Who’s responsible for addressing homelessness locally?
If you are confused, I commiserate. It takes a lot of tracking.
After all, sometimes elected leaders collaborate and streamline efforts, and sometimes they break apart systems and create programs anew. On occasion, a request for collaboration is actually a demand for acquiescence.
Put all this on repeat.
I’ll try to provide a quick, incomplete tour through local government responsibility regarding homelessness.
Imagine I’m holding a wobbly camera, and join me!
The city and county created the Joint Office of Homeless Services only seven years ago — an achievement in collaboration.
Deborah Kafoury and Dan Saltzman — at the time a Multnomah County Chair and city of Portland commissioner, respectively — wrote a commentary for Street Roots in April 2016, titled “Integrated city, county effort best approach to homelessness.” They argued a “divided system is more difficult to navigate by those in need of assistance, and is less operationally efficient.”
“The city of Portland and Multnomah County each provide services, targeted toward different populations: the city focuses on single adults, while the county focuses on families, youths and survivors of domestic violence,” Kafoury and Saltzman wrote.
Additionally, while the county’s focus is on health and human services, the city runs the Housing Bureau.
For the first six years, Marc Jolin ran the Joint Office. The last year has seen two interim directors, Shannon Singleton and Joshua Bates.
There was a coordinating board, too, called “A Home for Everyone.” It was launched a couple of years before the Joint Office and included the city of Gresham, Home Forward (the housing authority that issues federal housing vouchers and also develops housing) and other organizations. It dissolved last year. A finite duration is often healthy, but it’s worth pointing out its demise might herald a need for a new, unifying vision to communicate clearly what all the parts add up to.
The Joint Office administers contracts for outreach, shelters, rent assistance and supportive housing services. This is where the Multnomah County portion of the Metro Tax Measure funds land and are distributed, and how contracts are issued to nonprofits.
Speaking of Metro, since 2018, the regional government served as a vehicle to capture and distribute voter-approved funds in two instances — the housing bond (2018) and the Supportive Housing Services tax (2020) — as a way to stretch collaboration beyond county lines.
But I digress. Back to the Joint Office, which, although it brings the city and county together, is managed under Multnomah County.
Tension over what “collaboration” means is often a battle over purse strings. After all, the city contributes to the Joint Office by way of a budget allotment through the Housing Bureau and sends one commissioner as a kind of emissary, similar to how commissioners are assigned bureaus. But it is the county chair who develops the budget that is brought to the county board of commissioners for a vote. The Multnomah County Chair is now Jessica Vega Pederson.
Last week, Mayor Ted Wheeler re-assigned himself as the city commissioner liaison to the Joint Office of Homeless Services, pulling that back from Commissioner Dan Ryan.
All the while, the city continues to develop additional programs to address homelessness often through the lens of so-called livability, such as the Citywide Coordinated Campsite Cleanup Program in 2014, which became the Impact Reduction Program, which Wheeler also manages by way of the Office of Management and Finance.
Lucas Hillier, Impact Reduction Program manager, endeavored to systematize these sweeps so that, at its best, no one person can unduly influence the system through either making 100s of calls or pulling strings — this was the stuff of his social work project as a Portland State University student.
But as Street Roots began reporting last summer, the mayor’s office has found new ways to circumvent this by way of the police. In the bureau re-assignments, despite describing Commissioner Rene Gonzalez’s portfolio as “public safety,” Wheeler has maintained the Portland Police Bureau.
Now, follow my camera to an emergency declaration last February in which Wheeler announced the Street Services Coordination Center, or SSCC.
Like the Joint Office, it’s supposed to connect the county and city. This time, the Joint Office is hubbed beneath the newly formed SSCC (I hope you aren’t getting dizzy), but in this instance, it’s the city in the lead.
In theory, the SSCC better connects outreach workers to city programs and services. It could be a good thing. As Katherine Lindsay and Kathleen Evans found in another PSU social work project (this one in 2019) most bureaus spend money on homelessness in a “reactionary, compliance-focused” manner. At its best, such integration could be “intervention-based, harm-reduction strategies.”
But at its worst, this is a system that is organized around city sweeps rather than non-coercive manners generally led by Joint Office-funded programs. The SSCC is coordinating parking enforcement, the police, park rangers and firefighters to connect people to shelters, safe rest villages and other services.
Oh — and the SSCC is also housed under Wheeler by way of Mike Meyers, public safety director, who reports to Wheeler.
But what’s not housed under Wheeler? Housing.
Wheeler assigned the Housing Bureau to Commissioner Carmen Rubio, along with bureaus that deal with permits and zoning, a promising step. This is the first time Wheeler separated the assignment for the Housing Bureau from the Joint Office, which is at odds with the larger collaboration effort the Joint Office launched (first, he ran both, then Ryan ran both, until the recent reassignment). The Housing Bureau is key to developing new housing as well as supporting renters and, in the best system, would be strongly connected to services devoted to ending homelessness for people. The Housing Bureau is also looking for a new director.
The last decade has been busy. As Israel Bayer writes in "Everyone deserves a safe place to call home," his Substack column, “The City of Portland and the State of Oregon went from having almost no progressive housing polices (zoning, land-use related to affordable housing, renter’s rights, ongoing revenue options, etc.) post-recession to everything being on the table.”
This has meant the creation of new programs and systems that tackle the pressing, yet decades-long, humanitarian injustice that is homelessness. We need memory and vision — a strong sense of how we got to where we are, alongside nimbleness toward new ideas. One without the other can mean that we are either ill-adapted to the times or lack sustained attention to see through the hard work that leads to transformational change.
Bayer also describes how, a decade or so ago, the late-Nick Fish, as well as Kafoury and then-state legislator Tina Kotek “began to work with advocates and political strategists to think about pathways forward given the enormity of what was beginning to transpire. It was all hands on deck.”
Kafoury just finished her tenure at the county, and her next plans have not been announced. Kotek is now governor. She’s been in the policy weeds around homelessness and housing for years. Here’s hoping she brings both memory and vision to the position.
I wrap up my wobbly, quick tour of “who’s responsible for homelessness locally.” Next up: I set my sights on the state.
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