The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2026-01-15
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (24,438 words), shown in readable case and split into speaker turns. Speakers are not yet identified (colors just separate consecutive turns). Auto-captions can contain errors — check the recording for anything that matters.
Session summaryEditor-reviewed
On January 15, 2026, the Portland City Council held a work session, described as rescheduled from an earlier date, focused on homelessness, housing, and the shelter-to-housing continuum. The session opened with framing remarks about the need for a unified council vision on this issue amid constrained budgets, followed by a presentation from the Mayor's office outlining a six-goal (later seven-goal) plan covering ending tent distribution, diversion and reunification programs, emergency shelter system management, a 120-day shelter stay limit policy, community sanitation and enforcement standards, data-driven death reduction targets, and housing production goals, including a proposed 20,000-unit target over eight years. Staff from Portland Solutions and the city's shelter operations provided data on shelter utilization, demographics, costs, and camp removal/waste tonnage figures, though some figures were presented inconsistently across different slides and discussions. Councilors asked questions covering topics such as the 120-day stay limit exemption criteria, housing production feasibility, regional displacement of homeless individuals, equitable service access for BIPOC populations, Portland Street Response's scope, and self-managed housing villages. A second discussion segment addressed a housing continuum framework presented by the Portland Housing Bureau, with councilors offering differing views on where the city should prioritize resources, including transitional housing, SROs, social housing, and permitting reform, versus roles better suited to Multnomah County. The session ended when quorum was lost before all councilors could speak; votes, if any occurred, are recorded in the vote ledger.
AI-drafted from the session's auto-captions, reviewed by an editor — describes the discussion only; recorded votes live in the vote ledger. Captions contain errors.
0 1234. Five. Six. Seven. Good afternoon. Everybody. Welcome to our work session. Hello. This is a work session, so we don't have to take any sort of role, but. Thank you, friends. Welcome to my first work session trying to do this. It's going to be bumpy and I apologize in advance. It's good to see everybody. Second, this is a rescheduled work session from a few months ago to. We've invited the mayor and his team to come and speak with us about homelessness, to housing and the continuum of what comes next. Now that the mayor has achieved his initial goal of 1500 overnight beds, we're going to we need to know what comes next and how do we move forward as a city. Okay, before we turn it over to the mayor, I'd like to turn it over to our chair of our housing and homelessness committee, councilor Avalos, who also will be helping facilitate a lot of this meeting for us today. So councilor Avalos, please take it away.
1 Sounds good. Thank you so much, council president. All right. I just wanted to put some grounding remarks. We're going to go into this discussion with the mayor in the first half. And then the second half I'll lead a little bit of a different discussion. So colleagues, just this week I was speaking with a reporter who said that it doesn't feel like council has a unified vision for homelessness to housing continuum. And I said, darn it, you better look at that. But also I agree, and that's why this conversation matters. This work session is an opportunity for us as a council to get clearer about what we're trying to achieve, what we want to prioritize, and where we believe the city can make the greatest impact with the resources that we have, which are dwindling as we know. I also want to caution us not to turn this into a conversation where we rehash old arguments about the mayor's shelter plan. This is our chance to make an affirmative case for what the city can accomplish on homelessness and housing and the unified housing strategy. Phase one inventory gives us a strong starting place for that conversation. Thank you so much to the mayor, who has brought me in to work with the staff to really set up that vision, and it is my intention to help bridge between the council and the mayor, so that when we're going into this next budget session, we're not going to have all the answers for this budget cycle. I think a lot of the outcomes of us will be more next budget cycle, but I think we'll have a good framing, and it's my intention to help be that bridge from council to the mayor in my role as housing chair, we all know that we can't do everything, especially in a constrained budget environment, and every dollar that we allocate is a trade off, which makes clarity and alignment even more important. Important. And in recent years, the city has increasingly stepped into areas that that traditionally have been led by the county, particularly around shelters. So this is an opportunity to just step back, ask where our investments are going to make the best impact and what role that we feel the city's best position to play. And as we all know, this is the number one issue for portlanders. It's what we were all elected to address. And our eviction courts are the busiest in the state right now. Our city needs up to 120,000 new homes by 2045, yet we are nowhere near meeting that need at our current rate of construction. And while this task is daunting, just because the work is hard doesn't mean we're not going to do it right. And I can trust that my colleagues are prepared to do that work with me. So my hope is that today's discussion can help us move toward a shared vision for how the city leads on homelessness and housing, so that our investments are focused, our strategic and actually move people toward long term stability that they deserve. We owe it to portlanders to meaningfully deliver on the promise of the city where housing is a right, not a privilege. Thank you so much. Looking forward to the conversation. Thank you.
2 Mayor. Welcome. Please take it away.
3 Okay. Council president, council vice president, congratulations to the two of you and to the council colleagues. Good afternoon. And to our city administrator lee. Nice to see you. For the record, my name is mayor keith wilson in Portland. We've committed to providing a safe bed for every person, every night to everyone who wants one. And we've achieved that goal. It's the cornerstone of my campaign to end the suffering and deaths on our streets, and the cruelty of sleeping on sidewalks, in tents and in rvs. That said, 1500 beds is just the tip of the iceberg. This only works if we make continuous improvements to every part of the system. Any person who is down and incapacitated must have care rushed to them immediately. The better we handle the humanitarian crisis on our streets, the better we can build on success by bringing that same focus and resolve to housing and mental health, addiction and to gun violence. A livable city is a prosperous city and a compassionate, decent and dignified community sets the table for economic opportunity for everybody in Portland. During the course of my first year to meet our humanitarian crisis head on, I established a shelter to housing strike team and distilled my plan into six key goals. Next slide. Goal number one ending tent distribution has a direct impact on the safety and livability of our community. I've asked that all organizations funded by public dollars end the practice of handing out tents. This is now within. Excuse me. This is now written into the city of portland's provider contracts. And I've asked that Multnomah county join me and do the same. There's no law against private organizations handing out tents. I will, however, ask that any private organization that continues this practice help with information sharing by providing us with the manufacturer and product name of the tents they're handing out, as well as the distribution numbers. You see, when we discover bodies in tents, we need to be able to report back to the organizations. We want to make them aware of the safety and fatalities outcomes of that strategy. I have good news. Average tent counts in our enhanced service districts. The economic engine of our city have been on a steady and sustainable decline. We're leading with offers of shelter and services and making our community standards clear. More and more people are accepting shelter and services than ever before. And just last week, there were only 33 tents in the downtown core, a 70% reduction since we've all assumed office. Next slide. Thank you. Goal number two diversion and loved one reunification. Diversion means empowering people in immediate housing crisis to find and create their own safe, stable housing alternatives to emergency shelters through problem solving conversations and connecting them with resources. With regard to our reunification program, we have reunited more than 230 individuals to 44 states so far with their loved ones in the last few months of 2025. That represents tens of millions of dollars in supportive housing, dollars saved. It's a housing first, best practice, and the fastest way to house someone in need. And better yet, it's the best kind of housing. It's with somebody who loves them. Diversion must also extend to recovery. In October, I announced the opening of the southeast grand recovery and city team grand emergency shelters. We we listen to our participants, community members and provider partners that told us that recovery oriented beds that centered sobriety were badly needed, and the Portland solutions team stepped in and with only a few months, had that resource added to our community. Thank you. In partnership with Multnomah county and others, we are on track to reunify and house over 700 people to their loved ones in cities around the nation this year. To accomplish this, we will continue to grow referral partnerships for reunifications. We are beyond grateful for partners including urban alchemy, blanchett house, Portland police, our 311 operators who have been fantastic in this process, the city outreach team and so many other organizations for their phenomenal work. Goal number three setting up our emergency shelter system. It's been my goal since the beginning to make the funds contributed to my overnight emergency shelters and day centers the most cost effective money we spend on the homelessness crisis. I'm especially proud of our day centers, one of which now serves up upwards of 600 people per day, giving vulnerable people a place where they're welcomed and can connect with services.
4 Good afternoon, council president, vice president. Congratulations, councilors and city administrator lee, for the record, my name is skylar barker. I'm the director of Portland solutions. We receive many questions about our guests and whether we're equitably assisting them through our throughout the system. That data is available to you all in the public, online. So I just wanted to highlight that of the 1454 individuals served in the fiscal year 2425 at the alternative shelter sites that are listed, 694 were chronically homeless. Similar to the county, white identifying individuals are overrepresented across the system compared to expected distribution. Based on the 2025 point in time count, overrepresentation flips for specific bipoc populations at various shelter sites such as weidler, southwest, nato, ridgeway, and clinton triangle. The population we serve also has higher mental health and substance use disorder acuity compared to those served in other shelters. About 75% of our participants are also experiencing one or more disabilities. That fact underscores the importance of engagement requirements. We cannot reconnect individuals with critical services and benefits they're entitled to, such as social security disability insurance. If they won't have critical conversations with our case managers. Of the 3411 unique individuals that were served between January 1st and September 30th at our of this last year at our emergency overnight shelters, 728 were chronically homeless. Unlike alternative shelters, white identifying individuals were in line with expected distribution based on the 2025 point in time count. Most categories for bipoc representation were at or under expected distribution with not reported, and client doesn't know or prefers not to answer. Impacting differences in expected values. You can see a snapshot of that on your screen. The average total cost in fiscal year 2425 of an alternative shelter was $4,300,207. I want to make three notes on that and this slide. First sunderland rv park was decommissioned in early fiscal year 2526, hence its low projection you can see on the screen, and peninsula crossing was decommissioned in late fiscal year 2425, operating only 325 days in fiscal year 2425. Across the other shelters. Most saw a small decrease in expected expenditure in fiscal year 2526 compared to the previous fiscal year. North Portland roads projected expenditures are much higher than the previous fiscal year, which is expected because the shelter opened in fiscal year 2425 and had only 254 nights in operation during that fiscal year. Second, the city took over contracts for all city operated sites. In those negotiated renegotiated contracts. Cost savings were found in every contract, and we've explained that kind of peace to you all previously. Third, we have additional numbers for cost per bed per night that we will be happy to share, either in committee or report, or another work session, or individually if you're interested in those specific numbers. Thank you. Participation is increasing at all of our emergency overnight shelter sites. As you can see from this utilization chart, in November of 2025, we provided 8717 nights of safe sleep in total. As of the end of November of last year, we provided nearly 58,000 nights of safe sleep. Since may of 2025, the emergency overnight shelters system has served 3411 unduplicated and unique individuals. In fiscal year 2425, we received zero housing placement dollars for city alternative shelter sites. This has hurt our exits to permanent housing. Sunderland rv safe park received priority for the funding to which we did get access because it was closing. We wanted to make sure those folks were first in line for those services. All studies to date have made it clear that funding determines results in terms of housing placement from shelter. Thank you.
5 We're evaluating Multnomah county's homeless services department proposal to realign funding from shelter to permanent supportive housing. We're also in the midst of revisiting our intergovernmental agreement with Multnomah county. Separately, we've completed a memorandum of understanding with Multnomah county to expand the emergency overnight system and shelter operations to 24 hours during winter weather events. In the meantime, we'll continue to carefully assess emergency overnight shelter use to flex up and flex down based on the needs in our community. How do you double the effectiveness of a single shelter bed? You move someone through the system twice as fast. This brings us to goal number four. In 2017, the last year the city of Portland managed the adult shelter system. As this slide illustrates, our emergency shelter system had only 13 people who stayed over a year. Today, Multnomah county manages the majority of the adult system, and we now have hundreds. Applying continuous improvement techniques, we must shift our system and our approach to a rapid exit mindset. A rapid exit mindset has zero cost to implement, with potential for significantly improving savings.
6 Our 120 day stay limit policy requires engagement with case managers or care coordinators. Those engaging and moving forward on their housing journey are eligible for extension. Those experiencing severe mental health issues are exempted from this limit. State limits are based on nationwide best practices. They were finalized in discussions with provider partners in June of 2025. Initial outreach to participants began prior to the policy's implementation. The policy was implemented and clock started on September 1st of 2025. Not engaging with shelter, participants were notified and warned that non engagement would mean they would be ineligible for a stay extension. Notification letters for those not engaging were sent out early last week, with exits occurring by early February. There is also a three prong appeals process. Depending on participant preference folks can engage in. I also just want to note I went to chief's this morning to talk to your chiefs of staff about this policy and give them a further overview that included a couple questions. I just wanted to make note of here and happy to engage further on this policy if folks want to later, but there is a 45 day period of time after which folks could return to the city alternative shelters with a referral. So that was something that one of the chiefs asked this morning. And we also are engaging in reunification efforts. Every individual has a different story. One example is a individual who wanted to reunify with his brother and is now going to stay with his brother. Thank you.
7 We'll work with Multnomah county to develop clear referral process and funding mechanisms to move people from shelter to permanent housing. We will also continue implementing additional alternative shelter guidelines to stop dual residency situations. Individuals should not hold a shelter bed while also living on the street. We will continue data driven analysis of emergency overnight shelter to inform continuous improvement measures, and soon will be introducing a savings program policy to support the housing goals of our guests. Goal number five, we've reestablished community standards on safety, health and sanitation in our city. Portland has no sanitation infrastructure for lived in rvs which pose extreme fire, environmental mold exposure and other life safety issues both to the occupants and the surrounding community. The presence of these vehicles on Portland streets has no, excuse me, has a huge impact on our city's safety, health and sanitation. In conjunction with expanded overnight shelter beds, day centers and secure storage, we've increased tagging and towing of derelict rvs and other lived in vehicles. Importantly for those that might be dumping rvs on our streets in Portland, we are also now building the last known owner for improper disposal, and we're charging standard towing and storage fees for owners who want to retrieve towed rvs or other lived in vehicles.
8 Dashboards like the one in front of you are the eyes and ears of our city. We're returning to enforcing our existing codes on open drug use, illegal dumping, blocked right of way and other life, safety and sanitation issues impacting our public spaces. Over time. I anticipate this data will show us creating a more livable, compassionate, prosperous city and we'll see it in the numbers and on the streets. This is the impact reduction dashboard that is publicly available. This is the monthly waste tonnage collected by impact reduction program, camp assessment and removal teams, as well as glitter trash collection teams. In 2025, those teams removed over 10.3 million pounds of waste. While our new overnight shelter system is having a real and tangible impact on the livability of Portland, we are simultaneously clearing hazardous garbage and maintaining cleaner streets, sidewalks, bike lanes, parks and Green spaces. And we're hearing from portlanders every day who are seeing and appreciating the improvement. Our state owned Oregon department of transportation lands are the unfortunate exception to this. Due to the lapse in the intergovernmental agreement, those areas are not being addressed to our standards, and the people there are currently not receiving the same level of outreach or offer of services. Related to the last slide, this is a look at impact reduction program camp removals in 2025. As you can see, camp removals are on a steady trend as we are expanding shelter bed capacity, providing more life saving care, and leading with compassion and outreach. Our work to address the ongoing impacts of unsheltered homelessness remains. We're making progress, but there is still work to do. Encampments are still present in Portland, and we are keeping pace with the need for camp response and cleanup. These efforts are vital to maintaining public spaces, protecting our environment and ensuring accessibility on our sidewalks and rights of way. It's also important to note, as you look at this data, in addition to seeing the effects of the lapsing in July, there is also seasonality to the work of camp removals. We regularly have slowdowns in the darker, wetter, and colder winter months. We also had some notable camp removal suspensions in January and February. Because of the tri county point in time count and severe weather events. On November 1st, with ample life saving shelter capacity now available, we began enforcement of the city's public camping regulations again. After pausing enforcement in early 2025, enforcement is carried out by the Portland police bureau's neighborhood response teams and the central precinct bike squad, in coordination with city outreach teams. Nert and bike squad officers are trained and have prior experience enforcing this ordinance. They are also familiar with engaging individuals experiencing homelessness and bring that experience to their enforcement approach. These officers coordinate with city outreach to offer services, issue citations for camping ordinance violations on a case by case basis. They are not arresting anyone solely for violating the city's camping regulations, but do serve outstanding warrants and can make arrests for other criminal behavior they witness. The goal of enforcement is to first and foremost, engage with people and connect them to services, and we are seeing that priority reflected in the outcomes data we have so far.
9 Thank you. Our new care connect initiative trains every Portland first responder to rush care to anyone who is down or incapacitated on our streets, right down that number. It's Portland street response and you'll find the response incredibly heartening when you call. If you see some and or see a need for help, you can help too. If you see someone in distress, call that number. We us are restoring humanity and dignity to Portland. Since February, I've been meeting monthly with our regional mayors and providing updates about our progress. They've been universally supportive, even as they've seen unsheltered populations increase in their communities. As Portland continues to implementation of this plan, I've offered technical advice and support, and we're working together rather than pushing people back and forth across jurisdictions. By the time we received almost unknown death data, some of the data is almost two years old. We cannot see the impact of our policies and programs. If we have to wait two years in 2026, I want to reduce the number of deaths on our streets by 80% from the peak in 2023, the year we lost homeless neighbors. But to do that, I will need data collection and dissemination as close to real time as possible, and I'll need your help for this, as well as the help from Multnomah county. This is the crux of everything I'm trying to accomplish. All these conversations and metrics must lead to a single purpose saving lives. Goal number six homelessness is a housing issue. Full stop. Everything else is just triage. Portland has 31,000 households that have 30% of the area median income, or less. There are only 12,000 deeply affordable housing units that can accommodate this income level. That represents a 19,000 unit deficit. We are treating the Portland declared housing emergency as an emergency. We have deployed sdc waivers, zoning reform, and accelerated permitting. We're also working with affordable housing providers to remove bottlenecks and to improve safety. We're also unlocking empty stock in Portland with home shares and pad split. After the experience of the first year, I've added a seventh goal to my plan focus on reducing inflow to homelessness. In particular, there are three major areas that we are focusing on this calendar year. City of Portland cannot and will not accept homeless dumping from any institution or organization. Homelessness prevention and prevention, and cycle breaking through programing. We reserve the right to send cease and desist orders to those who choose the cruelty of dumping people on our streets. We're working with medical providers and the legal system to prevent the displacement of folks into homelessness. Previous statistics show that 26% of homeless arrived in Multnomah county rather than becoming homeless here. While we have been refused access to updated statistics regarding this fact, we fear the number may be growing. Finally, we're exploring programing efforts to assist in homelessness prevention and breaking the cycle of homelessness, including housing success initiatives and workforce development. Next slide and my final slide. I bring a challenge to this council today. It's a challenge I've already made to myself, and I want you all to join me. Within eight years, Portland will launch 20,000 new housing units through public private partnerships. We know we can do this. We can bring the same focus and determination we use to open 1500 emergency overnight shelter beds in a year to this new housing goal, opening up 1500 beds within a year was the fastest that any jurisdiction of our size in America has ever opened shelters. It proves Portland can do big, impactful things for our community and deliver them on time, on mission and on budget. When it comes to housing, we've already kickstarted this vision by issuing sdc waivers for over 5000 units and initiated the first of many office to residential conversions. Portland leads homelessness. Like so many other affordability issues we face comes down to a supply problem. There's room for everyone at this table. We're not waiting. We're taking action. And I ask you to join me in this challenge. Thank you.
10 Thank you. Mayor. I'm going to turn this next part over to councilor Avalos to lead our discussion and start a conversation. So please. Yeah. Okay.
11 Okay. Hi. Thank you so much, mayor sky. I'm blanking on your name. Tell me one more time.
12 Hank Smith, deputy director.
13 Thank you. I'm so sorry. Thank you, hank, for your presentation. And, yeah, what we're going to do is just have a little bit of dialog around this. I will go ahead and take stock. And I had put myself on the first because I was going to ask the question you told me in our last meeting to ask right now, so can I do that now?
14 By all means, yes.
15 And then so folks, if you can just go ahead and get in the stack and we will we will have a discussion with the mayor. So we were talking about the 120 day stay limit for the shelters. And I had asked the mayor because he said that if there are folks that have a high mental acuity issues, that they would not be asked to leave, and that there's other ways in which they would receive a waiver to not have to leave. So I was curious if you could speak to what is your criteria, how are you measuring that and making those decisions?
16 Yeah, absolutely. And I'm also probably going to bring up brandi westerman, who oversees our shelter system at the city. I'll just first quickly state. So yes, the mayor is correct. There is an exemption process for folks who, you know, have certain mental health acuity or are not able to engage with their caseworker in the same way that you or I would. But I'll leave it to brandi on the specific requirements.
17 Sure.
18 Hi everyone, I'm brandi westerman, I am the emergency humanitarian operations director, and I oversee the city's sheltering system. So the basically the 120 day stay limit policy includes engagement requirements in cases where individuals either are unable or unwilling to engage. There is some discretion allowed that the case managers to basically determine whether that person is unable to engage due to kind of the behavioral health challenges that they're facing, in which case those individuals can have their stay extended, individuals who are actively engaging, for whom the case manager determines it would be disruptive to their progress towards housing to exit at 120 days can also receive an extension.
19 Thank you so much. We've got a lot of hands in line, so why don't I go ahead and get to the next few folks? So councilor Novick.
20 Thank you chair. So, mayor, I just want to know why you think it's realistic to build 20,000 housing units. And are there examples of other jurisdictions around the country that are producing housing at this pace? Because you mentioned sdc waiver, zoning reform, accelerated permitting, is there an example of a city that has, you know, upzone everything and has no systems development charges and has the fastest permitting system in the west and is producing housing at that rate?
21 Yeah.
22 So I'll start with the first question is, are there any other cities councilor, Avalos and I, as well as commissioner Singleton and edwards went to atlanta and worked with mayor dickens office there. He has what's called house atl, and he set the same 20,000 goal for his city over eight years. When you look at our numbers and what we were talking about, first, we start with the 5000 sdc challenge, which we just worked on, and we passed early last year. So that puts a nice dent to start, but you still got to build those. So just providing the sdc waiver doesn't build them. We know that we are in a depressed building environment right now. Last year, 800 permits at that level for the next eight years. That's 6400. We're not going to hit it. But if we look back to 2015, 16 and 17, when we were building five and 6000 units per year, that's the goal. So we're going to have to start slow 800. Last year. We have the sdc waiver that you and collectively we supported together. We need to use that. We're going to be using the central city round table. And their goal is 2500 units in the downtown core. We have six tif districts. We're going to have to utilize and leverage those districts as we build affordable housing and market housing. But it says it's a public private partnership. Councilor I'm confident we're going to hit that number.
23 Mayor, I have to say I'm not particularly comforted because, I mean, housing production has plummeted nationwide for the past 15 years, and interest rates have gone are higher now than they were in 2015. So is that I mean, I want to know, how did atlanta get to where where they were going. And and for each for each of the levers, can we hypothesize how far it gets you like upzoning everything. How much additional housing per year do we think that gets speeding up permitting? How much additional housing do we think that gets?
24 Yeah. I'll be meeting with you and your offices. I've asked grace, my executive assistant, to set up an appointment with every one of you. So let's find out what your ideas are. Because we can't do this with one person. We're going to have to do this with all 13. So it's going to start with us working together on what ideas michael buonocore in our housing department. He's got some wonderful ideas. It's going to be the 13 of us working together to get this lift, because it's not just housing, it's the labor, it's the jobs, it's the wages that go along with that. We need to start becoming a city. That is population growth and job growth so we can fill those apartments. Councilor.
25 Councilor is that all? I'll just add one thing. Since I went on that trip with you, mayor, one of the biggest things councilor Novick is the coalition. And that's one of the things that we're going to be working over the next six months. They made a huge coalition that lasted longer than the original plan, and that's one way that they got to their goal. But we can talk more about that. Councilor council president Dunphy.
26 Thank you. Mayor, I have a couple of questions for you, a couple of specific to the slides and a couple sort of bigger philosophical questions that I'm hoping you can sort of help us understand, starting sort of philosophically. And I'd like to just start this off here. The the homelessness situation is growing. The number of people falling into homelessness is getting worse. And historically, the city of Portland is not a service provider. But we are meeting the moment because of the crisis we're in. But can you tell me what is your sort of thought of what is the proper role for the city of Portland broadly, what do you think our responsibility is in the short term, long term, medium term, and and how we get to the role where we are not duplicating efforts in different parts of the right.
27 So if we look at our roles, we and I assume you're implicitly talking about Multnomah county, the the bifurcation there, portland's required to provide to our community public safety right of way and infrastructure. And the county traditionally is health and human services. When somebody is suffering on the street, there's a host of interconnectivity there. It's public safety. That person is in crisis. They're on our streets. So it's a right of way. It's an infrastructure. What I believe is what we did prior to 2017 is Portland was in was in charge of the adult shelter system. We had the shelter systems, we had the hooper cheers where we could help somebody with a ride to a shelter, to sobering. It was interconnected system that we moved to the work. If anybody was down, we cared for them. We now seeded that over to the county and they handle lock, stock and barrel. And since the day we turned it over to them were 1700 people living on our streets. Today it's 7000 or thereabouts, I'm not sure. So you can see that we've seen a steady and increase skyrocketing effect. I'm just stating that our responsibility is to meet this moment as a humanitarian crisis. We can't have and or we cannot be a dignified city with, with people suffering and dying on the street. So we're moving to the work. What's the long term course? What? The action. We're working on that behind the scenes, often through the iga negotiation, through funding. What avenues do you want to provide? We're sharing information. We're talking about sharing reunification. Right now our reunification is 3 or 4 hours. We'll have somebody on a plane. Their system would take up to 14 days. I think they realize now we can do things better, faster, easier, lower cost. You're seeing kind of the relationship being determined in real time. Council president.
28 Thank you. A specific question that you and I have talked about, but I'd like to bring it up again here as your teams are working on, they are cleaning up campsites that the historic narrative has been in my district of east Portland, that when a campsite gets cleaned up in the central city, often those individuals are displaced and they physically migrate to east Portland, where there are fewer services. And there's not necessarily somebody waiting to help them figure out what comes next. Can you talk to me about how your team is approaching that work, and specifically making sure that we are not? Simply moving the problem from one neighborhood to another, but are actually and especially how how are we keeping east Portland from that narrative? And how are we keeping my neighbors from believing that that is still the reality?
29 Sure.
30 I think it's all handled, the philosophical approach first, and then I'm going to ask guy to really handle the mechanical or tactical philosophically. In the city of Portland, we inherited a system that swept people, and when you swept something, you just simply displace them to another neighborhood. And that's all we were doing. I've changed that word. I don't use it anymore. It's removal. We're going to remove the encampment, but we're going to lead with compassion and services and shelter, and we see a uptake into our shelter system, like a rate we've never seen. And the one number in the presentation that I'll share with you, 3411 people, unique individuals, have slept in an overnight shelter, a little nervous in January or February when we're starting. This is 3411 people were cared for individuals. So it's working. I'm going to have you handle the more mechanical part.
31 Yeah. Council president I think we're also happy to kind of go through the data. And I know lucas hillier is also here too, if you want to get deep in the weeds. But we can do that another time. I will just say largely we focus on the entire city of Portland. We're in charge of public space management on every city street, on every park that's east Portland, that's the west side, that's downtown, that's everywhere. So our teams go to every inch of the city. It is based on reporting. So that is one caveat. I just wanted to give kind of for the community or anybody listening, report a campsite if you see it please. That's the way that we figure out, oh, we need to send outreach here. We need to send our central city concern clean start teams to do an assessment of the site to pick up trash, and then we can engage in a removal after an offer of services. So I just want to give that as a caveat as well. Our data from that dashboard does not show an increase in other parts of the city. Again, that's not perfect data because it's based on reporting what we what I do know is that every single day our teams are out there, every single inch of Portland. So my city outreach team goes to every part of the city, and we work with the counties who is doing their zone outreach. So they are in every part of the county as well. So there's also collaboration happening at that level. And then if you look on the dashboard, for example, you can see work that's being done, camp removals, trash pickup that's happening across the entire city. So also happy to dig in deeply to that, because I know you all have gotten questions about that as well.
32 I think your team is doing amazing work, and I've seen that. And lucas is amazing, and he and I have dug deep and my team have dug deep into the data, and I and I totally and I also understand the inherent challenge of it being a report or a. Requiring a neighbor to call it in. And the reality is that in east Portland, we know that fewer neighbors are calling because they don't trust that it's going to matter. And is is that a how are we building that trust? Because I can tell you that my my experience traveling through the city does not align with the data that I see on the document. It certainly looks like east Portland is in a lot better way than the central east side. And I think in many cases it's flipped. But it's because my neighbors choose not to call because no one has ever historically shown up. How are you all showing up for folks who are in east Portland?
33 Yeah, no. Great question. Thank you council president. So we rely on reports I should say. But we also have team members out there who do the reporting. So there are all also city workers who every single day can report different campsites through the street services coordination center. We meet regularly three times a week with bts employees, like water PBOT folks who are out doing the work on the streets of Portland every single day. So they also report different campsites or rvs to us as well. So it's it's kind of an all hands on deck approach. We also have service providers who report campsites. So a shelter provider, for example, 122nd and glisan, we have our menlo park safe rest village, and they are walking around the site. There's the gateway service district. Folks are reporting what they see kind of out in east Portland. So that's just one example. But it really is an all hands on deck approach for city employees, but also contractors that work with the city of Portland. Thank you. We also have problem solver meetings, which I think you all are aware of, but they help us kind of with the reporting mechanism and teaching folks how to report. And then we also send reports that we hear basically from different individuals in those meetings.
34 Excellent. Thank you. My last question, and thank you, colleagues, for your patients on this. Mayor, can you please tell me more about your vision, about the production and use of sros? I think that sros are a wildly underutilized part of our housing production strategy, and also considering the amount of vacancies that we have, vacant buildings that we have right now, the ability to quickly stand up a bedroom with a shared bathroom or something seems like an opportunity. How are you envisioning sros as part of this next chapter?
35 I appreciate that, councilor, because that's housing for somebody right now. We have just in the central city concern network. They have 400 empty apartments right now, many of them sros, including in the home forward network. So there's a host of challenges with vacancies. Oftentimes it's the other guests in the building. It's a safety issue. So we're moving into the buildings to help work with and secure and make them more safe. And also it's about pricing. I'm really happy to say ivory matthews notified me just a week ago. She lowered an sro cost to $500 because the cost of a market rate was getting awfully close to the rate of an affordable or a regulated. Our regulated housing stock is starting to be really competitive with pricing. So it comes down to price, safety, cleanliness, all the things we're working on on the streets really move into the affordable housing because we want them to be dignified, decent and safe locations. Every week we have our housing incident band meeting every two weeks. We talk with the regulated providers and we are brainstorming on what do they need, what can we provide. And we're really bringing that relationship together to move fast. And by the December 31st, they're setting their goals right now about what what vacancy rate do we want to be in Portland individually and collectively. And they're going to be set two goals, and we're going to work together to achieve their goals.
36 Okay. Councilor Green.
37 Thank you, councilor Avalos. And thank you, mr. Mayor and team, for coming here to present this. I know we've been waiting for this for a while. I appreciate the presentation, the data. I know we've had some warm disagreement on this topic before, but I hope that you hear my comments today. Just in the spirit of what councilor Avalos tried to tee us up is like, okay, how are we moving forward? How are we being productive? So I do have a number of questions to help me understand this. So in terms of I'm going to just start with the irp data, I think it's goal five. And this is probably a sky question. Yeah.
38 Or lucas question.
39 Question. Yeah. So you have two charts one charts, pounds of garbage collected at irp over time. And it looks like 2025. And then the next slide is camps removed by our by RFP over the same time period. And I think as I look at this, there's a couple of ways to interpret this and help me understand the intent. We're just simply counting what the money was able to purchase in terms of pounds of garbage to remove. Right. Like it's a it's what we did over time, not what the potential exists for pounds of garbage versus what we actually did. It's just like literally what did we pull away? Right.
40 Yeah. Okay. I'll let lucas introduce yourself.
41 Lucas hillier I manage the impact reduction program. Yes. That's a look back in what we actually did.
42 And in the garbage is that, is that just is that refuse around a camp or is that include the belongings, the personal belongings? Are you are you distinguishing those two types of things?
43 No, that's that would be the belongings after they have sat at the warehouse for 30 days and not been reclaimed.
44 Okay.
45 That would be included in there.
46 Okay. That's that is helpful. So what I notice in the chart is, you know, there's a ramp up at the beginning of the year, we're spending some money. You know, we've got we've got new leadership, we've got prioritization thing. That's kind of what I see in there. But then about may we see a pretty sharp reduction in garbage collected by rp in the trend. But I look at the next chart which is camp removal. And I would associate I would expect these two to be associated like highly correlated. That's fairly stable. And so does that mean to me that that there's just less trash at each campsite? Help me understand how to square those two pieces.
47 Really, really good question. Thank you. Part of it is seasonal garbage that's wet weighs more. And so we kind of kind of get a bump by nature there. So and when it starts to dry out the actual poundage decreases. We pay less to metro to dump that trash. The other thing too is, though, the number of camp removals might increase, the impact of those removals at the time that we increase them is lower because we're able to intervene and get to them faster. I would say at the beginning of last calendar year, we were still in a in a digging ourselves out of the pandemic kind of mode. And so the average encampment that we were able to go post and remove was much larger and much higher, much more highly impacted. I think if you look back at our data in 22 and 23, you would see that as well, where like the poundage is way up, the numbers are a little bit lower. But the way that this system is built, we intend or hope to intervene right at that, that nexus point when it's no longer 1 or 2 tents at the end of the road, but it's starting to change into something else. So we try to intervene before that something else starts to spiral out, because then it becomes an exponential cost and time to remediate.
48 I would just add to, I think just for the specific may to June to July, that you're kind of seeing with some of the garbage that had to do with getting kind of some indication we weren't going to have the ODOT, iga or worry. And so we did slow down some of those kind of central city concern crews, some of that trash pickup. So I think that also can contributed to some of the decrease in tonnage. So a variety of factors like lucas mentioned, but that's also one.
49 But it's also people's belongings to I'm really uncomfortable with the term garbage here. I just I need to say that.
50 Sure.
51 Okay. That is helpful. I think one of the things that would be a little more helpful from just sort of allowing us to take this data driven perspective because, I mean, at the end of the day, this is going to this tells us what we need for resources, at least in the near term. Right. It's going to inform our budget stuff. And so if we understood what because what I see is just the flow data I have no sense of, is it reducing our overall stock over time where that happens and it gets to the council, the council or council presidents still getting used to that question there about where people go after that interaction. But I do note that in slide one it looks like goal one and tent distribution. I mean, you see that drop off which which does look great, but that's just those esds. And so if our camp removal is staying constant more or less, and we've got, you know, that seasonal shape, but but the average is pretty flat on trash and belongings removal. Then that means they are going somewhere else, right? They, they are going to other parts of the city outside those esds. Otherwise I don't know how this or they're going into something else, they're going into other shelters or they're going into rvs, or they're maybe they're just living under a tree. So that's what I see when I see that those two types of pieces. Can you respond to that?
52 Yeah, yeah. Let me start. And then I think lucas also. So I just want to note. So we showed this kind of esd chart mostly because they are performing their own tent counts. So it's just where we have that specific data weekly tent counts. So I just want to point that out because I can't compare that necessarily apples and apples to another part of the city. So just from a data perspective, and then in terms of camp removals, I think lucas has mentioned this before, but you could be performing more camp removals, but there are actually fewer camps in the city of Portland. So we could be faster. Basically, to get to a camp, we could be removing the same individuals if they're camping in another location, and we still count each of those as a camp removal. So it's a little difficult. I will just say fully to understand a point in time we can say, this is how many reports we have, this is how many removals we did in a ten day period, for example. But it's hard to know what the recurrence rate is of those individual camp sites. I don't know if you wanted to.
53 Mention, I want to back up to the previous question real quick to the poundage. If we can pull that slide back up. One thing that I forgot to mention, we started last fiscal year with a lot of carryover money. I think it was $4 million, and it was about June, may, June when we started reducing the number of crews that we had out there too. So that does impact the overall amount of garbage, that and material that we're removing. So we went from 24 total crews between two different vendors that are doing the camp removals, and I believe 14 crews with clean start doing the the assessments down to 15 and 11. And that transition began April, may June ish.
54 Thank you.
55 I'm trying to be cognizant of how much time I'm taking here. So I have so many more questions here. And thanks for engaging with this. Thank you for putting that nuance on, like the rate the turnover rate piece, because that's what I see when I see it. And we can all interpret that and have different political opinions about that. But we're on the same page in understanding that that could be what the data is, is telling us.
56 Yes. And I think we're actually I will just say right now looking at any ways we can better calculate, just like current campsites, current rvs in the city of Portland, like, how can we better capture some of that data? So really open to any ideas that you all have, but also happy to sit down and kind of dig into that.
57 Thanks. I would just like to ask maybe 1 or 2 questions that are not on the homelessness response piece, but on the housing side. And then and then I'll just wrap it up. I thanks for calling out the the home forward piece. I know that the Portland housing bureau has done some excellent work and has supported some rent buydown efforts. And, you know, there's been this narrative out there that we've got, you know, 1900 units of affordable housing that there must be an abject failure for those providers. That's not true. It is a market dynamic. They have a balance sheet problem. And one of the one of the least expensive ways that we can preserve capacity is to help them with that. And so I encourage that an increase in our investment in that space, to the extent we have it. I we had a finance presentation by the director that more or less showed that for $60,000, you get years and years and years of, of of rent reduction from 60 to 45% ami which slows the inflow. And it it significantly yields benefits. I think that we should continue to pursue opportunities with those providers to see what we can do there as we head into the next budget program. As of the stc question, I was really excited to support that. But I am worried that we won't make hay while the sun shines because of the conditions that we have. And so this is why I'm never going to miss an opportunity to hammer home that we have got. We have got to implement the inner east side for all planning commission recommendation to upzone those high opportunity areas. And the last time I had this conversation in public, I think the I think the suggestion is that with business as usual, with our normal planning timelines, we're looking at 36 months to be able to bring council recommendation. We can't wait 36 months to hit your targets, mr. Mayor. And so, in the spirit of what the councilors did with the planning commission, the design review, pilot suspension waiver, I would encourage bts bringing us forward a proposal that says we are going to to the extent that state law allows, find the least like minimally, like just what's the what's the shortest timeline that we can get to a consideration of the council to upzone. Because I think that's that's the one thing we can control that changes the economics of a project considerably.
58 We're going.
59 To be scheduling a meeting with you in the next week or so, and director and I are going to be sitting down with you. Let's let's dig into the details on that.
60 Okay. Thank you. I've taken up a lot of space here, colleagues, but I hope I hope my questions were helpful for you as well. And my colleagues here. Thanks.
61 Thanks.
62 Thank you councilor. And we have this discussion until 4 p.m. So everyone can just monitor on their own as well. Councilor Smith, you're up next.
63 Thank you councilor, thank you, thank you skyler. Thank you. Mayor, I have a few questions. One of the things that I asked you before I approved of me supporting the sdc waivers was, do you have any permitting opportunities for district one? And I still have not received any of those projects. I don't know where they are or where they, you know, in the system or if there are any that are viable at this point. And I'm just going to read off a couple of things in terms of the 20,000, I went back on the report online. That piece about the 20,000 increase, the 20,000. It's not on the it's not on your it's it's not on the public. Did you all add that last about the 20,000.
64 We were updating last night. So I can just check with the clerk to make sure they have the most up to date version.
65 I have the updated one because I wanted to go back. So did you say 20,000 affordable units or 20 units?
66 All the above tiff will cover the affordable units. Private public partnerships will come in with middle market or. Other housing units that might be available. It's essentially all the above. We're trying not to just pigeonhole into affordable housing, only its entire stock, because we still need some middle market and workforce housing and so on and so forth.
67 And that's my point exactly. That's where I was going. You knew where I was going because middle housing is important. It's critical for for every district in this community. But it's especially more critical for district one. We have businesses that are falling off, and that's a result of people not having discretionary money to do some of the things that we need to do in terms of building new businesses. And if they don't have money, you can't plop a bunch of affordable housing units into an area and expect businesses to thrive. Yeah. The other issue is, will you be reducing the parking mandates to allow more housing as a way in which to improve the housing?
68 I think it's a discussion. I think we're at this point where we need to get everything on the table and like councilor Green with you, councilor Smith, I'm going to be sitting down with you and your team and really taking stock. It's time for us to brainstorm on what do we want to do from a code writing standpoint?
69 Yes.
70 How are we going to shake things up? It's time for us to move that measure. We need to get going on that.
71 And the other thing that I'm really I'm a fan of, I did some stuff at the county on this. On the adus. I think that we need to figure out how to improve and expand, legalizing all the adus, additional adus in in city wide. And the other issue that I'm really concerned about, and I guess this is something that prosper Portland will have to to deal with in terms of the affordable housing. I think we need family sized housing as well. I know metro did a report and they did all these report and they said, oh, all we need in the next 20, 30 years is two bedroom. Condo type of dwellings. We need additional. In order for you to hit that point, you're going to have to increase the density, decrease the number of of actual parking spaces that's required per unit. And maybe figure out some additional ways that we can bring in revenue. And lastly, are you prepared to use our our bonding capacity to use to build some of this housing? Because, as you know, Portland is, what number 81 on the list of where private sector funding comes from. Now we have local funding, but how we're going to get this middle market going is through additional dollars outside of the city of Portland. And if we can't get those dollars, are you prepared to bond to get those dollars to make sure that these projects are moving within the next eight years?
72 Yeah, it's on the table. It will be in collaboration with you and this council on what steps we need to make, where the funding will come from and how and when will work on the timing for it. So absolutely, absolutely, yes.
73 And just lastly, I'd like to make a comment while I'm still the chair of the labor and workforce committee, I want to make sure that in addition to this, that you have some kind of opportunities for apprenticeships, whether that be with youthbuild or other places, that we're getting folks into these apprenticeships, because these are really high paying jobs and we need to make sure that that is rolling.
74 Yeah, I agree, it's a great idea.
75 Thank you.
76 Councilor pirtle-guiney. Thank you councilor. Thank you.
77 Council president. Thank you, mr. Mayor, for the presentation today. Before I get into any of what I was planning to say, I just want to say ditto to councilor Smith's comments about family size housing. If we are just building housing for the people who we see on our our shelters, the absolutely we're going to hear that we need. And one bedrooms. If we build housing for what we know, the need is because homelessness looks different for families and because we know that. Mr. Mayor, if you're trying to grow our region, part of that growth is in families. We must start building those larger units. We also know that that will help ease the pressure on families who are facing housing instability. I think there's a lot of ways that we could change our incentive structure in order to help to get more, larger units on the market. But first, we have to admit that just looking at what we see in the data doesn't help us get to where we want to be as a community. Mr. Mayor, a lot of what you showed us today looks at the immediate crisis in front of us, but I didn't see a lot about prevention, and I didn't see a lot about the services that it will actually take to help individuals stabilize so that we can actually keep folks housed and get folks back to a place where they are able to to be in that more stable setting. You mentioned that sometimes when units aren't filled, it's because of other residents. Sometimes that's because those residents aren't getting the services and supports that they need. So I have a couple of questions and I'm going to try to be quick. But the first one is how are you through your current day center model, ensuring that folks are connecting, not just here's a potential service, they're here. Sometimes you could go talk to this person, but actually connecting people to ongoing services in a meaningful way that will help them achieve, as an individual, the stability that they need to be able to stay in housing and not become homeless again.
78 Thank you councilor. I think I have two really qualified people to help answer that in schuyler and brandi.
79 Yeah, I can start. Brandi, just please add thanks, councilor. I'll just say quickly. So our current day centers are only a fraction of kind of the day center community basically within like the county has ten different day spaces. They also have libraries. So there's other entrance points for folks and connection points for services. I'll just say that right off the top. But what we're trying to do with our two day centers that we fund, so the join day space, for example, already had a really robust, just historic model that they've had for a long time connecting folks to different resources. So that was really well established. We've helped connect some additional services, but really that was pretty well established already. So we were happy to just expand their capacity. I would say for the oasis site, which is newer, we are still increasing services there. And so actually we just had a meeting this week about even further increasing the services on site. Right now. We're really excited to partner with the pier company in central city concern and other folks that are already working in that vicinity. In old town especially, it's a really robust service network. We partner with blanchard house and other Portland rescue mission and other services that are right there around that site, as well as rosehaven, which is not too far away. So I think that's been really positive, but I think there's always opportunity for further connection.
80 And maybe there have been improvements since I toured that site. It sounds like there might be more available than there were when I was there.
81 Yes. And I think also one thing that I'm really proud of is we started doing resource fairs there regularly. And so bringing anybody and everybody who wants to provide a service kind of on site, we also our city outreach team also hosts different resource fairs in old town. So we're really trying to bring services to that area especially.
82 I'll wait to see if anybody wants to add anything else. I know she has a side conversation there.
83 Just a couple of things to add to what I heard from skyler. So at both of the day centers that we're supporting, there is care coordination staff that's on site every day. So those are individuals who can help people navigate services, who can conduct missed assessments so that individuals can get included within coordinated access. In addition, there's partnerships with a variety of health and recovery organizations. So mobile medical on site substance use recovery organizations are coming on site on a daily basis at the oasis, as well as others and the resource fairs that are happening currently. They're happening once a month inside the oasis, and in every two weeks, either inside or in the immediate vicinity. There's one tomorrow, tomorrow afternoon happening there as well. So there's a number of partnerships that are underway, and we continue to do outreach to other county, state and private partners to invite them into that space to provide services, meet with clients on site. We've recently added infrastructure that allows for private case conferencing at the site itself. So there's some units that have, you know, heaters and doors that close so that individuals can have private conversations with either outreach or case management.
84 So there is the possibility. Now, it sounds like very recently of actually working one on one to get connected to the services that you need. Okay. That's fantastic to hear that that addition has has occurred for somebody who is houseless and is navigating this system. Right. We we have the services the city is providing. We have the services the county is providing. We have contractors who are receiving funds from the city and the county to provide additional services, and then other funders as well. How seamless as we increase our shelter system, especially our overnight shelter system, is the experience not from your perspective, not from the perspective of us knowing all of the resources and knowing what should be happening on the ground, but with what is actually happening in the shelters. How seamless is the experience at this point for somebody who is houseless, walks into an overnight shelter for the first time, wants to know where and how they can get services across the spectrum. Have we started to hit that point yet, or is there still a lot of work to be done?
85 It's a great question. You want to.
86 Go, yeah, it's a wonderful question. And I think there's a there's a there are numerous correct answers to that question depending on like individual experiences and what they encounter when they come into an overnight shelter. So I don't want to pretend that it's a universal experience yet, and I think we're working towards that. So at every overnight shelter there's there's kind of print materials and things for trying to access additional daytime services for every individual and staff on site are informed about a number of additional resources and will help people kind of navigate to the resource that's right for them. And I also want to kind of acknowledge that individuals are leaving fairly early in the morning, and those are time periods where, you know, it may not be that it's top of mind exactly which service they want to access for that day. Outreach workers are spending time outside of the overnight shelters in the morning and helping people navigate their their plan for the day, including kind of connecting them to those services. I would say I wouldn't claim that it's seamless at this point. I think there's continuous improvement that's happening and and room for us to continue to get better at that service connection.
87 When I hear.
88 Oh.
89 I'm sorry, mr. Mayor.
90 I think what brandy said is right. It's been triage. We've been just addressing the crisis. But one anecdote that just occurred, we had so many people asking for recovery oriented shelters, and they opened it up and only a matter of months. One of the first two participants that walked in to the recovery only on our southeast grand or city team within a week now have been connected to the city team 24 over seven recovery one year program. So you're right, it's not smooth. It's not a continuum of care. But we are in an ad hoc way, meeting the moment with particular needs as a person journeys through the system. But it just it's not linear, if you will.
91 I want us to get to a point where that's not an anecdote, but that is the expectation. And I want us to get to a point. And I'm looking to the back of the room because I see jillian here as well, where between the city and the county, I'm not hearing about outreach workers sitting outside a shelter, hoping people stop when they come out, but that it's the expectation that every shelter, even an overnight shelter, have somebody inside talking to every single person before they leave about what their plan is for the day, what their plan is to to continue moving back towards stability and whether they need additional help getting there. I know that that takes resources, but until we get to that point, we are leaving people to flounder. These are these are people leaving to flounder.
92 Tremendous amount of efficiencies in the system that can be had.
93 I also just want to flag and then councilor, I promise I will be done that. Mr. Mayor, you and I talked at one point and I said to you, have you considered, including in your plan, self-managed, sanctioned, tiny villages or camping areas and you said you hadn't?
94 I haven't.
95 At this time. Yeah.
96 And I just want to encourage us as a city to think about how that fits within our plans. We can't afford to provide all of the shelter, space and service that we need. There are some people for whom moving into housing isn't part of what they are looking for, for whatever reason in the near term. And we have examples in our city of self-managed, sanctioned camping areas or pods that have been very successful over a number of years that just need a small public sector investment on things like trash pickup and and porta potties. And if we are able to provide that low level and in exchange, ask for a level of self-management in a few additional spaces, I think we might ease some of the pressure that you're seeing, where you have people who are staying for longer periods of time in our shelters and not looking for for services, we might be able to ease that pressure and also provide people stability and a place to live that they can launch from, whether it is continuing to live there, but launch into work or launch into whatever their next step is. That's right for them. So I just want to encourage us to consider that as part of the options we look at at the city.
97 Self sanctioned villages, is that, to be clear.
98 Self managed or self-governed.
99 Villages, okay.
100 Villages or sanctioned camping areas?
101 Yeah.
102 In the city of Portland that looks like dignity village and right to dream two. In other cities there are different models, but the idea is that we are not providing services and staff 24 over seven. It is self-managed. We are providing some of the services that meet basic needs so that that can be a healthy place to live.
103 Yeah.
104 And so I'm glad I clarified that. The self-managed villages I perfectly understand, so long as that person's safety and security can be upheld when it comes to sanctioned camping, I have never seen a successful period where it's in san francisco. They tried and they had five sanctioned camping locations, and it was $126 per person per night, and they aggregated misery and nobody won. Nobody in the encampment won. The community members and the neighbors didn't win, and they've closed them all. And it was extremely high cost. It sounds inexpensive and humane, but anything that does with anything that has to do with unsheltered homelessness and promoting that suffering and misery, I just, I just it's not something that I've been able to. Support.
105 I would encourage you, mr. Mayor, to look at the successful examples here and in other cities. I know there have been some unsuccessful locations, but there are places where where things have been done very differently.
106 We're actually right now working with different folks around the city to actually go on site visits to all of those independent villages, to provide a report to both the city administrator and the mayor, because there's actually been several self safety, health, sanitation issues that have really come to different bureaus attention. And so we've actually coordinated with bts and PBOT and permitting and nate takara on our city outreach team to do site visits at all of those locations. So I am happy to walk folks through that report once that comes is finalized. After all of those site visits, we're also going to provide that to the mayor and the city administrator.
107 That would be fantastic to see. Thank you.
108 Yeah.
109 Thank you councilor.
110 Of course, also mayor hazelnut grove and birdie putt and dignity village. So so it's more than just a shelter right. Or a tent. It's actually there's actually infrastructure.
111 Those are locking.
112 Portable units. And and I understand that completely understand that.
113 Sounds good. Colleagues we've got 16 more minutes. We're going to go with councilor Clark next. Thank you, vice president Clark.
114 Thank you. And thank you, mayor, for your dogged determination, determination and your leadership. Really appreciate it. And the presentation today, I want to thank skyler for meeting with south Portland neighborhood folks on grover tunnel. I really appreciate that. I'm a regular at the grover tunnel cleanup, and I wanted to just put on your radar screen, moving the potluck in the park to oasis. I don't know if you're considering that, but I really appreciate you looking at that.
115 Absolutely.
116 I just want to ask a really basic question back to the beginning. Are we tracking homeless individuals? Do we have a list of who these individuals are and we know where they're showing up?
117 Yeah. So I was actually going to say that in response to a previous question. So just so folks are aware, we are entering every individual we encounter. So does the county. So do county providers into hmas. So that is the county wide nationwide kind of database. And so we are coordinating with the county every day. But our providers are all entering that information into hmas. Okay. It's an imperfect system, but it's the one we have.
118 Is there one number to call to find if there's a bed for me?
119 Yes. So you can call 311 for all the overnight shelters. We actually have capacity every single overnight shelter right now. So it's first come first serve. But they're happy to kind of tell you that too.
120 Okay. And can you remind me about secure storage? I know we mentioned it earlier, but there's still there is secure storage.
121 Yes. So we have for a long time had daytime storage in old town. Central city concern runs that storage site, the city. My program pays for that storage site. We are also currently actually getting storage containers at different locations, because I think that will actually provide some of that secure storage at different shelter locations as well.
122 Okay, I'll stop there. I just want to give you a heads up too, that I'm going to the Multnomah neighborhood safe rest village after this meeting to meet with some of the neighbors who live in the area, and I'll report back.
123 Thank you. Please do.
124 Councilor Morillo.
125 Thank you, councilor Avalos, thank you for this presentation. I think a lot of my colleagues have already asked some of the questions that I was going to ask, and I definitely want to echo that. I agree with a lot of the sentiments that were expressed by councilor Pirtle-guiney. I have organized for many years with folks at right to dream two and other village models where they're they are self-governing, and those take a lot of effort and intention and care to be done in a way that is safe for everybody involved. So I don't want to underestimate the value of that. But I will say, having worked in the previous form of government with some of the outdoor shelters were and safe rest villages were being created, what I saw was not that we replicated the self-governing model that actually gave unhoused people autonomy, but that we replicated the indoor shelter model. But just put it outside and that's not the same thing. It's not about the shelter space physically. It's about the model of governance. And I think that's important to emphasize here, because if we put people in places where they are governing themselves and they have the dignity to make choices about their lived situations, how they engage with their neighbors, how they engage with the space that puts someone in a completely different headspace because they have ownership over the community. And I think that's really critical in what we're trying to do and congregate. Shelter does not offer that same stability and identity to people at a very critical time. The thing that I am most interested in, though, is we got this presentation on sweeps data and on garbage collected, and there was disputes about whether or not these things should be considered garbage when they're people's homes and items sometimes. And I feel the same way about that. But the thing that I really, really care about is data on how many people have moved from homelessness into permanent housing this year versus previous years. And I want to see that over the course of a few years, because in looking at county data, it looks like things have not really changed that much at all. Like we're roughly the same amount of people are going into permanent housing that they were a few years ago. So that hasn't changed. And I think that that's the type of data and context that I need to be able to measure the success of this, because we are being told that this is an, you know, it's an incredibly successful program, 1200 to 1600 shelter beds. I know you said it's just the start, but we're taking away tents and other resources from people. When it's going to start getting colder, it's going to start snowing. That does not reach or qualify the amount of people that are on our streets. And you are inevitably creating a situation where the temperature is going to drop. Even if you had a unhoused person for every single shelter bed, there will still be more outside. And now those people have nothing to help them unless they get it by themselves or through a private agency somehow. Yeah. So what I need moving forward to be sold on this vision is concrete data that compares how many people are moving into permanent housing now versus over the past few years. And I don't know if you have that off the top of your head or if you can send that to us later, but that's what I'm going to need moving forward.
126 Councilor I did just receive a text message from anna plum so we can get that to you. County partners can pull that information from hmas.
127 Thank you.
128 I appreciate it.
129 I would like to answer though, and just say I know that we want that permanent housing is always the goal, the acuity on our street and our shelters is at a real high level. The dual diagnosis of somebody suffering from behavioral health and addiction. If we simply move them from shelter into a four walled facility, and that person doesn't have the life skills for independent living, we're just setting them up for success. It's not just housing. It's so much more to that than just a door knob. And so I want us to be intentional, to recognize that while we're talking about a continuum of care, moving a person along the mental health and the addiction system is so critical that we put and help the person, whatever they're needed in the right bed that they're going to be successful at. And that's that's a really difficult challenge.
130 Yeah, I completely comprehend that challenge. And I think you're absolutely right. Unfortunately, our state has disinvested in drug treatment and mental health treatment for the past 30 years. And now that is all culminating in what we are seeing today. And that's not just the city's fault. That is a a statewide issue and a federal government issue too. So certainly want to acknowledge that. And not everyone is ready to go into permanent housing. But a lot of our unhoused population are a lot of them had a medical emergency that made it so they couldn't afford rent. A lot of people that I talked to on the streets have, frankly, more advanced degrees than I do. But they, by the luck of the draw or the circumstances of their lives, they are in a very different position than I am in. And so there are people that are ready to get into housing, and we need to get those people into housing. And I, I know we're all just saying what we think at this moment. And I do have to say. I'm concerned that the not giving out tents is being touted as a success here. I understand that that is your vision and your model. But talking with homelessness services providers, a lot of them are very concerned about that. And also they have no choice but to say yes because we are holding their dollars. And I would say that a lot of those experts, at least from what they have conveyed to me, are concerned about what's going to happen on the streets in the next few months, because, again, even if we have an unhoused person for every shelter bed, there are more out there and the weather is going to get worse, as you have noted. And we all know because it happens every year and we seem to scramble every single year. So I'm very concerned about some of those things. And I guess we will see what happens when it happens, and we'll have to be prepared to kind of go into our districts, I think, and distribute resources ourselves. But. That's not a success to me. That is very concerning to me, and I'll just leave it at that.
131 We have 200 beds available tonight, and that's been the promise is we always will have an empty bed for every Portland every night last week driving down water avenue. So I spend my weekends in your neighborhoods. There were two tents that burnt down just underneath the Hawthorne bridge. I got a call a few months ago about a woman that was found in a burnt down tent, and her bones had been there for four months. Life safety is conflated with a tent, and I just want us to really have a robust conversation is if we are a community and we start fostering unsheltered homelessness by handing out tents, we've got to provide better for the most vulnerable in our community than a tent. No water, no toilet, no life safety concerns. We've got to stop the thought that we can be a community that hands out tents. We should be providing life saving care for portlanders. That's our requirement. That's my job from a public safety standpoint, is to make sure nobody is ever kicked to the curb with a tent.
132 I agree with that sentiment. I think the practical reality is that it will take a lot of time to set up more shelter beds and more housing and getting people into housing. And so in the intermediary, I'm asking you to think about those people that are not going to go into a shelter bed and that are not going to go into housing, because that doesn't care about our future vision and our aspirations. They are going to be dealing with that reality this winter right now. And I just don't I don't see that working out well. Thank you.
133 Colleagues. So president, I'm going to go to councilor Canal and then I'm going to go to councilor Koyama Lane. And then if we have some more time, we'll do second rounds with president Dunphy and councilor Novick. And then if we can't, well, I think we'll you'll be able to get some of those thoughts out in the next section. Sound good? Councilor Kanal.
134 Thank you, madam chair. Just a couple quick notes on the structure of this conversation. Altogether. I received an email with meeting materials for this at 1030 today, and that's where the information was only posted today as well. This is a very big topic that was gone through very quickly because of the shortness of it. And I think that if if we're going to have work sessions, we need this information in advance. And I'd suggest a practice to the council president that if presentations aren't received a week in advance, we postpone the session and indicate to the public why we postpone the session, especially given that this was originally scheduled for December 4th. I'd love to see net numbers. A few people have managed this. I don't want to hear only about outputs. I love the narrative. I do appreciate the storytelling here, but I want to understand the impacts and that that's where net numbers come into play. I was going to ask a question of the lawyers who are not here about the impact on, or, I guess, the interpretation of the charter in terms of whether or not determining that there would be 120 day stay limit is something that is within the administrative scope. Given that we authorized money for this entire system, it seems that this is a legislative decision and that it was moved to the administration. And I'm concerned about that. Moving into the content here, first, I want to broadly stress. I stress that I broadly agree with everything councilor Morillo said. I want to first appreciate you for the work you've done with the county to get the 24 hour emergency warming shelters. That's really, really important. It's been on an issue for a long time. I agree on everything with relation to the tents that councilor Morillo said. There are 7500 people here. I don't think anyone's trying to suggest that five people should be in each of the 1500 beds, but that is how the math maths. So I'm not clear on how that works, because what we're actually comparing it to is someone sleeping in a sleeping bag on a stoop, or sleeping in a tent some of the time and, and actually most of the time, and then occasionally in a shelter or not, 20% of the time, 1500 is 20% of that. And I just it's starting off that way, came across as blaming people for poverty or mental illness through implication. And I know that you know this, mayor. I know you don't believe in it that way, because you got 3411 people into shelter for an average of 17 nights each this year, which is a major accomplishment. And enforcement was not a part of that until the last month that you have data on. In fact, it was only an 8.5% increase, which seems to be in line with the trend that you were already on instead of because of the enforcement. I want to go to slide seven and eight and ask two specific questions. Can you confirm if I'm correct on the interpretation here? What we're seeing is that alternative shelter participation has fewer bipoc people than their percentage of the population. And we're seeing that the emergency shelter participation is roughly proportional. I think logically that this means that more people in either situation, which is primarily people on the streets, are more likely to be people of color. Is that correct?
135 Brandi? I don't know what you would take of that. I think I'm following you and I think, yes, but I will defer to brandi on that one.
136 Yeah. I mean, so I can speak to the alternative shelter data in particular. And in that case, we're seeing higher rates of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness who are bipoc than what we're seeing being accommodated in those shelters. So there is a delta there.
137 Okay. So what is the plan then to reduce this disparity so that Portland solutions is serving houseless bipoc portlanders equitably?
138 Yeah. So actually, thank you for the question. We are having discussions about expanding. We currently have a pretty small bipoc village that's been really successful, seeing kind of a bigger kind of scenario for some of those culturally specific services. We're also partnering with the county on their efforts within the homelessness response system. Jillian has talked about this before, but seeing what works for culturally specific providers and kind of different mechanisms that we can all invest in in order to increase that number of people served bipoc population specifically.
139 Okay, and I apologize, I'm rushing through this, but I want to make sure there's time. I agree with both councilor Pirtle-guiney and councilor Morillo about these self managed villages. I was. Your comment about having them investigated was really concerning. I'm going to oppose any effort to shut them down. And I just want to tell you that director brock, right now, that was really concerning what you just said to councilor Pirtle-guiney.
140 Yeah. They're not I wouldn't say being investigated what they are on city property, city right of way. And so there are kind of health and safety hazards that have been reported sometimes by individuals at the sites. And so we have an obligation to actually follow up on those reports. We're trying to make sure it's a very small group of people that are engaging in that those visits, and we're doing it in collaboration with the villages themselves.
141 Okay. We'll wait until we come back on that. I guess I'm concerned about the request to call psr to do something other than its original purpose, which is something we reconfirmed at council in resolution 37709 in June. Portland street response is not a homelessness response program. It is a way to divert calls about behavioral health to the best possible responder that would otherwise be responded to by a non-ideal responder. It also minimizes the minimizes the impact on pbs's capacity, which means that diverting the wrong type of call to psr increases PPB response times. I'll ask everyone to go back to resolution 37709, which was very, very clear on this subject. I'm really disappointed to see that be highlighted as a homelessness response. Again, we've had this conversation, we've legislated about it, and I just I don't know how what else we have to do if we need to write an ordinance to do it that let us know. Lawyers when whenever you are here at a work session, which hopefully is soon. But we cannot keep having this conversation after council has voted over and over again on it. I'm really disappointed in that. I would love to know. Speaking of PPB capacity, you noted that 25 diversions are conducted by PPB, along with the arrests of 100 something people during these sweeps, and I'd love to get information on the impact on response times for PPB to burglaries, to murders, to alleged every other type of high priority call that has come from the from before November 1st to after November 1st, because we added this new type of workload to pb's plate. Does that make sense? Yeah, give it to me now.
142 But that workload is. Being used.
143 Or pardon me, it's being provided by the nazis. And so they were already there, but they were working as security guards for the camp removals. We flipped it. So they're working with our camp removals, our outreach workers, but they're checking for warrants. And if there's somebody with a warrant, the arrest is being affected.
144 That makes sense. And so I would love to see if the if there is no impact in the data, I'll happily not have a concern about that.
145 I look at that data often. Especially the response times.
146 Oh apologies mayor. They also can get pulled for a call while working with our outreach team, and then we will just stop that process. So I'm happy to dig into this a little bit more with you. We will also be working with PPB on a dashboard. I think soon that will have more data. It's not very regular, so maybe like once, maybe twice a week. So it's pretty it's not super common.
147 I think. Then then my concern in this place is alleviated. Thank you for the information. And then I'll just ask these two together, even though they're a little unrelated, but just switching to the housing side first, building off of what both councilors to either side of me said, I would love to see a commitment from the executive to changing the metric. When we're talking about building new housing from the number of units or doors, as it's often referred to, to the number of bedrooms or the number of people housed. I would love to see that, because three and four bedroom units get deprioritized when we talk about building doors and building units, and that is where the biggest need is, is that a change in what we measure that you can commit to?
148 Yeah.
149 Let's talk. I'm looking forward to hearing what your ideas are and then incorporating them. Anything we can do to just create transparency, accountability, but more importantly, getting the sticks and bricks going to where we're providing that outcome that we need for our city.
150 Thanks. And then finally, I agree with you 100%, mr. Mayor, that the safety and affordable housing, the impact on potential new residents of the other residents who are there is a huge factor. I appreciate you bringing that up. I would love it if you would join me and going to louisa flowers and talking about that, because it's a it's a really important day. Two obviously location where we're dealing with some of this and we've not been able to get the the type of attention out of a single council office yet that we'd like for, for the problems there. And this is not on you, but I think if, if your team was willing to come help me raise awareness, I'd really appreciate it.
151 Consider it done. Councilor it's part of our housing command meeting. The louisa flower is a tremendous opportunity because there's vacancies right now in that building. Let's go figure out what it is and let's activate them.
152 Absolutely.
153 I want to work with you on that.
154 Great. I want to go back and to your first question regarding psr, what I want to level set in our community is, is that we've inherited a city where we often walk by somebody in distress on the curb, and so there's not a day or week that goes by that I'm not stopping and checking on somebody. So I flipped the script with our public safety system. So officers, firefighters, they go to their priority call. That is their absolute priority. That is their dispatch call. But going back to the I'm changing and I'm flipping the script. If they see somebody in there to stop and provide that care, what can I do to assist you? I'll stop for somebody who has a blanket on them. I see them breathing, but I want Portland to now start being the change in the city that they want to see. We're not going to leave people on the street anymore. We're not. We're going to bring our humanity back. Psr is part of the solution. They are not the solution. They are part of our public safety response system. We're going to allow our dispatch to dispatch the right resource at the right time for the right cause. So I just I don't want us to push back on a resource. We all got to lean in, not push back and say that wasn't the mandate. Let dispatch dispatch the right resource to portlanders in need, and let's start helping those individuals into the shelters we have, or the detox centers that we have open right now. We have so much resource let's let's use it.
155 So in principle, I agree with that completely. The broader thing that you just talked about, I agree with completely. And I appreciate also you bringing up cheers earlier as a we really need to talk about that. Yeah. 43% of psr calls are eventually resolved as unable to locate because of how long it takes psr to get somewhere. And so I'm trying to make sure that there is capacity not diverted from that one specific program. I would love to talk with you about how we can maybe make this a chat responsibility instead, as part of making it an ongoing funding solution. It's not that I don't think the work should be done. I agree with you 100% on that. I'm just saying it's not this program that's ideally suited for it, and I know that there's leadership there that doesn't really believe in that original purpose. Hopefully we'll have that resolved as well. But I want to make sure that it's in that original purpose. And that's why we needed to legislate that. And we did in June.
156 Thank you.
157 But I agree with your underlying purpose. Thank you.
158 Thank you, councilor. We're going to round this conversation out with councilor Koyama Lane.
159 Thank you, chair Avalos. Hi. Thank you team. I was speaking to a community advocate last week who was saying that it would make so much sense that wraparound services be available at every single one of the overnight shelters, like case management, behavioral health benefits, access, housing, navigation. Can you talk about what kind of wraparound services are available at the overnight shelters and are if there are some, is it consistent? Is it the same at each one, or do they vary by location?
160 Yeah, it's a great question. I think brandy touched on this before. So the overnight shelters have materials staff on site who have the knowledge of the resources that are available, particularly day centers, because when an overnight shelter will close, folks can plan for the day to get connected to one of those resource hubs. So knowing kind of what's in the close vicinity, transportation options to get to that resource. We also provide, for example, streetcar kind of passes for the morning. We also have a van that helps transport folks to some of those day center opportunities. And then the outreach workers who brandy mentioned. So they have a schedule and go to the different shelter sites. It's our current commitment to provide that at every single shelter site, which is tough with our tiny team, but we're trying to do it right now, and they're doing an amazing job to help navigate different folks to different resources. I think it's a particular part of kind of this system and this structure to have those resources available during the day, at the day spaces, because people are sleeping basically most of the time that they are at the overnight shelter. So we want to encourage folks to connect to those other resources that are available in the vicinity and have that. Those printed materials have staff on site who kind of are really knowledgeable about all the different pieces of the puzzle and have outreach workers who can connect folks to those resources, but I don't. Okay, I got an a-plus from brandy. So.
161 And so would you say it's more like the sharing of information fliers? Yes.
162 Okay. And I think there's always room. I mean, frankly, we will. Anybody who wants to connect, we welcome the partnership, the support we have to rely on that. Frankly, we don't provide behavioral health services in that way. We don't provide a lot of those services as a city. So it requires partnership with other community organizations. And I've been really appreciative of all the outreach workers and community organizations and mental health and medical teams who have really shown up for us in all those different spaces and really come to the work and wanted to partner. So we're continuing to do that. If you have, frankly, have any outreach from a community provider who wants to get engaged, please connect them with me. With brandy, we try to go to multiple meetings a week to connect with different folks, but there's always more that we can do.
163 And does it vary by the different overnight shelters or is it exactly the same? I know I stopped by over winter break. I was in old town and so I actually went by and looked at the the outdoor day shelter and I could they were saying like, oh, here's some resources here today. This one's here on Monday, Wednesday. And so is it kind of like that where they rotate through.
164 Yeah. So each. I would just say quickly each overnight shelter has the same resources listed like the printed materials are the same staff are know kind of all the different available resources for the day. Spaces like the medical vans for example, have a schedule so they come certain days of the week. It's it's all routine. They go to different sites, different days of the week. So there's just like a schedule for a lot of those resources.
165 If I could just add one additional piece to that. The recovery shelters themselves have specific supports within their staff to help people access recovery resources, because that is the intent of those shelters. So I would say if we're if we're kind of looking, is it exactly the same? No, the base level of support is the other piece that I would add to that is that we're partnering with a number of organizations who have really deep experience in our community in connecting people to services, and as such, those those individual organizations are bringing their strengths into that space and their professional staff who are helping people connect to services, sometimes within that same organization that has other service sites.
166 And, mr. Mayor, you shared that neighboring cities are seeing increases in their unhoused populations. So that does raise a regional question for me. Are we as a metro area, unintentionally shifting people from one city to another rather than reducing homelessness overall, or. Yeah. Do you have thoughts about that?
167 Yeah.
168 Portland has been the center of the resource universe and it's been the opposite. And so mike jordan, in his meeting with city managers, were notified by the city managers. He's seen an inflow in the adjacent cities. Speaking with the mayors, which I meet with once a month, they had noted they had seen changes. And so they are fortunately much better resourced than we are. The Washington county communities and the Clackamas county communities. The amount of money they have per homeless soul is double ours. I mean, I don't know that specifically. And so all we're doing is, is simply caring for those community members that are here, but you just can't camp in the city anymore, have rvs because of that, that behavior shifting to the adjacent communities. And I've asked each one of the mayors and I've told them my team is here to help them. Technically, I told them how we're doing it, and I started telling them in February, diffusion is going to occur. It's going to affect your community. It's time for us to work on this together. And it's heartening because mayor beatty and mayor stovall both said, we have the resources. We're ready. We're here to help. And so that relationship has really been strong.
169 I'm wondering, given this reality, and I'm glad that you're doing those meetings, I would almost wonder if you'd want to do them twice a month or. But I wonder how those meetings are going with the regional mayors and how you guys are specifically talking about coordinating strategies, sharing resources, collective responsibility. So progress in one city doesn't create pressure in another. Can you talk about how those conversations are going, about ways that we can invest together in resources and programs?
170 Yeah.
171 There was one city in particular that saw a difference. And so we all came together as the mayors and started explaining, here's what we're doing. That city didn't have any shelters. And so anybody who needed shelter or could live in a tent, if you will, we're coming to Portland. We even had some jurisdictional partners in the law enforcement releasing people only if they came to Portland. That whole thing is shifting now, and the collaboration is conversations. That's why I was very clear with the cease and desist, if that behavior is going on, we're going to hold you accountable. It's time for community members and cities to care for their citizens. But that's why I wanted to say with mayor beatty and mayor stovall when this mayor said, hey, this is affecting my community, they spoke up for us and said, hey, we have systems. It's working. You can do it too. And then I reached out to that mayor and I offered our technical assistance. They can do this too, at very low cost, but very humane. So it's it's a good, uncomfortable conversation to be having.
172 Thank you. Sorry.
173 Thank you. No. That's okay. I think this was an important discussion, mister mayor. We have a lot of work to do, as you can see, no doubt. But I'm hoping that this next part of the conversation will start to unpack some of that. So thank you, mister mayor. Skyler, brandi, hank, luke for being here. And we'll be in touch.
174 Thank you.
175 Councilors.
176 All right, so the next part, let's go ahead and bring on our staff. And I will introduce what we're going to do while they get settled. So we're going to have a quick presentation to talk about the shelter to housing continuum. This is something that came out of the unified housing strategy stage one, when they were pulling together all of the information and trying to get a good inventory of what the city has planned to do, what they've attempted to, what needs money, what needs vision. And so this discussion, after we have a quick presentation in your packet, you received these guiding questions. And these are the same questions I posed to you all last month. We're just bringing that back up. So given the time we're at 415, let's try to make the presentation short in five minutes. And then I would encourage originally I was going to have us just go one question at a time. I would encourage you to just speak on all of the questions. They kind of blend together. Anyway, I really would love to hear from everybody. And I have my staffer, sophia, who is taking vigorous notes, because what you guys say today is really critical, because I'm going to be bringing it into the next meeting of the unified housing strategy, phase two, so that we can start to unpack these things. So please do. I would encourage everybody to get in the queue. I'll actually probably not get in the queue to make some space. So we'll go ahead and get started. Are you ready?
177 Ready.
178 All right. Take it away.
179 All right. Council president Dunphy, councilors, thank you for your time today. We will be brief. We have just a couple of quick slides for you. I think many of you have seen the first slide that we'll pull up.
180 You're going to do great.
181 Of course I'm going to do great. That's what I do. Go ahead. So as I said, many of you have seen this slide already and had some facilitated conversation about it. It is it appears, in our unified housing strategy conversations. It represents sort of the spectrum of housing that starts from homelessness services and goes all the way through homeownership. So what we wanted to do to help support the conversation that you all are going to have today is show you the ways in which the city engages along this continuum, and then specifically how the Portland housing bureau does. So as we talk about housing in the city, naturally, folks think immediately about the Portland housing bureau, and obviously we have a really big role around that. But also, it's a significant piece of the work that is done at the service level and citywide in a variety of ways. So this next slide. Is fun. It's like a smiley face and it shows if you start from the top left, you see that Portland solutions does their work at that end of the homelessness services and emergency shelter space. And there's a small asterisk on public safety because obviously public safety covers all of all of the city and all of the types of housing. But there are specific sort of interventions and support that that are partnered with Portland solutions at that end of the spectrum. And then over on the far other end of the spectrum, you see prosper Portland and their resources, the tax increment financing, middle income housing and workforce development initiatives that they lead. And then underpinning everything we have permitting and development planning and sustainability, things like land use, zoning and permitting codes and the infrastructure bureau. So these this is sort of the zoomed out view of the ways that the city and the service area touches on this housing continuum. Next slide. And then here's the Portland housing bureau. So we'll start at the top. And it's hard to see. But it says tenant protections eviction prevention and eviction legal defense or eld. The the bar should touch all the way over to supportive housing. So basically these are the renter protection programs that we provide to anyone who is in housing where they hold a lease. And then at the underneath the slide, you see a big swoop that includes the housing bonds, tax increment financing, tax increment financing, and the regulatory the regulatory oversight that we provide to the regulated affordable housing portfolio in Portland. Above that, there are federal grants home cdbg hopwa that fall more in the supportive housing community or social housing realm, and then inclusionary housing touches below market rental and ownership and private rental housing stock. And on the far purple end of the spectrum, we have down payment assistance programs, home repair, foreclosure prevention, and the homeownership opportunities. Limited tax exemption programs that we provide out of the bureau. So this gives you just sort of an opportunity to see where our resources are focused along the spectrum. As you have conversations about where you think they should be. So I'm happy to answer questions if you have them or to just step back so you can have your conversation.
182 Thank you. Thank you both so much. So yeah, I think so. Probably be more discussion based, but you guys can hang back if you'd like. So you don't have to feel like you're up there. But if people do have questions we'll bring you up. So again colleagues. So the questions let me restate them. So our one given that we cannot do everything on this continuum, where should the city focus its resources, efforts and leadership to using the same continuum? Which part should the city prioritize in the fy 26 budget and three based on your continuum priorities? Where should the city deprioritize or shift resources? As I said at the beginning, you know, ultimately the this strategy we will intend to bring back in the fall, but I think we can start to outline our priorities for this budget cycle. And that's what I'm hoping this conversation can get to, not to say, you know, particular line items, but to say just broader vision, especially by looking at this spectrum that was provided by the bureau. So with that, I would and like I said, I would love to hear from everyone. I've already see some people in the q councilor Smith, I think you're still legacy. So can I go to councilor Green and you want to get in the queue again? All right, councilor Green, let's kick us off.
183 Thank you so much for this discussion. I like this style of engagement with the work session. So happy to share some ideas with you all. I'm just going to go in order of your questions to prompts. I think in terms of the continuum, the city's role should begin with transitional housing, and I only say that because I think I actually would put transitional. I'm not really sure. It's I don't know where it really lives. I think it lives in a venn diagram space on that continuum. I actually think of it maybe in the context of those micro villages could be an example of that. So there's there's a lot of different ways to think about transitional housing. So I would put transitional housing being sort of a capacity resource potentially that would be in the city's purview. And then I would move it on up and stop before homeownership. And I think our strongest role could be shaping what we think the future of affordable housing looks like without the baggage of what the term specifically means legally in terms of finance. So we think about affordable housing as like ami level stuff. I think affordable housing is social housing. And I think we're we're about to get a much broader and expansive view of that. And it could potentially be cost based stuff, and it could be middle housing. It could be a lot of stuff. So I think the city focuses on that. I think it's it's like $600,000 to build a new affordable housing unit for a studio that's very expensive. So we got to think about that pretty critically. I think we need to in terms of partners, the city obviously can't do this stuff alone. So I think we lead on policy zoning. We lead on sort of focusing what a social housing program looks like and what supporting our partners in the affordable housing space looks like, and then figure out how to do joint agreements with, like metro regional government to help finance the whole arrangement. Right. So that's kind of how I think about it. I don't think we should be in the homelessness services business. I think that's the county's business. Okay. So question two aligning strategy with the next budget. I think we're going to be in a very constrained budget year. I'm going to support the financial implementation aspects of slow the inflow to the extent that comes before us as an ordinance, because I think it's going to provide that guidance right there. So I think that answers that question for me. A big piece of that, though, and this is why I mentioned it with the mayor's team was up is is the is the rent buy down work that does I think is perhaps one of the the highest cost efficiency approaches that we can we can employ with one time money to get long term benefits. And so for those who have not been in the trenches on those discussions, I'm just uplifting that so we can start to talk about it and get a common understanding of what rent buy downs are, what are the value propositions, and how do we rank those in terms of our priorities? And then finally, I'll just say, if we're going to have an inclusionary housing model, we need to fund our inclusionary housing model so we don't end up with like weird boundary condition issues where you get the 19 floor problem or the 19 unit problem. Sorry, I would love if we had a 19 floor problem. Anyway, I'll leave it at there. Again, I want to deprioritize homelessness service business sitting on the on the the city side. And what I mean is, is frankly shelters and and sweeps. I know we're not using that term. Not not everyone's using that term. But I think that's a county thing. I think we need to figure out what we're good at and divide and conquer capacity is how I frame it. Thank you.
184 Wonderful. Great modeling of what I'm looking for. Thank you. Councilor, council president Dunphy.
185 Thank you. Yeah, I, I appreciate this this spectrum to sort of help us understand it. It does feel like it gives a sort of broad, the broadest understanding. But I will say that I, as I mentioned to the mayor, I really am interested in knowing more about the city's ability to stand up sros. And those are transitional. They are not necessarily temporary, but they are not intended to be a place where somebody lives for the rest of their lives. I think that that is the built in. I think that still feels like it is somewhere inside of the realm of what the city should be doing with our dollars. I'm very excited about the work that the county or that the city. The housing bureau has different parties. The housing bureau is bringing about social housing, and how I am fully convinced that we can get more using the same dollars and we can get we can create more holistic assets for our for our community that actually meaningfully move the ball forward. I agree that I think we need to identify and agree. Finally, at some point, that what what we only we can do, which is permitting, which is the built environment, which is public spaces, and try to find those areas where we are duplicating our processes and our processes that other governments are doing and stop doing them. I think we just need to not have to keep reinventing the wheel and doing all these things multiple times, which again, what that means is, as councilor Green was saying, I don't think we should be running shelters. I don't think that should be our role. If we have an iga, we should be moving. Now, to answer your second question about prioritization, I, I feel really uncertain right now how to say this, because I think that a lot of that also depends on the realities of the state and federal budgets, depending on. I mean, you know, we heard from the president is trying to target federal dollars to sanctuary cities or out of sanctuary cities, and I'm certain we will sue and I'm certain we will win. But there is always some some real pain in the process, and we don't know how quickly that will happen. Additionally, we know that the state is trying to patch enormous holes in their budget, and we are going to see, I'm certain, certain types of services that we expect not delivered in the way that we expect them. So it's a really tricky spot right now to say how we are choosing to prioritize. I also we have a color of money problem. A lot of times where we will say, oh, we don't have any money over here, but we have hundreds of millions of dollars over here. But you can't use those hundreds of millions of dollars over to here. And, you know, for example, money that is sitting in tif districts, but that is future allocated or associated with a community plan gateway, for example, has $30 million or something sitting in the tif fund and a 20 or a 15 year old action plan. It is hard for me to sort of understand, you know, and I'm looking forward to more work on the unified housing strategy. So we can also identify where all those pots of dollars are and how we can prioritize. But I think broadly for prioritizing, I think we need to prioritize the things that only we do and only we can do. And to that, that means prioritizing the folks that we have a contractual relationship, the services that we have contracted out with the county and start moving that direction. But lastly, I will just say there was also the report that came from Multnomah county recently about the effectiveness of their 24 hour shelters, transitioning people into housing, and whether that is going to change what their budget looks like. I'm unclear at this point. So. I that's yeah, that's as broad as sort of broad answers for three questions.
186 Thank you. Very helpful. Thank you. Council president councilor Morillo.
187 Thank you, councilor Avalos. We had this discussion already in the housing committee, so I won't take up as much time because I think I articulated my thoughts on that day when I was more well rested. But I would say that the areas that I think the city needs to focus on are between the orange transitional housing all the way up to homeownership, although I think homeownership stuff tends to be more statewide policies that can be passed. I don't feel the need to reiterate everything, because I think my sentiments were largely expressed by councilor Green as far as wanting the city to focus on more imaginative solutions, including a community or social housing. With the issues that we're facing, I don't think that we can continue the same things and expect different results. And I do agree that I think that there has been a lot of mission creep as far as what the city does with our homelessness response. That used to be largely and solely the county's role, and we have been taking that on more and more. And I think that has actually strained. There's too many cooks in the kitchen, and I think it's strained relationships because people have different sets of expertise and different things that they have control over. So I'm not saying I want us to leave the joint office or anything like that. So no one panic. But I think that overall, I've just seen that shift more and more into the city's role, and frankly, we don't have the dollars to do it. The county has millions of dollars to address this problem in a way that we don't. And I'm seeing our dollars and our general fund shift to emergency shelters when we are having to make drastic cuts year after year. So that's where I think our line is, and I think that we really need to rely on our partners at the county for that part of it, right, because they are a public health entity. And when you view homelessness through a public health lens, your response to it is going to be very different than when you view it through like a bureau infrastructure lens. It's a different way of approaching people and their problems. So that's what I see our role in. And for councilor Avalos, staff for taking notes, a lot of the stuff councilor Green said already covered it. If you want to just copy paste, thank you.
188 Awesome. Thank you, vice president Clark.
189 Thank you, councilor Avalos. Just maybe three things. Number one, whatever it takes to keep people safe, our neighborhood safe, keep people off the street, people on the street. Help them get safe. That's the humanitarian crisis, whatever that takes. Number two sros I have talked to the mayor about sros in my small town. I grew up. There were sros in a small town, and lots of different kinds of people lived in sros. So I think that it would be a very good investment. We used to have a lot of them in Portland, and they were either torn down or stopped because of code code violations. And that was a long time ago. But ultimately, I, I think the money is drying up. I don't see a lot more money being available from the federal or the state government. So I think it's incumbent on us to create the conditions that facilitate as much private development as possible, whether that's, you know, land use permitting, the sdc waiver, whatever it is we can do. Because ultimately, you know, I started my career in this area. It's been a long time since I worked on it, but I was shocked as a very naive person, to realize that it's really the private sector that supplies most of the housing that gets built, and the more of that we can get, the better I'd be. It's a cdbg still even exists. That's great if it still does, but it's going to be one of the last remaining things that's available anyway. That's those are the three things I would I would provide. Thank you.
190 Thank you, councilor Smith.
191 Thank you. Thank you for convening this. And I know she's going to hate me for this, but, gillian ciani, come up for a second. I see her because I have a question. I am kind of going down the line as our vice president about how we do this. So could you just give us history? Because I want to make sure that folks know that the city gave through this joint housing, all of their money, the old mckinney money. What's the what's the name of the new homeless dollars that we get from the feds?
192 The new what we get from the feds.
193 The mckinney homeless.
194 Mckinney bento. Yeah. Through the schools. Okay. Yes.
195 City of Portland used to get the mckinney money. Multnomah county used to get the mckinney money. And what we did was when we did the joint office, we pushed our staff, our city staff over to Multnomah county. And that is the reason why we pay, because some of our old staffers are in Multnomah county that we should pay for. So when people say, let's take away the joint office money, no, because we put all those services over there that that were done here and the shelters that were done because we both were doing them. But Multnomah county was doing the lion's share. And so we figured out a way that maybe we do all the homelessness. And that's how the iga came up, because I was there as a for those of you who don't know, I was a former county commissioner. And so I just want to level set this conversation. It's not an issue of, I mean, there is a responsibility, whether it's 31 million or whatever, there is a responsibility that the city of Portland has to Multnomah county to give them some money.
196 Absolutely.
197 And it's not. Yeah. It's not it's not even an option because some of our employees are over there, which are now county employees. So that part I'm not sure I would like to see a, a line from infrastructure to homelessness. But when you talk about safety we are responsible for safety. So homeless shelters and, you know, cleaning up, we're going to have to do some of that because that is a part of our mission. I had to go back and look. And in our charter and see what we're responsible for, and that is public safety. So it's not an option for us to say, I'm not going to do anything because we do have a responsibility, and you may have to call the roll and get some receipts on what it is and how many folks went over there, and that what we are really and truly responsible for, and how much money we had going into that system here. We have created a dual system where we are also doing the same thing. And so as we have this conversation, we need to put all this information on the table, madam chair, because it's not that easy. It is not that easy. And the question I have for you, when does the iga expire?
198 June 30th, 2027.
199 June 30th, 2027. Okay, perfect. Not perfect, but it just kind of gives us some numbers and how we need to do that. So that's not something this conversation is for conversation for fiscal year 28. I mean, we have to have it now because if we're going to do something different, we are going to have to have folks have enough time to do something different. And I don't want this to be the only conversation that we have about what individual councilors want to do as it relates to housing, because that conversation, as the mayor was here is going to have to be included in this. But I wanted to make sure that we have the data and the data that you all brought over, which was I don't want to do it off the top of my head, but I was alarmed. I think you said something like, even if we had double the money of what we had, we still would. Could you repeat that for me? So I can just for people who didn't see that particular. Could you repeat that stat?
200 Yeah. What you're referring to councilor. And I wish I had it in front of me. I don't, but we we sort of we were working the math problem, if you will, and what it would take to reduce homelessness over two years by 50% and it would essentially be double the effort is what we say, because it can happen in multiple ways. Right? It doesn't necessarily mean you put double the effort into housing placement funds, right. That's millions of dollars. You can put a lot of more effort in eviction prevention, in debt restructuring, for affordable housing development so they can reduce their rents like that's part of eviction prevention. Right. And the forward has done that very recently with sros in downtown for example. So double the effort doesn't necessarily mean dollars in one place along the continuum. It can mean policy or financial efforts in a variety of ways. But you are remembering correctly that it was a 50% reduction would take double the effort in some way.
201 Okay.
202 It's a daunting figure, which is why I'm recalling.
203 I don't mean to pick on you or to to pick your brain, but you are the person who has the the data and you are the homeless czar for the county, correct?
204 I don't use that title, but a reporter.
205 Official title.
206 Director of the homelessness response system.
207 You are the homeless czar. So so so the other piece was I had a conversation with the mayor upstairs earlier, and we were talking about eviction prevention services. And I remember the other day in the finance committee, councilor Novick said that rent assistance in terms of being effective, that 1 in 9 people with the assistance are being helped as opposed to the people who are on the street that that there's a 1 in 9.
208 There is national data that says and and not having the report in front of me, but but essentially says that one out of every ten people that are helped with eviction prevention would have actually become homeless like that. That is what that one report says. So this is where homelessness math can get very complicated, right? Because right there you're trying to prove an unknown. And then you're pitting. And I was sitting in the finance committee. Then you're pitting the rent assistance folks against the home building folks. And we all need to, to to have all those, those legs of this chair in order to make sure that we keep that we have enough affordable housing, we have to build enough affordable housing. And then on top of that, we have to have enough money in eviction services to make sure that people who are currently in housing, that they don't lose it.
209 Right.
210 And so the mayor was saying it is not as effective to use eviction services. I don't agree with that personally, because what I, what I think is that people who are already in housing, if, if they just need 1 to 3 months to keep them in their housing and they're good, then they're good, right?
211 And it's the cheapest. So I mean, keep people housed is at the top of the list to reduce the inflow that is coming at us at tsunami levels.
212 Yeah. And I just wanted to make sure because I didn't that stat that he gave me that said, well, you know, those folks who are already housed, they'll find a place, they'll find a way to do it. How how would they find a way? I just want to make sure that as we're having these conversations, I have a, a a bill that will be coming up soon. I hope that will deal with the, you know, slowing the inflow of all of this stuff or, and or, you know, something passed out of the finance that that does the same thing. But I want to make sure that we're putting resources where they're going to be most effective. And I don't know, I'm not as as clear on all the stats as as the two chair and co-chair of the, of the housing committee. And so I'm just trying to make sure that I'm level setting and that if I'm directing resources, that they're going into a place that's going to be effective, because I would I mean, just me, I don't know the data, but I would like to see a little bit more money put into eviction prevention. So that's keep people housed. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you and the work that you do.
213 Thank you.
214 Thanks so much for coming up. Okay, folks, we've got about 17 more minutes and I want to hear from councilor Novick, then canal, then Koyama Lane. So let's go ahead.
215 First of all, it's providential that councilor Smith was talking just before me. I just wanted to say that I had read that statistic that says that for every ten people you give rental assistance, one would have fallen into homelessness. And we've also heard from jillian's folks that every month, a bunch of people who we hadn't reached with rent assistance, who just wasn't part of the system at all, fell into homelessness. 1400. Yeah, yeah. So what that says to me is that there's a whole ton of people out there who are rent burdened and at risk of homelessness, and some of them, you know, find something, you know, manage to stay in homes one way or another anyway. But some of them don't. And it's hard to predict exactly in advance which ones will. And that doesn't mean that rent assistance isn't an effective investment. It's just we need to recognize it's not like for every person we give rent assistance, we prevent them from falling into homelessness. As far as the priorities concerned, I agree with with all of my colleagues. Unfortunately, one way or another, I agree with the idea that the city's primary role should be creating more actual housing through zoning, through permitting, through building. And and I think that we need to start thinking of housing in different ways. I mean, I think we need to start thinking of your social housing. I think we also might need to start thinking that it might not be possible for everybody to get a traditional x number of square foot apartment. I talked to a builder recently who said that they could take the colwood golf course and put 650 400 square foot manufactured homes there, and that struck me as interesting, because that's going to be a lot cheaper than $600,000 affordable housing unit. And it's land that we own. However, having said that, I think it should be mostly creating housing. I also am sympathetic to councilor Smith's point that we are going out, that there's some places where we can place the neighbors, that a homeless camp is causing huge problems. We might disagree about what circumstances in which we might remove it or not, but I think there's going to be some cases where they get removed, and it's not fair for us to be removing a camp unless there's someplace for people to go. So that's what I think kind of leads us into what we've got to participate in building some shelters if they're not available. So, I mean, I'd be preferable if the city was not in the shelter business. But I have a hard time saying we can't be in it at all when we're in, when we're still removing people that don't necessarily have other places to go. So that's my extremely unhelpful comment.
216 Thank you. Councilor Novick councilor Canal.
217 Thank you, madam chair. First, thanks to the administration, everybody who came up here, the mayor, for this information. I do really appreciate this, this format as well and as well to the hrc folks, we're not pro royalty here. So I get the the avoidance. The terms are. Yeah. So I this is a challenging thing to answer the first question because I agree with councilor Green that transitional housing, there is an overlap. I think the public safety and right of way part is very clearly ours as it relates to jurisdictional responsibility. So sweeping is a conversation that lives at the city primarily. It's not to say I support the idea of what we're doing, but that the decision point is with the city. Emergency shelters, I think, are a part of our responsibility. I don't like seeing that they're defined exclusively here. But I understand, given that this is from the housing bureau, that it's a that it's defined only as people experiencing houselessness. I think that there's a, a need to build resilient systems that can work in case of natural disaster, in case of fire, in case of everything else. And I know that's not, you know, within this bureau's role. And I just wanted to flag that I agree that the the housing I'm sorry the self-governing villages fall into the temporary or transitional housing as well. I do think homeownership is a part of the solution here. And not just but but primarily for those who are past planning and zoning practices have dispossessed. And I think that's an important thing to to bring into this conversation that we have a history of redlining, we have a history of all these different practices that have denied people homeownership. And I do think that it's our responsibility to fix that. And again, not just for those folks, but for everyone, because as a renter, I am constantly thinking about how one can get out of this, this thing of subsidizing someone else's profit margin. So I just wanted to flag all of that. I do prefer the idea of the solutions that don't feel like running on a treadmill, and I appreciate councilor Novick's nuance, you know, in terms of how we dig into the conversation about rent assistance, because there is a place for short term rent assistance, but a long term rent assistance runs the risk of subsidizing landlords as well. So there's a there are some tension points there that we need to kind of navigate in detail that we just don't have time for today in terms of comparative advantage, social housing, we have bonding authority to get that started. I do agree on sros as well. With council president. I think where we start to lack comparative advantage, whether it's within our jurisdictional role or not, is in the permanent supportive housing space. I think there's some there may be other providers that are better at that than we are. And then finally second to finally the permitting, zoning, expanding access. But there is and finally, actually the policy that creates access to housing. So I do not think it's a worthwhile investment to build housing if we're not going to actually put human beings in that housing. And so whether it's home forward and it's 14% vacancy rate or it's putting a long term vacant property tax, sorry, long term vacant property fee on both commercial and residential. And I'm very much looking forward to the report back on that at the end of the month of February, so we can start having that conversation in earnest. It's about getting human beings into housing, not just having the housing and letting it sit vacant. Thanks.
218 Thank you. Councilor councilor Koyama Lane.
219 I have a very specific question that maybe connects to other spaces too, but I have been upstairs in the downtown safe shelter, the salvation army shelter. Have other folks been upstairs and seen that there are just a ton of sros that are being unused of just wondering, like, can we use those? Are there other situations like that? What's getting in the way of that? I'm not sure if the folks that could answer that are here or not.
220 I can quickly give you an answer to that. So brandy westerman, once again, for the record, at safe, we've been in discussions. So that building is owned by the salvation army. And we've been in discussion with them about activating the sros that they have upstairs. They were prior their prior use was as transitional housing for women who come through that program. They have a vision to use it that way again, and we're talking to them about how we can support that vision. Currently, however, they are down due to plumbing issues, which is, I think, fairly common in some of these older buildings with sros. So I think these are some of the challenges that we face is just kind of the the old infrastructure and trying to keep that at a usable, safe level.
221 Anything further councilor Did you want to share your answers to the questions?
222 I just have a quick question.
223 Okay, councilor Green.
224 You haven't had an opportunity to speak yet. I was going to respond to some of the things I heard along the way, but if you wanted to take that privilege, I can wait for you.
225 No.
226 That's okay. Okay. I really again, I really appreciate this format. I think the reason why I cut it off before homeownership is that's a tough one, because I think my motive for wanting to do social housing is rooted in the recognition that wealth, the wealth distribution in the united states, is largely a function of whether or not you were lucky enough to get property and keep property, and that that is incredibly racialized. It's also, you know, race, class and gender. It's a very intersectional problem. And so social housing in some sense, for me is designed to move away from the model of wealth generation through the fee simple property ownership. So I was I was councilor Kanal was here for this, but I'll say it anyway, this youtube and so what they have in vienna, if that's the model we end up choosing, is you just have like you have hereditary rights to this apartment like you don't. You're not going to be evicted from this apartment. You get to keep this apartment. And so you get the same benefits of the stability of a mortgage and homeownership with that kind of a model and on a cost based rent model, you can accrue and save money and build wealth through financial markets instead of through one very specific type of asset that doesn't have a lot of liquidity and is actually exposed to deep, like high risk of depreciation, you know, so like that's kind of how I think about it. But I think if we were to make that sell and get folks interested and comfortable that, you know what, there's a different way to build wealth in the united states. There's a city like Portland is we would want to offer a framework around like very intentional community wealth building framework that says, like, look, it's we're building wealth in our communities. That is yours. That is part of where you live. You have a vested stake in it. We can also do things like, we don't have the money for it now, but we could we could figure that out and prioritize it. But we could do baby bonds for people who have been redlined. That is, that is that is a proposal that that our communities could engage with. And so there are other ways to, I think, to build wealth. And I would love for us to engage on that. I just worry about with the scarce resources that we do have. I think in a housing market like Portland, trying to build homeownership will go very will not go very far at all. And I think we can make a lot more hay by building building apartments that are outside of the affordable like ly tech space. Basically. Thanks. I just wanted to add that.
227 Thank you colleagues. We are at the end of the stack, but also we have lost quorum unfortunately. So we are going to have to end. But I appreciate this conversation. Like I said, what.
228 Councilor Kanal online?
229 Oh.
230 Is he online?
231 Well he's logged.
232 In but he's okay.
233 Never mind. I don't know how that works actually. Yeah. So we'll we're we're gonna have to end it. Yeah. Because councilor Smith left. Yeah, but thank you. I will still end with pleasantries. Thank you so much for the discussion. Like I said, my staff have been taking lots of notes and I will be working to report that back out to you all and we'll continue this conversation soon. So with that.
234 That we are adjourned.
235 Thank you.