons I accepted the opportunity to serve on the board for Home For Everyone. I believe there’s a collective sense on the board that if this plan is going to be successful then we’re going to need the leadership to make this something more than the status quo. This has to be more than simply rearranging the deck chairs.
It all starts with Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury and Portland Mayor Charlie Hales. It’s one thing to develop a plan and to bring people together. It’s another thing all together to lead our community in prioritizing affordable housing and homelessness.
For years, housing has been a central focus of Multnomah County and the City of Portland. What hasn’t been the focus is gaining additional ongoing resources in a way that changes the playing field. For far to long we’ve been funding homeless and housing systems around the edges, while state and federal cuts continue to bleed our communities dry.
If Multnomah County is to set itself a part and practice what we preach concerning sustainability and equity in our community than we’re going to have to create something that has never been built before.
How might we get there, you ask? It starts with holding state and federal officials’ feet to the fire. It makes me cringe every time I hear our governor talk about health care, jobs and education without ever once mentioning housing. Without access to affordable housing, everything else becomes a moot point. Local officials need to direct government lobbyists to put the full court press on elected officials in both Oregon and in D.C. concerning housing.
Locally, it’s a matter of building the political will to move additional ongoing resources forward. Without it, the Home For Everyone plan will simply be spinning its wheels.
