The record · Transcript
Council Session — 2025-11-04
Transcript from the session's official auto-captions (20,807 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
The Portland City Council Homelessness and Housing Committee met on Tuesday, November 4, 2025, with roll call confirming attendance and the statement of conduct read into the record. The session covered three agenda items. First, representatives from Multnomah County's Homelessness Response System presented an updated, reorganized Homelessness Response Action Plan with five goal areas replacing the previous nine, along with a status column and responsible-party listings; new key performance indicators were described as still in development, with further review scheduled for a November 13 joint work session and a vote anticipated in December. Discussion touched on permanent supportive housing retention rates, with figures stated inconsistently across speakers regarding cohort sizes and success percentages. Second, Portland State University's Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative presented findings from the 2025 Point in Time Count, explaining differences between sheltered and unsheltered data sources, by-name-list methodology, demographic breakdowns, and geographic origins of people experiencing homelessness, noting some figures were presented inconsistently depending on methodology. Third, representatives from the Welcome Home Coalition presented the "Finding Home" report, including survey data on housing preferences, barriers to accepting housing offers, and policy recommendations regarding rent assistance, peer support services, and expanded housing models. Discussion included extended exchanges about service accountability measures. The meeting adjourned after quorum was lost; any votes taken 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 There we go. Good afternoon. Is this on? Hey, there we go. Hello. Good afternoon, and welcome to the Tuesday, November 4th meeting of the homelessness and housing committee. I now call this meeting to order. It's 1202. Rebecca, can you please call the roll?
1 Zimmerman. Here.
2 Avalos. Ryan.
3 Here.
4 Morillo here.
5 Dunphy here. And, claire, would you please read the statement of conduct?
6 Good afternoon, and welcome to the meeting of the homelessness and housing committee to testify before this committee in person or virtually. You must sign up in advance on the committee agenda at Portland.gov/council agenda, slash homelessness and housing committee. Or by calling 311. Registration for virtual testimony closes one hour prior to the meeting. In-person testifiers must sign up before the agenda item is heard. If public testimony will be taken on an item, individuals may testify for three minutes. Unless the chair states otherwise, your microphone will be muted when your time is over, the chair preserves order. Disruptive conduct such as shouting, refusing to conclude your testimony when your time is up or interrupting others testimony or committee deliberations will not be allowed. If you cause a disruption, a warning will be given. Further disruption will result in ejection from the meeting. Anyone who fails to leave once ejected is subject to arrest for trespass. Additionally, the committee may take a short recess and reconvene virtually. Your testimony should address the matter being considered. When testifying, please state your name for the record. If you are a lobbyist, identify the organization you represent. And finally, virtual testifiers should unmute themselves when the clerk calls your name. Thanks.
7 Thank you. Claire. Today we're going to have three items on our agenda. First, we're going to hear from our colleagues at Multnomah county and councilor Zimmerman on the homelessness response action plan. And then we're going to have presentations on two recent studies. First, doctor marisa zapata, I don't know which emphasize. I'm sorry.
8 I'll teach you in a minute.
9 Okay. Thank you. I'm always bad at this part and I apologize, but we're going to share analysis on the 2025 point in time count. And then representatives from the home welcome home coalition are going to share their findings from the recently released finding home report. So first, rebecca, can you please read the first item?
10 Item one homelessness response system steering and oversight committee.
11 Thank you. We've asked jillian, shoni and Ryan deibert from Multnomah county to return with an update on the current work of the steering and oversight committee, and then I will invite councilor Zimmerman to share some comments after jillian and ryan's presentation. Take it away.
12 Thank you council.
13 Turning Green. Is that okay? Oh, now it's Green. Thank you. For the record, jillian schnee, director of the homelessness response system. Glad to be back. Okay. Next slide please. Ryan. Thank you. I'm first going to talk about the updated plan and preserve enough time for both Ryan and Ryan to share a bit about the performance indicators that are still in development. So I'll share enough for the members of the general public and media just to bring everybody along with where we're at. By way of reminder for those tuning in, the homelessness response system action plan and current set of performance indicators were largely developed during calendar year 2023 and passed by the board of commissioners and the Portland city council during the summer of 2024. Immediately after passage, a team was put in place to establish the oversight structure our three governing bodies and to begin work on the deliverables as outlined in that version of the plan. The plan represents all of the systems and programs that we should be looking at, regardless of the level of homelessness in our community. Some of it represents big financial implications, like our efforts to expand our shelter system, funding for more permanent supportive housing or rapid rehousing initiatives. Other work really represents sort of big systems work like such as creating ways to connect our housing and healthcare systems to improve outcomes for those served by both of those systems, or big policy lifts like what we, the city of Portland, did to change its zoning code to make it easier and cheaper to build affordable housing. What it isn't it is not the overarching investment strategy that is primarily driven by our key performance indicators, which inform your budget votes. So think of the plan as the policy document, if you will, and then the key performance indicators as your guide to making investment decisions. So with some solid work accomplished with just over, you know, one year under our belts, it was clear that the plan was due for a refresh. And with the nationally respected work of the data team over at the homelessness services department, there was an opportunity to reorganize the plan with how we talk about the homelessness response system and the big buckets of work. So in may, we set out to engage our invested partners internally and externally. And what you have before you today is that reorganized and updated plan. Next slide please. So again this is the first time it's received a refresh. It will not be the last. We have always planned for this document to adapt and keep up with the work that needs to get done. It's a mix of existing items being carried forward, some with a bit of refinement to improve clarity and then some new action items just that represent the additional work that we need to tackle. And I just want to say for a moment that truly, the collaboration over the last several months has been incredible. I really do think that we have some rock star staff members at the city, county and metro doing the hard work in the face of the monumental task before us all. And what this plan gives us is a guide. It keeps us on track and on task, and I'm personally and professionally energized to keep at it. Next slide please. So just some nuts and bolts. You'll recall that the original plan had these nine broad goal areas. And then there was an appendix of a mix of things. It was really difficult for our elected leaders and external partners in particular, to follow along with what the heck we were actually working on. That was a valid thing. So we've now reorganized it into five goal areas. Three of those goal areas align with how we talk about the homelessness response system. Inflow safety off and off safety on and off the streets and outflow. The fourth is care coordination and cross-sector collaboration. That is really where the heavy, meaty work around the big lifts in health, behavioral health and their intersections with housing. That's largely what that section is about. And then finally, the fifth, the never ending as it should be need for data and evaluation, especially actionable data, and how that allows us to constantly be in a state of continual improvement. So those are the new five goal areas. Next slide please. And then the only thing that I will highlight on this side, this slide is number four the orange four. You see we added a status column. So we for all involved we wanted to be clear about what we were currently working on and what we saw as. Up next, we welcome your feedback on those items, but I think that alone has just provided a lot of clarity to folks with how we are spending our time. And then the other thing that I just want to point out is the responsible parties. Please know that we generally just named the the lead convener or funder. It's not an exhaustive list. All of these will once we start tackling an item, we build out the group. Once the scope is is really, really clear. And of course you don't see the state woven in quite yet except for the active conversations. There's there's a whole engagement that I'm going to do with the state of Oregon about and give them their own spreadsheet and document to, to work alongside with us for the action items that pertain to them. So when we took this updated plan to the soq, essentially what we asked them, we showed them was we're doing a lot of stuff. Do you all agree that it's the right stuff? If not, what do you think is missing and what do you would like us to prioritize if it's not already noted in that way? And the result of that particular meeting was that they did do they did provide us a high five, what I call a referral vote out to both the Portland city council and the county board of commissioners for an official vote and adoption of this updated plan. And I have time held on your calendars on December 11th to make that happen. So today's presentation is just to give you a little teaser. We'll be back on November 13th in our next joint work session to go in depth a little bit more, and then we'll be back for an official vote in December for sure. On the action plan. What is still in the works are the key performance indicators, and I'm going to kick it over to my colleague brian deibert, to sort of brief you up where that work is right now.
14 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Ryan deibert. I use he him pronouns and I'm the deputy director at the homelessness response system. Very glad to be here with you today. As gillian said, a key part of this work is not just defining what the work is, but how we're going to measure the success of the work in the existing homelessness response action plan, we have four key performance indicators that it was originally developed with, as it was passed under the intergovernmental agreement between the city and the county. You've heard us report on those four existing key performance measures at each of the joint city council, board of county commissioner Meetings. And you've also heard us talk about some of the limitations of those four existing performance measures. They're helping to tell part of the story, but certainly not all of the story. And we've recognized some of the gaps in that, in that measurement process. So coming into this, this new and revised version of the homelessness response action plan, it's also given us an opportunity to update those key performance indicators, especially as the existing ones are mostly due to sunset as of the end of this calendar year. So we've done a fair amount of work to working with our steering and oversight committee, our community advisory committee, and our implementation committees to really dig deeply into what would make for good metrics, to help us track the success of our work, and just to help differentiate a little bit, we we talk about key performance indicators, really as as the what I often describe it as the needle. Are we moving the needle in the right directions to know that we're succeeding in our work within each of those key performance indicators, there's a number of sub indicators that we can also measure to better understand. Why is it moving one way or the other, and how can we continue to influence that direction. And then each of those indicators is then set up to flow into individual program metrics that both the city and the county, as funders of this work, can build into contracts so that we can measure the performance at an individual provider level. Another way of looking at that is this slide. Just understanding that key performance indicators each come with a set of goals. Those goals transfer into strategies, programs and contracts. And we're measuring performance at each of those levels. Importantly though, all of that has to roll up into the work that you as, as legislative bodies do to understand key policy and budget decisions. So as we're pursuing these new key performance indicators, we're particularly trying to put forward ones that can help you understand how to make policy and budget decisions, to drive in the directions that we want to see across our community. So as we set about developing those key performance measures for this, for this new iteration of the plan, we worked really closely, particularly with the the data and evaluation team at the homeless services department who are able to put forward criteria by which we were reviewing those key performance indicators. In particular, we wanted to make sure that they were measurable and that we had data sources that would allow us to actually to measure the progress against those metrics. We were also looking for strategic alignment so that we could align those key performance indicators to that new orientation of the plan around inflow outflow, a safety on and off the streets. So each of those indicators are directly tied to those different components of the plan. And then we were looking for those indicators that helped to look at a system wide impact. So in other words, not just looking at the performance of the county's homeless services department or the work that was happening here through Portland solutions, but instead able to measure the success of our systems as a whole. So again, today is really just a preview. We'll be going in depth into each of these key performance indicators and some individual briefings with each of you in the coming week. We'll also be going in depth in that joint session of city council and the board of county commissioners coming up on the 13th. But just to briefly walk you through the key performance indicators that have been recommended by the steering and oversight committee. Three, that that track across all inflow, outflow and safety on and off the street and then several that are connected more directly to each of those. So looking just at our total numbers of people who are experiencing homelessness on a month to month basis, people who are returning to homelessness as part of the inflow to homelessness, some of the most significant conversations that we've had with our colleagues here at the city, in particularly at the housing bureau, around setting some key performance measures around the availability of housing that's affordable to folks with very low incomes. And then you see here the range of additional key performance indicators that are measuring each of those points at inflow, outflow and safety on and off the streets. So again, since today is just a little bit of a preview, I won't go in depth on any of those. Happy to answer questions, though, and know that detailed briefings are forthcoming.
15 Great. And before we turn any questions to the committee, I'd like to turn it over to councilor Zimmerman.
16 Thanks. They did a good recap, I think that noting for the colleagues that the kpi conversation has to still happen. And that was where I think we really. You know, we left it and we added some some meetings because I think that is actually an area that a lot of people expressed at the last sock, a desire to dig into. So that referral for the action plan has occurred. And now the kpis, I think, require the rest of our attention. It it has been it has been an improving cycle, I think, to get to this next iteration. There's there's a willingness that I've found on the sock to discuss some of the populations in ways that I've watched governments beat around the bush for many years. And I have found that I've appreciated that. There's been a willingness to get into why certain providers say something, or why they insist on something in ways that I think previously we've really avoided as a community to have direct and frank conversations. So I'm appreciating it from that perspective. And also that means that the old form of whatever the joint office and the iga was, is also experiencing new input by people who are talking about topics that used to be kind of taboo, I think. And so that has been healthy, and it's uncomfortable. There's a there's a lot to be said for defining population, defining and really articulating the story of people who have been to a shelter, have been placed and then find themselves back into the homeless system. What is that failure? What population, what norms are we having? Where are we seeing success? Can we invest more in those who we're being successful with? Can we take more time to investigate where we're failing and the kpis, making sure that the kpis are driving toward what makes sense instead of just to meet a kpi. Meaning we've had a lot of discussions on this dais and other places about the push that has existed in this community to get people into a housed situation who were not ready for a housed situation. And then they had a really sad outcome, not just for themselves, but for their neighbors, for others, etc. So those types of conversations are happening now in ways that I've watched for a long time. Them get avoided. So I think that's good. I think that jillian is. I'm not sure if she's a some sort of wrangler of some sorts for all of us, circus master or, or chief of ideas, but it has been it has been a space that I think we're growing into it. But I think that this group, we're going to have to really take a look at the city, given how much we have invested in shelter with this mayor and the previous and how that fits into this plan. Right, because that is different than where this is all set up originally. And those outcomes are going to matter when we see that 50% of shelter beds are going vacant each night. This type of thing is we have to find a way for kpis to help us measure what is being talked about and and observed in the community. So we've added a few. This is like Ryan said, this is just an update for now, and I think that we need to give this a little bit of time to marinate, both with the county, with the city of Gresham, with our other partners, and with where the mayor and I sit before we bring the final one in December. Is that what you said, jillian? Yes. Yeah. So that's all for me. So thank you for the presentation to both of you.
17 Thank you, councilor Zimmermann. Councilor Morillo.
18 Yeah, I just had a quick question and maybe you guys can answer it. Or maybe councilor Zimmermann, you can answer it because it was based off something you said. I, I certainly understand that there are some people who are not ready to go into housing because they have other supportive needs that aren't being met, whether it's addiction or mental health services. But it's my understanding that our biggest problem is actually we're really struggling to get people into housing in the first place. So is that like a problem that we're seeing in a lot of abundance that people are getting into housing and they're leaving statistically? Or are there a few one off stories that we're hearing? What is the actual gravity of that? Because it's my understanding that we were we're just struggling to get people into housing at all.
19 I'm going to address it first. What what we're starting to hear is that we have we have housing providers. So people who who run supportive housing, who have previously felt the pressure from, I'll just say, the greater system to maybe take a person on that. They're their ability to provide the specific type of permanent supportive housing and what those services are maybe was out of line with the person who was placed there. There is an there is. And then when that happens, that person is like more likely to have a failure. But also when that happens, some of these failures can be catastrophic in terms of the impact of like going down the stack of units, for instance, if you're flooding a unit, etc. The point here, and I think commissioner Singleton is leading in this, is that what psh means? And the types of services that are available at different communities being more specific about that, so that we can more specifically place people and have them be ready for it, is is where I'm seeing what I think is a more healthy conversation than what some of the providers were feeling they were allowed to bring up in previous iterations, and now they feel like, yes, I can say, hey, we're good on this type, but we need either more services or we need this client to maybe go, this is a this is not the best place for them. So that's where I'm seeing a conversation happening. That has been kind of avoided previously, because the type of service that comes with psh seems to vary based on who focuses on what, who has specialties, etc. So that's what I meant in that sense. And it doesn't. The umbrella statement that you made in terms of we're having a hard time getting people placed that remains, which is, I think, why they're bringing it up, because they don't want to lose units or have them taken off the market while they have to go through repairs because of a bad outcome, given how tight the the placement situation is right now.
20 Thank you. Is there anything you two would like to add?
21 I just layer on. It is both. There is that larger part. We just need more housing placement. Get more people in housing. That's that's that's the bigger problem numbers wise. But we do have this slice of individuals who are are getting placed in psh who are not being successful. I think I liked how councilor Zimmerman put it where it says it's a sad story for them and and others, the impact to their neighbors and the housing provider. And we have new data in our hands looking at the we call it the high acuity behavioral health cohort of folks that y'all should get a briefing on in here, too, by the way. I'll work on that. But at any rate, we have a work group right now to sort of design something different for to target those folks. That's a segment of the population we want to look at closely to, to improve their success rate in housing. Right now, there's about a 4% difference between people who aren't in that high acuity behavioral health cohort versus those who are. And there's about a 4% difference in their success rate. So we want to close that gap. It's one of the key performance indicators. That's about 200 people. So that's what we're that's where we're starting to tackle that problem. In partnership with behavioral health providers housing providers. The hospitals are at the table. Ryan is at the table, hsds at the table and bchd over at the county.
22 Yeah. And just just to help with the scope of that councilor, there are about 4600 people who are currently in permanent supportive housing across Multnomah county. Almost every one of those is some form of partnership between the city and the county. It's affordable housing that was developed by the city, financed and developed by the city, and then services that are provided by the county. Of those 4600 people, about a little more than 85% of them are successful and remain in that housing more than two years after entering that housing. And so we really are looking at in this discussion at that smaller subset of about 10 to 15% who are having difficulty retaining that housing.
23 Thank you both. That was helpful.
24 I'll jump in and say that I think this is great. This is the exact right direction we need to be going and to be able to set goals, define what success is, and hold ourselves accountable to this. As the kpis are still being developed, I hope that we are intentional about building in the programmatic flexibility that is necessary to adjust on the fly, that if we are seeing that we are not meeting this, that it's not a six month process that has to come back to us and vote on these things again, that we're able to see that the goal is to get people off of the street into housing and a system where if someone is facing an economic hardship and the next immediate next step isn't just falling into homelessness, and that we also can respond when those cases do happen and that they are rare and it's going to require flexibility. The the, the challenges on our streets today are different than they were four years ago, and it's different than they were ten years ago. And as you are being more successful, I think that the challenges will also evolve, that as we're able to deal with some of the easier cases, you know, the single mom who loses her job and has to sleep in her car is fundamentally different than someone who is a decades into a substance use problem or untreated mental illness, and has been failed by the system multiple times. And so they are service resistant, quote unquote. So I think as long as we are defining what success is and charging towards that and getting what we need to get there, I have every confidence. I also think that this is the kind of conversation that we need, so that we can all get into our appropriate Lane, that the city of Portland should not be converting our housing bureau into a bureau of housing and homelessness services, that we should be focusing on. Bricks and sticks, the long term plans, the permitting processes that get cranes in the sky and get homes built, and that we are looking at where those pinch points are. I think that that right now is the next biggest challenge, is it's great to have shelter beds if every bed is full. That's a phenomenal success as compared to the normal. But what happens at 6 a.m. When that person is on the street? And what happens when that person is, you know, ready for that next step, and how do they get into those? And I'm really going to be really interested in understanding how do those systems that are across complicated governments inform each other and collaborate so that the city of Portland can get back to the job that we are supposed to be doing, and the county can go back to the job that they solely you all are supposed to be doing. So this this gives me a lot of confidence that we are well along that line that way. And I'm really grateful for all the work that has gone into this. Oh, councilor Ryan.
25 Thank you. Chair, I realize first of all, thank you. It's good to see you both Ryan and julie. And also just always acknowledge the people that do this hard work every day. And I hope as I go through this with you, I'm able to see how they are, how they can be connected to this. If we're building a data driven culture. My experiences, it has to be from the bottom up. So they have to have those same dialogs in the sub indicators that you were speaking of. So people need to find themselves on the map so they're connected to this bigger picture. I know we're going to go into more details. I think the overarching big picture for me, in addition to what councilor Dunphy said about moving people into homes, for me, it's it's bigger than that. It's that we want to move people from the dependency of drugs, substance abuse and and not be dependent on that. And then you want to see people move from eventually being into workforce and then not being dependent on government services. What we have right now is a large population of of working adults that are unfortunately in a chronic state of pain. And we're trying to figure out how we could do everything we can to make them whole again, to go from that isolation of addiction to that connection in society. And so if we can't have that as an aspirational goal, I sometimes wonder what we're doing. So I'm always going to be looking at that really big north star in that I'll be looking for workforce overlap, and I'm sure that's going to be coming soon. And so I'll be looking forward to that. So I just wanted to make those cultural comments about how the workforce can be seen and experienced this as a part of the same team, and then some of those bigger arching comments about what we're really moving towards with the north star and finally making sure that we see recovery services and workforce as two key drivers that actually move people from dependency to independence. Thanks.
26 Thank you.
27 Colleagues. Any other comments? No. Thank you both for being here today.
28 Yeah.
29 Rebecca, can you please read item number two.
30 2025 point in time count overview.
31 Okay. Thank you. Portland state university's homelessness research and action collaborative have been has been conducting analysis of our annual point in time or pit counts for the last several years. Doctor marisa zapata is hr director, and she's here to share findings from the 2025 point in time count. Doctor zavada.
32 Hi y'all. I've got to start my computer from scratch and I'm sure there'll be 50 updates. So while we're hanging out here. Yes, I am marisa. Or marisa. Zapata and I run the homelessness research action collaborative at Portland state university. I've got the tech person here to help me every step. And while I'm setting this up, I can explain to you first, I'm sorry that you didn't get much information before this presentation. We literally released the report at around 10 a.m. This morning, and I wanted to take the opportunity to come and talk to you all. I wanted to take the opportunity to come and talk to you all while I had it. Before you adjourned for basically the rest of the year, because I know the point in time count gets a lot of hype and a lot of attention, and it is merely a data set, and people want to ascribe a lot of meaning to it. And I really just want to take the chance to show you some of the numbers and then talk about what what it actually how you can possibly interpret it. So the point in time count is an annual count that the department of housing and urban development requires. Requires. Why don't you just do this? Excellent. Requires that local jurisdictions known as continuum of care here in the tri county region, those would be our counties to report the number of people experiencing homelessness on one single night at the end of January. Why end of January? It is because it is the most likely time for people to be in shelter because of emergency shelter. And so the idea is that we might get a better count if we actually are counting during the winter than during the summer. There are obviously a lot of pros and cons to that. The idea of a one night count well, so the count really consists of two pieces of data that are submitted. One is the sheltered count, and that is a live count of everyone who is in shelter. The night of the point in time count. It's of all shelters that report to the Multnomah county data system, miss homeless management information system. It does not include people shelters that are not participating in that system. There is an attempt to survey them as well, but that is a data component that's missing every other year. Hud requires that a street count survey is conducted. When most people hear about the point in time count, they're thinking about the street count survey. But really, that is only one component of the data set, and that is the one that is required only every other year. In 2023, the tri county came together to conduct the point in time count. We administered the whole thing at PSU. We did a massive assemblage of data matching to help be able to say, can we deduplicate this data set effectively across the three counties? Can we make sure that we are not having people show up in different systems in different ways, and make collaborative decisions on how to reconcile that? Thank you. So that's the basic structure of the count. We talk about a one night count in terms of people going out and counting for one night. Hud actually allows you to go out and ask people where they slept for seven nights after the count. So you're asking people on a Wednesday, where did they sleep the following Thursday? The count depends on a small army of outreach workers and volunteers to actually be able to go in and say and conduct the surveys. We rely a lot on our outreach workers who are paid staff, in part because they are the people who have relationships with people living outside. So they are the most likely ones to to be able to get a good set of information and good responses. They're also the people that we would want going into encampments. We don't really want volunteers like yourselves suddenly trying to go into an encampment without existing relationships. So that's the basic structure of the count. And that is perfect timing, because there was nothing else I could say without showing you my slides. Do y'all have any questions about the count itself while I continue to get set up?
33 Actually, do.
34 I think we should just take a break until there's less?
35 Sure, sure.
36 It's actually ready to go now.
37 Oh, there you go.
38 Okay.
39 Well, I just had a real quick question and maybe you'll get to this, but does the pit count affect our federal support, either financial or.
40 It's not supposed to. Okay. Do people think it does. Yes. But again it's not supposed to. So that's the official line. It is just as a note, the only nationally reported number on homelessness around the country. And that is going to matter quite a bit for when we get into some of these differences and data sources that were used this year to report the number. So up here you see the number of people from the tri county, Clackamas county, Multnomah county and Washington county as by individuals and households. The total numbers for Multnomah county emergency shelter is 2947. That includes our people who are living in domestic violence shelters. Those are very particular numbers that won't show up throughout the report because of confidentiality issues, but they are part of the summary. Safe haven. 17 people, transitional housing 650. And here's where things start to get a little confusing. The unsheltered street count survey what people go out and ask people. There were 1822 people who met the criteria for HUD homelessness for that count. In addition, Multnomah county opted to use a modified version of their by name list to augment the count to say, we believe there are additional 5090 people that were unsheltered. I know that you all have heard a lot about the by name list. This is one of the powerful tools that come with the by name list is to be able to say to HUD and to the country, actually, we know we're not getting it completely. When we go out and survey people here are the other people that we believe are represented. This is not the normal. The normal point in time. I mean, it's not the normal by name list. There's modifications put on it to meet HUD criteria. Councilor Zimmerman. You raise your hand, what do we do? What's the order? I'm sorry, I'm a professor. So if you raise your hand to speak, I assume I'm supposed to call on you.
41 Well, at least I get an a for the day, doctor zapata.
42 That's my job, though. Let me.
43 Yeah, I'm gonna defer the chair when you're ready for questions, I just. I'm zoning in on something here.
44 If you'd like to jump in now, we can. Or we can wait.
45 Okay. Hell, yeah. I'll jump in now. So, marissa, that's a huge difference in a number that you're articulating here. And I believe fully in the by name list. So when we look at other cities who. You know, we've only got 1000 homeless people on our streets, should I expect to see in a lot of communities a similar. I'm not even sure the right word, but the enormous gap between 17% and 48%, or the enormous gap between 1822 and 5090.
46 Yeah. The magnitude of effect. Yeah. The the magnitude of difference I would not expect to see in every city. It would depend on the city and their share of unsheltered homelessness. Okay. So I would not expect to see that in, say, boston. I might assume that.
47 Because they're like, I'm sorry to interrupt. You said boston very specifically. Was that a reason or.
48 No, that was just like what came to my mind.
49 Got it.
50 Okay. Just in terms of the east coast, more people tend to share. People tend to be in shelter. Yeah. So would I expect this potentially in seattle? Maybe. Right. It wouldn't surprise me. But also the by name lists are continuing to be cultivated and cleaned and so forth. I think it is answering the question of the degree of undercount we thought might be happening with the street count survey. Lane county has been doing this approach for years, and they actually now use like more of a sampling approach for the street count survey. Their difference is not that big. And so I would expect it to change. Could I tell you which direction at this point. No.
51 Okay. And then is it is it accurate for me to say since we have 5090 in the by name list, that we're then also missing 8822 from that by name list.
52 We could not fully deduplicate the data set. Okay, so could there be overlap? Yes, we did our best to deduplicate with the homeless services department. One of the challenges is to get more people to participate in the point in time count. We have to ask for less identifying information. The con to that is that means that we have a harder time. Deduplicating. So there was some overlap, but not as much as we would have hoped.
53 Okay, thanks. I'm done.
54 Great.
55 I just that brings up a question that I was also in my mind, but specifically, are there entities in this current system in Portland that don't don't participate in the point in time count? Are there private shelters? Are there city shelters included in that? Do we have a requirement that if you are part of the broader homeless services system within the city, you are participating in the point in time count? Or is there anybody are there any anomalies out there that wouldn't be.
56 A requirement if you well, actually they've changed the contracting lately. My colleagues from the chair's office might have a better answer. The short answer is that yes, there are shelters who do not submit data to the joint. I mean, to the homeless services department, and would not be counted the night of the count. We do send and ask to send volunteers there, and so we send volunteers to those shelters in hopes of being able to complete that survey. There are additional shelters that do not want to participate in any of it. It's not a huge number, right. But those numbers are there.
57 And that's not I mean, are those privately funded shelters at that point or are these publicly funded shelters?
58 I don't remember, like what the breakdown is, because there are certain rules where you are required to report to homeless services department to hmas and some that you don't. It's a question for hd-sdi.
59 Yeah, I will ask that. I'd sure hope that if there are public dollars going into this, that there's participation in public processes. Councilor Ryan, do you want to answer your question?
60 No question. Thank you. Councilor. Nice to see you. Good doctor. I'm sorry, a little distracted. I was looking at the last report. We had like two big reports that we just got.
61 So. I know it's crazy, right?
62 Yeah. It is. And so I actually just need you to explain to me and those who might be watching that don't know what these letters stand for. And so could you go through them again?
63 Yeah.
64 Oh, yeah. I had a note here to go through the categories with definitions. Thank you. Welcome. Yes. So the categories are emergency shelter is is safe haven is safe haven. And transitional housing is th unsheltered street count survey is the uns. Scs and the unsheltered pit by name list is the last category. And the reason that we went ahead and really emphasized the separation is because if we want to actually talk about us in a regional context, the other two counties were not able to submit vital data.
65 I appreciate that. Is this new for us to use these categories?
66 Not really. What do you mean?
67 Well, what I mean is, when I looked at this a few years ago, did we have these same categories?
68 Right. So in some of the tables we did have the bottom two categories presented as they are here the unsheltered street count survey, the unsheltered pit by name list category. In some tables they are combined as the unsheltered count. So the joint office submitted the combined 1822 and 5090 as the unsheltered number to HUD. So when you see the HUD tables, it is going to have that combined number.
69 And repeat that again please. The combined number.
70 The combined number is a combination of 1822 and 5090.
71 So that makes sense.
72 6912 that sounds about right.
73 Could you define because I don't want to assume anything with these initials. Now we have names for safe haven.
74 What is safe haven? Again.
75 It's only 17 but it does stick out.
76 I'm making my indictment ask this question because I know it's a.
77 You're asking. You're calling a friend.
78 I am phoning a friend to explain safe haven in better detail because it's not used very often.
79 Okay.
80 And that was a compliment. I think there is more definition than in the past on these categories, and I appreciate that.
81 Yeah. Good afternoon again. For the record, my name is Ryan deibert. I use he him pronouns. I'm the deputy director of the homelessness response system, and I used to administer the point in time count in a prior life at the joint office of homeless services. Safe haven is a specific category of shelter that's specifically set up for folks with significant disabilities, primarily mental illness, where there's intensive treatment on site along with but they don't have ongoing tenancy. So it's considered a type of shelter as opposed to permanent housing.
82 What's an example of that in Multnomah county?
83 I'm actually not sure of the most of the most recent count, which which is categorized as a safe haven. But I'm happy to follow up.
84 Yeah, let's let's make sure we know that. Okay. Thank you. I needed to understand the actual categories I was assuming and had most of them right, but I wasn't sure, especially when we had the long ones. Yeah.
85 Well, the other thing too is that in the HUD reporting, emergency shelter, safe haven and transitional housing can all get rolled up into shelter. So again, I'm trying to just give you all the lay of the land that you're going to see.
86 Beyond the compliance of HUD.
87 Yes.
88 Good.
89 I love that framing.
90 Well, I've been yapping about that for five years, so I'm glad you like it. Their compliance won't get us very far.
91 Yeah.
92 So one of the things I really want to emphasize is the numbers in the report are the combination of multiple data sets. And there is nothing a researcher likes less than putting together data sets for different purposes of different people. And so it's one of the reasons why I'm like, yeah, it's not really 70% of anything. It's a much smaller number. So the shelter data comes from the non miss shelter survey. That is the shelter. The survey that is administered to shelters that are willing to participate, that don't submit to miss. There is a data set called the comp site or the comparable site data set that is of the domestic violence shelters. And then there is the general miss data system. All of that is what goes into that sheltered number. The unsheltered number is for the three counties based on the street count survey and what we call in the report, a classified as unsheltered. The point in time. The Multnomah county modified by name list. And so in the HUD report you would see the shelter number based on those data sets. And then for Multnomah county, you will see a combined unsheltered and classified unsheltered number. All right. So one of these things that this brings up is how do we make sense of these numbers comparatively. The if you look at tri-county numbers, you are essentially looking at Multnomah county numbers. We so far let me go to the next slide. We so far exceed the number of people in the other places that if you look at the far left, that's the tri county. If you look at the third, that's Multnomah county. The other two are Clackamas and Washington county. Right. And so to be conscious of the fact that when you're looking at a tri county number, if you're interested in the other two counties, just be cautious of the fact that you're really citing a Multnomah county number. Similarly, when you think about the actual breakdown between the groups, again, we have what will be a by name list that will drive the count for all of the data. So if I leave in the data set for analysis purposes, if I leave that by name list number in the data set, I'm effectively only going to be showing you those results. And so I think when we really want to think about how to work with people who are unsheltered, how to work with people who are sheltered people in different circumstances, it's much more effective to disaggregate the data sets based on data source or based on population. Otherwise, you're simply looking at a data set combined that is really only focused on one population. And in this instance, we would lose anything relevant about domestic violence shelters. Not domestic violence survivors necessarily, but about the shelters themselves. If we stay at this level of aggregation. To put in context, wanting to break down the different surveys, this is the street count survey numbers based on each county. So fairly consistent in the number, the share that Multnomah county has compared to the other ones. But again, just that this is what you would compare our three counties to, but will not be the number in the HUD report. I forgot to delete. This slide has boxes over the background. Actually, this whole slide should have been deleted.
93 Pause right there and councilor Zimmerman, jump in.
94 Thanks. These are very interesting differences in those Green graphs that we were just on. We before we walked in. I at least got the the byline of the oregonian's coverage of this, which was they answered the question about people from out of town or out of state being here, and that 80% of the homeless folks that are in this report are from Oregon. But I want to dive down a little bit further. Some of us have had this conversation about about. People in Portland, or in Multnomah county who maybe were previously residents of other places. We have a lot of anecdotal evidence and stories about when people interact with the police in communities that surround Portland, or interact with the hospitals that surround Portland, that there is this idea out there of just get them across the line into Multnomah county. And so when I look at these Washington county numbers, and when I look at those Clackamas county numbers, and I look at ours, is there is there anything in here? As we dive further in that will show me or indicate that people are being pushed by our neighboring counties into into Multnomah county, that people are being dropped off in Multnomah county, like we've heard our mayor talk about with hospitals, just having people get in cabs to come here because this is the place, because these numbers are so askew from one another that it doesn't. I don't think that a geographic boundary on a map should have such a significant change in the numbers here, given the the similarities in the community. So I'm looking for some more meat on these bones.
95 Yeah. So when you say the similarity or the differences between the numbers, are you talking about the overall homeless numbers or the numbers of people who came from Multnomah county versus other counties?
96 I guess if we're in the the previous slide. When it said so for this, for instance, the, you know, thousands of people in Multnomah county and and I will I will say it is from my screen, I'm making an assumption that the left or the middle one is Clackamas, but it's cut off for me. And the far right is Washington. Correct. So each of them, less than a thousand and. Here's my hypothesis I'm trying to chase. I'm just going to say if you fall on hard times, if you are so sick, you can't take care of yourself. If you are so addicted, you can't take care of yourself. That doing so in Clackamas county is less likely, and doing so in Washington county is less likely. And there is a funnel by all services, all community members, all police, everything toward Portland, Multnomah county. Is that what I'm seeing here? Because I don't have a belief that somehow it's our portlanders are this much less supportive, less healthy, less or more addictive. There's something here that I'm trying to understand these because they're so deeply different.
97 Yeah. So I mean, the first thing is, is that it's about share of population that's reflected here. Right? So you would expect to see that we have much higher numbers than the other two counties. The question that you're asking is a very challenging one and frankly very political. I do not have a research basis from what to speak to on that. I do have several slides, though, about the who moved here, who did not move here and why. And from what they told chose to tell us the the short answer for what you're looking for is nobody reported that we also did not explicitly ask that.
98 Okay. It's helpful because, you know, when I when we talked to the governor, we talked to other communities across the the state. Everybody is trying to have a conversation about two things how to create more housing in their community and how to create more shelters in their community. And I believe that's important because if you are if you are hitting difficult times closest to your support network, then the path out of those difficult situations can generally be easier. But if we have a state that seems to lead to if you fall on hard times and you can't access the three shelter beds that exist in some tiny little place in in Oregon, then you get put on a greyhound bus and you find yourself in Portland, and now you're now you're stuck here. And this is a story that we hear a lot about. And I'm trying to understand data around this now instead of just the story piece of it, because I think the governor I think the state I think every state excuse me, I think every every city council and legislator is talking about how to do it, but I want to understand how real they are when they talk about across the state development for this. Because if we have a system that kind of touches the topics across the state, but then funnels to Portland, these numbers would make a lot of sense then.
99 Yeah, I will get into this more detail in a second. Thank you. This is the percent change over time. This again is why we want to pay close attention to the data sets. The the by name list that was created for the point in time count, used a different administrative data set than two years ago. And you can see that reflected in the numbers that were included 1421 and 2023 versus 4934 and 2025. To me, the numbers to really get a sense of how much have things been going up or down, is the emergency shelter number at 64 and the street count survey at about 5%. And then of course, transitional housing at 14%. Obviously the by name list will have gone up, but I don't think it was a 247% increase. So again, putting that into some context, why do we think things went up? There's a number of different factors. One is that the shelter system in Multnomah county has expanded quite a bit. So I paused. I gave pause when you were saying that only 50% of the shelters are full every night, because then I'm like, oh, well, maybe it's not as important that Multnomah county expanded shelter beds, but that is part of what had happened. There has also been a lot more culturally specific outreach. And so we're going to look at the bipoc numbers in a second. And that goes along with that. The more you talk to people, the better they're represented in the system, for better or worse. At the same time, we know that we still have insufficient affordable housing units, and that is the only way that we actually resolve housing, whether it's people go to a psych hospital first or second, we eventually have to have the housing in place and evictions continue to go up. And so as long as eviction filings are going up, then I'm going to say, okay, this number went up simply because more people are homeless. Racial identity 46% of the population experiencing homelessness was experiencing homelessness. It's 44 from Multnomah county, one of the few times that we're lower than the entire rest of the county, the tri county. But across the tri county, only 36 of the percent of the population identifies as bipoc. So we can see those disparity numbers right front and center. We also know that bipoc are is not even just the share, but it's the rate at which they're increasing. Almost all of the categories of bipoc grew at almost double the rate than they were at two years ago. And so we look at the number of people who are white that only grew by 67%, that, you know, can reflect the increase of culturally specific services, but is also just emblematic of the fact that communities of color will experience any harms or instability at a greater share or greater level of intensity than white counterparts. The latin population, in particular, grew more than it has in the past, and we're going to have a report that comes out about that population in particular age, pretty cut and dry. Most people are 35 to 44. It's very exciting. Gender. We do continue to see that slightly more. I'm sorry. Yeah. Gender. We do continue to see that men tend to be homeless at a higher rate in Multnomah county. That is 59% compared to 37%. We were excited to have more respondents who participated in the question about gender. And so we did have people report a different gender identity by 5%. Chronic homelessness. This is what was turned into HUD for the rates of chronic homelessness. That is the share of people who are actually reclassified met the definition of chronic homelessness for the first time in two years. I mean, the first time the tri county and the first time in some time, several of the counties asked about domestic violence status. And there's been a lot of back and forth on whether that is an okay question to ask, given the trauma nature of it. We ended up working with providers and came up with two questions. So we asked people if domestic violence and or partner violence, sex trafficking, etc. Was a driver for their homelessness. We also asked if they were experiencing it right now. And so we recognize that there could be different answers to those questions we did. One of the challenges with all of these data sets is that some data sets ask certain questions, some don't. Some are cleaner in terms of having more complete data. So we were able to determine the status for dv at 5000 for 5739 people. And we did have a finding that 60% were fleeing domestic violence. Chronic substance use disorder. This is a really big one. This is one where the denominator is really messy. And I don't actually love a percent on this, because this is a data set where we've got a lot of missing data, and it's hard to know what those answers are affirmatively or negatively. In terms of chronic substance use disorder. But we would like to just make clear that 2597 people did meet the threshold for chronic substance use disorder, 2924 people are living with serious mental illness. I am not reporting a percent here because the data sets are just too fraught, and I would rather focus on the fact that it is 30,000, as opposed to saying like it's 40% and therefore everyone experiencing homelessness is at 40%. In Multnomah county, the most frequent sleeping location indicated was on the street or the sidewalk. Okay, this is where I'm going to get into the out-of-state stuff. Should I wait for counselor Zimmerman to come back or go forward?
100 No, just keep going, okay?
101 We're not going to wait for him.
102 Actually, wait. Before we do move into that, I am I am intrigued about I mean, building off the questions he was asking about the enormous imbalance and the clear difference that is happening at a policy level both in Clackamas and Washington county, as compared to how Multnomah county and the city of Portland are leaning into this. Is this information going to be shared with metro?
103 It's already been shared with metro.
104 Great.
105 This needs to be. Everybody can have everything.
106 This needs to be the centerpiece for all the future conversations about an extension of the supportive housing services bond, because it is there is no justified based on the just the numbers alone. There is no justifiable reason why Multnomah and Multnomah county isn't getting almost all of those dollars. If we are the ones handling almost all of that problem.
107 So I just want to flag if you're including that by name list. Yes, it looks very dramatic. When you remove the by name list, it is much more comparable to what you might expect. And Washington county and Clackamas county were not able to put forward a by name list and so.
108 Weren't able or chose not to.
109 I actually don't know. This was one of the things that I was like, this is getting political. Yeah, well, tell me if you think your data reaches a technical threshold to share with me. Okay. And so that is a question for them. There is an explanation in the report. And yeah it's all about gets that data quality. But I just again want to flag that. That's fair. And I have also already flagged it to metro will not be part of your political shenanigans.
110 You might be.
111 Okay. So there's a lot of reasons people want to know different pieces of data and how we deal with that, and how we make sense of that can drive policy decisions. Sometimes it's a very legitimate policy decision. You all are asking, are people coming here because we have more services, are people coming here? And so forth and so forth. And then the next question becomes, well, why does that matter? Right. And then you're saying it's because then we should get more resources, right? So that's an argument for getting more resources, a policy framing on who you might serve and how effective communication, rhetoric, evidence building and politics. I wanted to focus on this question last place house, because it is the one that gives me the most heartburn in terms of the use of a data point without contextualization or the explanation of the question that you have. You all have laid out a question here today that I'm like, okay, I might present this differently to you knowing that. But for the most part, what I hear is people want to be able to show that people are from here. Great people want to show that people are from somewhere else. They want to figure out how to how many resources to spend sending back to people where they were last housed, reuniting with friends and families, and to distribute costs or resources. So the answer to the question of last house was that 13 1311 people, 73 of the respondents who answered the question, reported living in the tri county area before experiencing homelessness. Now going to this question of where are they going? About 60%, and it was about the same for all three counties reported last being housed in the county in which they were surveyed. And so I think that that really deserves some some focus and attention, because people are becoming homeless and staying where they are, which is something that is is often demonstrated in research. It doesn't mean that people aren't moving across a region to obtain services, and then going back to sleep someplace else, but that was where they tended to become last house. 83% of people were from the tri county area, or Clark county or the rest of Oregon. Why am I putting Clark county in here? You know, I hear a lot about how many people moved here from out of state for the same reasons that y'all are pointing out, like movements and so forth. I don't really understand what we would do differently if people were from eastern Oregon versus idaho. Right? Those seem very similar. Maybe it is. There's a justification for more resources. If you're hoping that people would say, leave Multnomah county and go back to Clackamas or Washington county, then you would want to apply the same thinking with Clark county. Right? And so it's it's very hard to imagine what are the cuts and the geographies that would be driven by your actual policy questions historically, because the tri county, the tri county have been trying to be more collaborative and put a foot forward, they wanted things presented as the tri county because the no. The goal was not to move people from Multnomah to Clackamas or Washington. So a tri county number becomes most effective for that purpose. If you want to talk about the Portland metro region, which makes a lot of sense because housing markets are regional, you would want to include Clark county. I also think that geographically, if you're really driven by saying we should move people back to where they came from, people in Clark county are just as likely to come back here as somebody in Clackamas county. So again, it depends on what you really want to try to get at, how you group the numbers together and make sense of them. And that is why the next question of where did people that people, 60% of people were largely surveyed where they became homeless and that the number one reason people selected for whether they moved here outside of the tri county was to reunite with friends and family. And that's 34% of participants selected that. And so, again, if people are coming for friends and family primarily, then you have a different set of issues to consider. And so those all factor in. One of the other things that gets complicated with these percents is the denominator that you choose to work with. And so people do argue a lot. Over 12% of people are from this region, whatever this region means. 25% of people moved here from someplace else. Right? It's very easy at this small number to change the percents. Right? This includes the people who are reported. Other. I could take the other out for very justifiable reasons. I could split the category up. I could put more people in. Right. How do you make this grouping matters? And I think that denominator focus really loses track of the fact that overwhelmingly, the people who were last housed are our neighbors, and they are from our community. Whether you consider the community, the tri county, the metro region or the state. And so I really want to emphasize that the number of people who were housed outside of the state of Oregon or washington's Clark county is 298 people. It is not a lot of people, but it commands a huge amount of our policy conversation. Again, this is from the street count survey only. And so whatever percent you choose to use would apply to just that survey. We don't have that information for the rest of the the rest of the data set. I do want to just say if you want to use a percent, it is 17% of people moved here without housing outside of the tri county, Clark county and the state of Oregon. That is the exact same percent as two years ago. 73% of people reported being from the tri county itself. That is also almost exactly the amount of people, percentage of people who reported being from the tri county. From another study that we have ongoing called the pathways project, we were able to run some quick data. 74% of those folks also reported being from the tri county, and that is data from the last year and a time period in which they have been homeless for six months. So whether it's a lot of people, whether it's a small number of people, it's fairly stable. And again, I really just want to say that most of the people are from here and there is not an overwhelming burden on our resources coming from other places, according to the data.
112 Councilor Zimmerman.
113 I think you just said that they reported being homeless over the last six months.
114 Now, the pathways project, we did the survey within the last year. Yeah. And we asked the only people who could take the survey were people who had been homeless within the last six months. The point in time count does not have that caveat.
115 Okay.
116 I guess I am. We get a lot of reports about how long a person in Portland has been homeless. Right? And those numbers are getting quite staggering years and years and years. So I'm actually more interested in the future getting data around not just the last place they were housed, but like the last two places, right, in terms of understanding this because and I and I'm not going to cite and I don't know where the mayor gets his 30% topic or 27% topic, but the last known or within the last six months. But also I want to be cognizant of that. We often talk about very long term homelessness, and I'm having a tough time right now because I can't tell if you are dismissing the numbers between the tri county area and the. I think even if you get rid of the by name list, the significant difference in those three counties for me still jumps off the page. And or if or if there's a different point that you're making. But I, I'm trying to understand why my city or my county doesn't get 98% of the funding, or at least get it based on this report every time. And I, I guess I just don't believe that you're less likely to become homeless or less likely to be untreated for mental illness because you live in. Molalla than if you live in southeast Portland. So that's what I'm having a tough time, because it seems like you're kind of dismissing the point that it's important for us to talk about, and yet it's a multi hundred billion, hundreds million dollar funding package that we have to make decisions about with this and where to spend dollars. And it's also important in terms of the practices of all community based services and all government based services across the state, whether or not they are taking care of their own or if they are continuing to say, go to Portland because you'll get access to. And now they list the things. And that's what I'm having a tough time with this because I can't like I said, I can't tell if you're dismissive of these numbers or if you're if you're trying to say something else. But if you are, I'm missing what the other thing is here, because Clackamas has more than 300 homeless people in that whole county, I will bet my bottom dollar on that. Now, they may have sent another 300 here, but there's something else going on here that's not popping off the page.
117 Yeah. So I. Let me think about how to rephrase this. My point of emphasizing the by name list is to simply point out apples to oranges comparisons, and that, yes, it is a massive difference. It doesn't mean it's not a big difference, but the enormity of that difference does go away. When you look at the by name list, whether you all interpret that as a large difference or a small difference, I don't have a say over. I haven't done the analysis to look at population indicator. Like I could run that analysis that you're asking about in terms of more likely to become homeless based on a whole set of factors. Would we expect to see more homelessness in certain places based on demographic indicators or housing market? I could run that study and I haven't, so I can't actually offer you any data or grounding on it.
118 I.
119 I do appreciate you've stuck to what you have data for, and that is I am thankful for that. I, I am expressing where I am hoping to now take this data and then I think, unearth a future learnings, frankly, for myself, for my constituents and where we go as we sit in this committee. So but I do appreciate you sticking to the data that you've got and you've been true to that. Thanks.
120 Thanks.
121 Councilor Ryan.
122 Thank you, councilor Dunphy and doctor zapata. I really want to just lift something here. One of my biggest takeaways from this new data is the overwhelming amount of trauma and pain you can see and feel from our homeless population that they're experiencing on the streets, especially when it comes to domestic violence and substance abuse disorder. I just really want to thank you for bringing this really important reality to the report today. I know back in 2021, I was asking questions about trying to get to that granular point, and I just want to acknowledge the progress we're making on having that type of rapport. Thank you. I wanted to lift that, and I just want to call out that you you said that most people, the largest number of people living on the streets that are in chronic state of homelessness are men that are ages 35 to 44.
123 Yes.
124 And what's that percentage? I don't have the full report in front of me.
125 I can pull it for you and send it. Yeah. The report has all the tables and so forth. And if there's any data points that you want, I'm happy to pull them. I'm also happy to meet with you all to talk about interpreting these numbers or any numbers. I think one of the hardest things as a researcher in this field is the complexity and confusion of all of the data. It's taken me years and I still sometimes like, wait, what is this data set for? What is this one? Tell us what doesn't it? And so I, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about that particular issue. And I'm always happy to meet and talk about different ways to think about data.
126 Wants to have those numbers. And that's one reason I've always been pushing more for the workforce overlay as part of the solution. Thanks.
127 Great.
128 Do you have any more of your presentation or is that the end of the presentation? Oh perfect timing. Cool. And we do have to yeah, we have to move on to our next topic. But doctor zapata, thank you very much for all your continued work on this and for also helping us understand that data is not as neither friendly nor unfriendly. It is interpreted how you interpret it. And we have a lot of work to do regardless of what which numbers that we're looking at. So thank you very much.
129 You get an a plus.
130 Thank you.
131 Time for some of us.
132 Thank you. Rebecca, can you please read the next item?
133 Item three welcome home coalition finding home report.
134 Thank you. The finding home report was released in late October, and it's the culmination of more than two years of work by the welcome home coalition and its partners. The report focuses on the voices of people experiencing homelessness and what the community needs and what, and wants to be able to stay housed. We have we have lauren armani and melissa bishop up here to share the report and its policy recommendations. Lauren, good to see you, melissa. Take it away.
135 Oh my gosh.
136 There it is.
137 Pardon me I'm just trying to get the oh I am so sorry. What is happening. It's not showing the present okay. Even though I.
138 Pulled it up.
139 I did pull it up.
140 So what we're going to do. Stop.
141 I tried so hard.
142 We need a technology committee.
143 Absolutely. I need a volunteer.
144 If I had a double screen, this would. This would be done. And then go to this title slide. Okay. All right. There we go. Okay. Perfect. Oh. Good enough okay. Good afternoon counselors. Thanks for the introduction. Committee chair. Dunphy, my name is lauren armani, and I am the voices for housing justice training manager at welcome home coalition. I'm here to present, yes, our recently released report in partnership with sisters of the road called finding home lasting housing solutions rooted in community expertise. And I am here to present with my esteemed colleague.
145 Hello, counselors. My name is melissa bishop. I am the senior housing and facilities director for the pier company, and I have been doing housing work in Portland, majorly downtown for the last 15 plus years. So really excited to be here and share this report with you and just, yeah, share some expertise from boots on the ground. Yeah.
146 Thank you so much, melissa. Special thanks to committee chair Avalos, even though she's not here, because she was one of our speakers at our release party on the 23rd, we know many of you were unable to attend for various reasons. And so we're very excited to be able to bring this report and our findings to you directly. To start, I want to ground us in the voices of our participants, the people who were a huge part of this survey through a short film. So let's see if that works. All right. Can I get it to work? It's going to work. No. All right. It thinks I'm a bot. Unfortunately, I do have a backup. It just means I need to share a different screen, so bear with me.
147 Oh my gosh. You would not be. I'm sorry. You're doing a great job.
148 It's all good. This is how it goes. All right. Are you going to help me again? Thank you.
149 Give a special shout out to adam.
150 For helping our technology.
151 Absolutely work me on.
152 The spot. If they didn't think I was a bot, we would be perfectly fine.
153 Couch. It comes up fine.
154 You do seem awfully suspicious, lauren. I don't.
155 Know.
156 I got I got my eyes on her.
157 Yeah.
158 All right. Being homeless, that's never left me on my sons, though. It's been 28 years since we got rehoused. I am now 61 years old. All the services that were in place all those years ago were gone. The streets are so unsafe for women. I see older women living on the streets and my heart breaks out of control rooms. Lack of people caring as we told them. The people in their golden years and a desperate survival mode.
159 I became houseless due to a circumstance that I couldn't help. My husband had left. I lost the house. I lost the business, I lost everything, and literally wound up walking away.
160 Kicked out of my house around 14, I just I never experienced having a place of my own. I was I was couch surfing and then I was shelters when, well, when I first got to Portland, I had took a chance and did the whole craigslist thing. My gut said no, but I did it anyways. And then when I came up here, they said they didn't know who I was, already taken my money, all that kind of stuff. So I became a victim of domestic violence.
161 My wrist was broken. I lost my career, my house, the boat, the car, the the dream that age.
162 Of growing up and trying to figure out what's going on with me and what kind of things I need to do to care for myself, how I fit in in the world, what the world even is. And I ended up on the streets of Portland as a teenager.
163 They told me, and they told my rv in one fell swoop, left me with a backpack and a couple two bags. I went from being a halfway normal person to nothing.
164 You're always one one paycheck away. You could go to work tomorrow and the next day lose your job and you're out there on the streets. Yeah, I guess just like anyone. Just life happens. And it wasn't something I was prepared for, but I was thrusted into it and just trying to make the best out of it at this, you know, current time.
165 I didn't choose, you know, in third grade, I when the teacher said, what do you want to be when you grow up? I didn't say, I want to be homeless.
166 Why do we have, you know, a congress full of men, full of white men making decision about women? Why do we have a congress full of straight white men making decisions about the LGBTQ community? We only get authentic results when you are dealing with authentic people who are going through the real and raw experiences.
167 We're living in it. We know what it's like, and it's not like through pie charts or through different graphs or anything. It's actually lived experience, which I mean, I think there's no experience like lived experience. It's not somebody sitting in a glass window and saying that this is what it's supposed to be like.
168 I'm a number to a lot of those people. They don't know me. They don't know my story. They don't care about my story. I'm a number. That's all I am. I'm a figure to them.
169 These are the people who have lived through it. They have been saying what we need to do for a long time, and we just need to listen to those voices.
170 It's so hard to get in, but it's so easy to get kicked out and thrown out, you know? And a lot of people get they don't get that second chance or opportunity because they blew it here. And if you blow it here, it's like you blow it statewide.
171 I have an arson on my record.
172 I didn't.
173 Burn nothing down. I threw a lighter at somebody and I took a plea bargain in california. 20 years ago, and they're still holding it against me today. I never burned anything down. Most of these shelters that they have around here, they don't open until 8:00 at night. And then you got to stand in line and and wait for your interview call. And sometimes your name ain't even called, and you got to worry about where you're going to sleep on the streets tonight. They need to have more opportunities.
174 Housing is notorious for just kicking the problem down the road.
175 And who wants to go live next to somebody in a congregate shelter? They when someone might have like schizophrenia or, you know, like they might be on a drug induced psychosis, we don't feel safe.
176 It's not a system for the nils to be successful.
177 Ridiculous how people are marginalized and and put into a certain box rather than being helped where they're at, regardless of circumstances. I think it's really important to provide housing first and then go back and triage and say, okay, how can we help you?
178 They are our heads on old solutions that work that nobody's ever going to bother to follow up on, and old solutions that don't work, that nobody cares about and keeps doing anyways.
179 Why don't they listen to the people who actually have to live it?
180 You know, we're not all dialects, we're not all drug addicts. We didn't choose this. We just want to be heard for one. And to have a fair chance at life.
181 I just got my apartment on Friday from colter bay.
182 I went to this outpatient program and introduced me to two housing programs. One's called home ford and one's called urban league. I'm with both of them, 46.
183 Years. Old now. This is my first apartment.
184 Ever where I'm at now. It was because one of the other people in the shelter actually had found out that it was. It was brand new, and that they were actually taking applications for I have a year rent free and they pay for it. I don't know how that works. I haven't gotten that far into it, but I'm going to find out. So they pay my rent for a year. That's how we all kind of found housing was that we were bouncing off of each other saying, this is known. I've already tried that. You do this, that kind of thing.
185 The ones I would do get into housing. It's always it's always nice to see him getting in. He's like helping and being a part of this. I know what it's like because I was in their position, you know. So I get a really identify, like being housed in tiny home is one thing, but moving to an apartment is another thing. And then keeping that apartment.
186 Never give up on life. Never. If it gets you down and down, look upstairs. Always remember where you come from. I mean, do not let life get you down. People that are homeless are still people. Shouldn't be ignored, shouldn't be considered invisible. Don't count. I wish people would actually take more time and talk to people that are homeless and find out the situation, because everyone is different. And people talk about homeless people, like like they're the bad people. You know, some people are, some people aren't. Not everybody is the same as everybody else. Just come talk to us. We just don't want to be exiled and and and treated like we're trash.
187 Thanks, everyone. Now to get us back to our slide show.
188 All. Nine. Of.
189 The tricks you played on me.
190 I have no idea what that is.
191 Yeah.
192 Yeah. There we go. Found it. Sorry, everyone. Sometimes this is just a part of the. Part of the thing. Okay? All right. It's not showing the prison.
193 I'm so sorry I.
194 Pressed those dots.
195 You should get out of it.
196 Goodness gracious. All right. Thank you, everyone. Although we don't have much time with you today, I think that showing that video and having you hear directly from our participants is really valuable, because that's what this project was about. So two and a half years ago, I was a part of a group of people who started this project. As while I was the systemic change director at sisters of the road. Now, a lot of you already know sisters of the road, but just to share the very founding of the organization was in community based research. The founders asked people on the street, went to the day centers themselves, went to the services themselves, and asked people what they needed. And so this comes from that 45 year long legacy and tradition of grounding operations and advocacy in community based research. So thankfully, we had the support of Portland state university and Oregon health and sciences university to ensure that our methodology was academically rigorous and ethically sound. And since she's in the room, just a big shout out to doctor zapata and the homelessness research and action collaborative for being a part of that. So I'll start with our researcher research questions very briefly. This is this was the grounding of our research. What type of housing do people who've experienced homelessness actually want? Not just need not just a box, but what do people want? What would make housing desirable? How well are people who, who've experienced homelessness, aware of our housing programs and policies? And then a two pronged question of how well do their expectations match our actual policy directions, and who do they think is responsible for our housing system and homelessness in the first place? So from the beginning, we knew that we wanted to center people with lived experience, right? And so we decided to look at and adopt as many methods as possible from community based participatory action research, which we simplified down to three core pillars, which are participation, collaboration and action. Participation means we genuinely engage people with lived experience in the community, and we provide the resources they need to genuinely participate. That includes actually paying them right and providing other services so that they can collaborate in the co-creation of knowledge. This research and then also action. This research isn't living on a shelf. We are here in front of you, and we are hoping that you are able to take radical action to address the findings that we have in this research. All right. Moving into our methodology, the cornerstone of our research was our survey. For a long time, it was just called the housing survey. And so doctor zapata and other researchers advised us creating the survey instrument. And 12 outreach workers with lived experience over the course of seven weeks surveyed 429 of their peers. And that data was then processed by data professionals to bring us back, to give us some preliminary data so that we can then bring the research back to our community. We brought them back in the form of community analysis groups, very similar to focus groups. We brought the preliminary data and focused questions back to people with lived experience. Over 35 people participated in this and either affirmed the data, questioned our data, and created policy recommendations that we'll share with you at the end of this presentation. And after further refinement, getting all of this data from the survey, from focus groups, from our community analysis group, we then before writing our final report, before releasing our final policy recommendations, we went back to community members. We went to five different data centers in the Portland metro area, and we brought posters with the data to the center. And then we brought what we called graffiti posters, which you can see right here, where we asked people to give feedback on our policy recommendations and the data that they saw. They then put their information on post-it notes, and we analyzed it from there. Over 215 people gave us feedback through these data walks. This is another good picture. So now we'll move into the data. I really want us to spend a lot of time in the data and especially in our policy recommendations. So at the time of the survey, of the 429 respondents, over half of them were living outside or in shelters. These are the people that you all are making decisions for with very little of their input. Just letting this sit here for a second. We also took other voluntary demographic data, and we looked at when we looked at our responses and compared them to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age. We did not see. We saw little to no difference in response rates for the the further data sets you're going to see, I just want you to point that out. We asked people what their top three most preferred housing types were, and top three least preferred housing types. Most preferred are apartment and house, with tiny home trailing behind, and the least preferred were shelter and being outdoors at the same exact rate, and then a tender pod at a managed site or sanctioned encampment. This just goes to show that shelter is not housing, and people do not see it as a first step to finding housing. 91% of our respondents, as you saw in the video, would move into a home if they could afford it at their current income, at their current income. This is not this is not a moral failing issue. This is a cost of housing issue. And it's further supported by the next question we asked, which was supports. People needed to stay housed. People told us what they needed to get in, stay housed, and 91% said they needed either cheaper housing or rent assistance. Far and away. That is the most. That is the biggest game changer you can make in someone staying housed. And I'd love to pass it off to my colleague.
197 Housing alone isn't doesn't take us to the finish line, right? We know that we listen to the people in this survey. They want to be in a house. They want to be in an apartment. They don't want to be in shelter. They don't want to be on the street. But we also know once we put someone in a home, we need supported services. I know housing first. There's a lot of talk about housing first right now. And I just want to say when housing first is done to fidelity, when it's done correctly, when it is staffed with the right amount of staff to meet the population, it's successful. It's, you know, there's many other states and cities that are running successful housing first programs. And I just want to talk about like I am an expert in running recovery housing. I've done it for years. I know what works right. And it's having adequate staff. I've run programs, I've run transitional housing programs, I've ran the gamut, and we've seen amazing success rates when we let people have a voice and a choice on what fits, what makes sense for them. But on the other end of that is we have to be able to adequately staff these programs. We can't just put someone in a house, just like we can't just put someone in shelter shelters get. I mean, people don't feel safe because they're not adequately staffed, just like our housing programs. And so recovery services, mental health services, employment and workforce development is a critical piece. Access to primary care and basic needs. But people are saying, we want to be in a house, we need rent assistance. And along with that is we need to offer them these services that will give them that housing stability and housing retention that we all need and want to see. I think it's really important. I just want to give a plug for peer delivered services and lived experience because we're experts by experience. When we put people that know what the people are going through that are living in housing, we're seeing success rates skyrocket and we have to do something different. What we've been doing over and over and over again isn't working. It's time for a change.
198 Thank you so much. And just before we transition, these are self-reported needs. People know what they need to stay housed. We also there is this pervasive myth that we have service resistance among our community. So we ask people, what? Why are you saying no to housing offers? What would make you say no to a housing offer? And I just want to share that people are saying no to housing offers for the same reasons you would say no to a housing offer because it violates their autonomy, they don't feel safe and there isn't a sense of permanency. So as you can see, the top three are curfew, no or limited guests and not being able to have their partner. These are very three. These are three very legitimate reasons to say no to a housing offer. I don't know how many of you would say yes to a lease agreement, or a mortgage that would be tied to those rules. We also ask people, what should you all what should our government do to about housing to address homelessness? And over 300 of our respondents said the government is responsible for providing housing. So you get the Green light and they're saying they need more options, there needs to be more housing, and then you really need to genuinely listen to people with lived experience of homelessness, and also just decreasing the price and increasing the funding for rent assistance. As we move into policy recommendations, I want to reiterate that we had over 650 people look at our data, analyze it, and vet our policy recommendations. Before we bring it to you today. First, we need immediate interventions that keep people housed and prevent displacement. As doctor zapata brought up, evictions and cost of housing are a huge on road to to homelessness, so we need to restrict local rent increases. I wanted to give a shout out to councilor Avalos for committing to advocate to lift the state preemption on local rent control. We also need to increase funding for eviction prevention, rent assistance and streamline the dispersion of those funds so that they get to the people who need it, when they need it. We also need to, as melissa said, fund more peer support programs and streamline our housing access process because that in itself is a huge barrier.
199 Yeah.
200 So I really just want to drive home services here today because we're doing all this work creating housing, building housing, trying to figure out like what is the solution. We get people into housing and we see them just kind of, you know, circulating through their housing. They can't afford it. There's nobody there to do an intervention. They're back on the street. Something happens with them. They get an eviction, they're back on the street. And so really what I want to talk about is supportive services with the human centered approach. Right. It's time to do something different. Housing first doesn't mean housing only. It means housing is the foundation for recovery, employment, healing and reconnection, peer support and supported services are like the magic sauce to making sure that housing is successful. Once we get folks in housing like we crisis and issues don't happen from 9 to 5 right now, like in our housing programs that the city and the county are funding are not funding those programs adequately. And we don't have 24 hour staff, which we need it like a crisis could happen at three in the morning. Who's showing up? The police, a project respond, a different responder when really we could have staff there intervening in the moment, keeping people housed, dealing with crisis in the moment. It takes money, right? But I mean, it's really cost effective if you look at all the services folks are utilizing when they're being evicted from housing, supportive services, prevents evictions and returns to homelessness. And that's really what we're trying to solve here today. The people that are impacted are telling us what they're the experts. They're giving us the answers. They're telling us what to do. And I feel compelled to be the voice for them here today. I'm a person in long term recovery who was homeless on these same streets, in and out of jails, in and out of shelters. And somebody took a chance on me, and they listened to me and I got the services I needed. Today I run programs. And so I think it's super important for us to listen to the voices. I know you guys have a really hard job ahead of you and trying to figure out this policies, but we're here with a solution that we think will work. We know what will work, and we just really hope that you hear this today and really dive into this, into this survey and really try to figure out, like, what the solutions are going to be. People that are most impacted are the experts.
201 Thank you so much.
202 Yeah.
203 We also have a couple more slides. We also need to expand and diversify affordable housing options through acquisition, development and policy changes. I think this is really where Portland city council can shine, right, with our Portland housing bureau. So this looks like implementing social housing models to increase non-market units. Thank you all for researching that. You can continue to purchase buildings and convert them to non-market housing with lower rents. A few hundred units have already come online through that this year, and also incentivizing diverse housing types like autonomously run tiny home villages like dignity village and hazelnut grove. Right. These are pennies on the dollar, and people are finding that autonomy and safety and community that they crave. Next, you need to authentically include people with lived expertise into budget policymaking and your planning processes. This looks like it can look many different ways, but we suggest a meaningful lived experience council where participants are fairly compensated and have real decision making power, not performative, and also allow for more public and transparent budgeting and budget and planning processes, which I see you all striving to do. So thank you. And now, before we get to q&a, just want to leave you with some final thoughts. And that's 91% of people would move into housing in a heartbeat. If they could afford it. 91% of people would also need financial support or cheaper housing in order to to be housed. Right. And respondents are ready for permanency. They they're not they don't want to be on the street. They also don't want to be in shelters. They want to be in a place where they know they can go to night after night that is theirs, that they can shut the door behind them and feel safe and secure. And then of our policy recommendations, just really wanting to highlight that rent assistance, funding, peer support, housing, navigation support, recovery oriented housing, housing that is supportive of relationships with loved ones and pets, right on site staff at affordable housing, investment in work skills and streamlined pathways to housing and assistance. Why are there over five waitlists you can get on to get into housing? So with that, I'd love to open it up to your questions.
204 Thank you both.
205 And congratulations on spending this much time to get a report that actually demonstrates a clear through line on on the lived experience of people who are actually using these services and are in desperate need of more. I want to ask a couple of questions, and I want to say I. Pretty unequivocally agree with your policy decisions, but I want to I want to poke a little bit. I think that if you were to, these questions may seem unfair and I please push back where you can. But if you were to poll 900 people who are walking, they would say that they would like to have a car if they could afford it at their current outcome. But there are obstacles between for the folks who are on the streets that led to the to where their situation is, and there are obstacles between their next step. Did you get into the details of why specifically, what are the trends between what causes a person to end up on the streets, and also what are the obstacles to getting into permanent housing and being successful once they are there? Beyond, I mean, just straight capitalism is failing sort of things.
206 Yeah. So we didn't we chose to not have it be one of our research questions to ask people how they became homeless. Right. We were focusing on what did they want? Are they aware of what's available, who do they think is responsible, and what recommendations do they have for you? So we do not have that. I also want to want to poke at the assumption that a 900 people would wish they were in cars, because why do people want to be in cars? Because our infrastructure fails them to feel safe, comfortable and empowered to walk. So just want to want to plug that. Before getting into your question around barriers, I mean, we we share deal breakers and those are also genuine barriers. And I you heard some of it getting you heard some of it in our video that it's very easy to get kicked out of housing. But I honestly think my colleague here can probably speak to barriers more.
207 Yeah, I think people are, you know, I think we just have to look around like people are struggling with mental health issues, you know, recovery and substance use issues. And what I know about those two things is they can sit in shelter waiting for years to get into these services because we don't have enough mental health respite, stabilization beds. They can't get into the state hospital, take some three months to get an appointment with the provider. So do we leave them in shelter that long? Same thing with recovery. We don't have enough residential beds for the folks that need it. We don't have enough detox beds for the folks that need it on any given day, putting them in housing and get them linked to outpatient services makes sense. It's cost effective. And so most of those people like yes, they are putting them into housing. It seems a little shaky because maybe they have a substance abuse issue, but it's the same thing. If we put them in shelter, they're still struggling. If we put them in there, we wrap around services around them and we make sure that they're getting their needs met. We're cutting out those barriers. So yeah, everybody wants to go live in an apartment and I get it. And and it it takes probably a good year for somebody to live in an apartment with those wraparound services, to be able to be ready to work and to do the things they need to do to support themselves. But it's like we have to be able, as a city and a in a state, be able to support the services people need, and we just can't.
208 Yeah. And to just round it out, 91% said they needed money. So that is really the biggest barrier I on my sole income, cannot afford a single bedroom apartment in the Portland metro area without being rent burdened. As a professional, as someone researching in community, I am very close to being on the streets myself. Right? We need to talk about the main barrier being our housing market and housing costs, along with the services needed to get there.
209 From a from a policy perspective and with with regard to your recommendations on us for next steps, how do you envision the sort of balance between the need for to get people into programs, into services, into assistance with? Also, the slide that said that a lot of these programs have barriers that are too high, and some of those barriers I can understand from an individual perspective why you wouldn't want or why you wouldn't want to go into a service if I can't bring my dog. I can understand that, but I also understand it from the perspective of the service provider that we have, you know, 200 people to serve can't have 200 dogs. They have to put a line there. How do we find that balance?
210 I think that's a I think that's a fair question that I don't think I'm qualified to answer. I definitely would want to rely on our service providers to give a more robust answer. But what you've heard from us today is are our services and service providers are not funded enough to even get to those questions. They are putting out fires every day. And I also want people in the city of Portland and honestly across the nation, to realize that their unwillingness to control our housing market, like our government's unwillingness to put reins on our housing market, has led us to where we are today. And Portland, especially like people have been so harmed from being chronically homeless, not because of their own decisions, but because of our housing market that we are dealing with more and more and more people every day who are harmed and need more services than they would have if they would have just stayed housed or been able to rapidly be rehoused. So I just we need to reckon with that. Like it is going to take decades and generations to get us out of the harm that 40 years of neoliberal policy has gotten us into. So I just want to make that clear. Like as we talk about these tiny details around services, like it's going to be a long and bumpy road. And again, I'll have the experts answer the question on those specific barriers, like like pets and loved ones.
211 I will say, I, I echo.
212 The concern that this is all ronald reagan's fault, but also I will acknowledge that, you know, my my tiny ranch house in Lents doubled in value from 2016 to 2020. Like that's preposterous. It is not worth the amount of money that the market says it is. And I've said this a dozen times. I don't know how we as a city respond to that. I also I'm, I mean, I in another life, I worked for a us senator, jeff merkley, working on social security and social security. You know, 100 years or 60 years ago, 80 years ago now was built as to be a a tool to actually catch people when they fall. And now, as you demonstrated, the average payout for social security disability or even social security retirement is significantly below market rate rents. So is there ever a scenario in which we're going to catch up if we don't have a willing partner on the federal government level?
213 I don't think I'm the policy expert. I don't even know if there is a policy expert that could that could answer that question.
214 Well, I just want to say this is a local we have to like focus in. Yeah, we have to focus on the local problem and local solutions. We can't figure out what the federal government is doing. What I know is we have like grit and heart in this city and in this state to figure this out. And when we when we stay rooted in the people that we're trying to serve and are in our community, we're going to figure out a solution. And I think it is it's that social housing model, like we have so many empty buildings sitting down here that are just getting graffitied or whatever they're doing. You know, they're just sitting there empty when we could be doing something about it. And so we're going to have to think outside the box. We're going to have to shake it up a little bit. We're going to have to push back, and we're going to have to figure out a solution for people to be housed in a house with electricity, with all the amenities and the things that you and I get to have. Right. And get them, like self-sustained building some, you know, agency and self-autonomy, it's like it's time for us to do something different.
215 Councilor Ryan noting, we only have about three minutes left and.
216 I just.
217 Noticed that.
218 Thank you.
219 Melissa, is that your name?
220 Yes.
221 First, I just want to acknowledge your recovery journey and your courage to tell your story and your clear eyes in the way that you show up. Thank you very much. I also want to acknowledge that I always say complex local problems take complex local solutions. So we're on the same page about that. And so and also just bringing this to council, I appreciate our meeting earlier. It was really I was sadly really rushed. So I didn't get to spend this much time with the report. So it was like hearing it fresh today and I appreciate that. I find some of your recommendations are really quite helpful and especially using diversity of housing types, peer delivered services. I've always said when I first got into this space as elected to, many of our solutions felt like one size fits all. And so the more that we have strategic, we have strategies that at least differentiate somewhat. We all we all know and your video did such a beautiful, elegant job of explaining that you can interview 100 people, get 100 different stories. That's the complexity. But at least we could move towards having at least, you know, 3 to 5 very different type of strategies in terms of housing and getting people to that place of independence like you are at today. And there was a time where you were not. So I just wanted to to lift the video that brought that point. I do have one question for the presenter at the end the presentation, there's a picture that says shelter equals a tent. Can you explain that further?
222 Yeah, it's.
223 A very big policy statement.
224 It is a very big policy stance. And the exact same number of people shelter as the least preferable as being outside in a tent.
225 To that number. Again.
226 It it was the same number. It was 277 individuals rated that as their least preferred, both of them at the same rate.
227 Okay.
228 So this this just goes to show that I know we're hearing that because the cold season is coming up, more people will enter into shelter. Right? That is it is not by people's will. It is not because our shelters are desirable. And as experts have said for many, many years in front of Portland city council shelters, does not provide the same autonomy, community and permanency. In many cases. Yet shelters don't provide those that living on the street actually can.
229 It's not all shelters, though. It's shelters that don't have services. Correct?
230 Yeah, yeah. We actually in welcome homes membership we have very we have a few very great examples of shelters that successfully get people stably housed. And that's because they're 24 hours. They have shelters, they have a lot of flexible funding. So they can follow people for years after they leave the shelter.
231 And when they have those services and we have compliance with those services, a key thing that we have to keep focusing on. We have seen good results. Clearly. I'm attached because it was so hard to do anything. In 2021. We got the safe rest villages up with 24 over seven, allowing people to have autonomy, allowing them to bring their dog in, having services and especially the ones that have people with lived experience working there that are actually motivated to move people into recovery. We are we we're seeing results. We're not seeing as many now because we don't have the on ramp, perhaps to the housing that we did back when we first built them. I don't know what happened there. I haven't been in this space for now, three years, but I just want to acknowledge the distinction between services and how important it is. I think that we voiced that as well.
232 Absolutely. For however successful the safe villages are without, you know, the 4 million in funding in home placements that were just cut by the county because of our budget. Like there's no way out of them. So however good our shelters are, there's no way out. We're stuck.
233 Stories were when they were getting into recovery services and they were getting into workforce, and then they were building their agency. And so I hope that we keep tracking that data when we have people in services, so we can measure impact and we can measure progress and continuous improvement. And of course, I'm always reminded no one is just a number. So again, thank you for the video.
234 Yeah.
235 Thank you. Thank you, councilor Ryan. Councilor Zimmerman, take us home.
236 Thanks I appreciated this. I've known some of the folks who were in that video as well and been to some of those locations. I'm curious, since the county is the service provider, social service provider in our community, have they gotten this presentation yet?
237 Can you can you rephrase that.
238 Question so we don't have social services on our employee docket, so to speak, right. We're not a social service agency. We produce housing. Yes. But since the county is in charge of social services and a lot of what you had to share today was about social services. And so I'm glad we're seeing that. But have they received that? The county commission, who runs all the social services.
239 Yes.
240 They have. Okay.
241 Chair peterson. Peterson. Was that our release party? And commissioner Singleton spoke at our party. We made sure to send this out to all government agencies, as well as through our listserv, and boost it out through networks. Since our report release on the 23rd.
242 Great. That's that's good. I mean, I think that everybody can agree that shelter is not preferred over housing, but and shelter that has wraparound services and placement services is is better than shelter. That doesn't. I'm troubled a little bit by kind of the assertions that were made here that. I mean, I think that sleeping on the street is just about the most dangerous thing you can do in the city of Portland. And there seems to be somewhat of an equalizing of that in the way that some of the data come off. If I think about a lot of the voters and a lot of portlanders, and I said to them, you know, the funding is something that we have and we're trying to get placements, but there's a there's a really troubling graph here that you all have shared in terms of the responses. The question was, if you were offered housing, would any of the following rules or conditions be dealbreakers that would cause you not to accept the housing? You mentioned it as? An assault on a person's autonomy, but I think it is better to frame it as a situation of being on the street. So from my current situation, what I want to put up with a curfew? No, but from a street living situation, I might be more willing to put up with a curfew. You also listed that no drugs or other substances would be allowed. Would that would be a deal breaker for a person? That mandatory case management would be a deal breaker that required to take prescribed meds, would be a deal breaker, and that doing room checks might be a deal breaker. And I just want to I, I think it is important to keep a perspective here that I think a lot of portlanders would say it's a deal breaker if those are the things that are a deal breaker for you to leave the street to get into housing. I think we expect that folks are going to be moving into housing or moving into shelters in order to be in a safer position. Having been involved with the creation of the task sites from their very beginning, that pod shelter model was both designed to offer a few steps of autonomy while working through what is a very difficult transition for a lot of a lot of members of our community who many have benefited because they got a quote unquote, a room check, because that having some sense of accountability for when they're in has been helpful for them as they transition. And so I think a lot that is presented here gives us what would be a great situation, but also doesn't seem to be taking into account as many of the deeply. Untreated members of our community who need medical attention, and that the the questions of some of the decision making is being brought up by places like central city, concerned that we do need interventions. And so I'm missing that in this. I think that that everyday portlanders would be. Somewhat alarmed by the way that this was presented today. And, you know, I've been at I was at the county for a long time. You all are new to me. I've not I've not met you before, but I think in the nonprofit providers who talk to me and in the seats that I sit in and in my career of work, that there's been at least an acknowledgment that something is better than the street, something is better than shelter. And everything that comes with with wraparound services is important. But that a level of accountability, a level of either health workers, treatment providers, etc. Is is important. And that none of those are perfect situations. When you compare it to what is the other option, the other option being the street. So I'm just a little bit concerned that we we kind of put this out here in a way that does not get to the choices, as they're really being faced by by portlanders and as they're really being faced in terms of the impact on the overall community as well as the impact on the individuals. So I know we've gone long, chair, I just this I'm not sure what the chair of the committee's point was in terms of how we are intending to engage here, since we don't have a lot of service. Excuse me, social services in our employee base, but I just I needed to raise that so that maybe we can dig further in and get get some comparisons to the situation that's actually on the ground.
243 Yeah. I just want to chime in before we close out here. I want I want to ask you a counter question. Do you consider people with lived experience to be experts in their experience of homelessness? You said, what does it look like on the ground? This is what it looks like on the ground. So I'm really curious where you're coming from in in questioning our data and questioning the expertise of our respondents and participants.
244 I'm not questioning your data. I believe that you asked these people these questions. What I'm saying is, I think that there is a reasonable conversation to be had about if if housing exists and it exists with some parameters around the the type of living that it might be or the parameters that might exist around that, whether it be curfews or taking your meds or having to check in with a mental health provider that I think on, on whole, portlanders would accept that as a reasonable approach to publicly funded housing. And what this is telling us is that that's not good enough for your responders. And I think that's where we have to have a reasonable conversation about the that there is a poverty aspect. And then anybody, anybody who is in any of the rooms is saying there's also other aspects that's not just poverty based, but it's mental health based. It's it's other health issues based. And so that part of it requires us to put more wraparound services, and wraparound services don't necessarily happen when it's just a poverty based homelessness. And so these are important factors for us to consider. And like I said, you know, this was you continually said I'm not the policy expert, but we were presenting policies here for us to consider. And I think that that's important. And in many of the rooms that I've sat for for a long time, these at least would get a reasonable consideration that that wraparound services exist because people need those wraparound services, and some of those wraparound services would say, you do have to come to your appointment. You cannot do drugs in this building. And I think that that's a reasonable thing to say. But you can't get that from the data, the way that that's being presented here.
245 I'm unfortunately going to have to end us there. We will have to ask, invite you all back for further conversation as we consider policy considerations. But we are ten minutes over time and we no longer have a quorum. So lauren, melissa. Thank you. Our next meeting will be Tuesday, November 18th. We will have Portland permitting and development here to talk about the impacts of staffing and service levels based on budget cuts that we've endured in the current fiscal year. Stay tuned for other updates. I adjourn the meeting of the homelessness and housing committee.