About the plan
Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson and former Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler in 2024 unveiled a strategic reset of the community’s response to homelessness, called the Homelessness Response Action Plan. That two-year roadmap guided plan partners in sheltering or housing more than 20,000 people by the end of 2025 - significantly exceeding the plan’s initial ambitious goals.
Through the continued collaborative leadership of Chair Vega Pederson and Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, the plan was revised and updated in late 2025 to guide the next two years of work.
The Homelessness Response Action Plan:
- Is a path to provide more people with safer options off our streets that meet their needs.
- Strengthens and refocuses existing systems of care to better ensure that when someone leaves their tent or shelter bed for a home, they can remain in that home.
- Emphasizes work to address racial disparities in homelessness.
- Commits to providing expanded access to the services someone needs to leave homelessness or never have to experience it in the first place.
The original plan was approved in July 2024 as part of an intergovernmental agreement creating a shared oversight structure for homelessness response between the City of Portland and Multnomah County. The updated plan was approved by both the Portland City Council and the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners in December 2025.
Read the plan
Our progress
To track our progress on the plan, visit the Homelessness Response Action Plan Dashboard or read our latest quarterly reports.
Key goals
The original plan laid out short-, medium- and long-term goals. Among the top goals were:
- Sheltering or housing 2,699 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness by Dec. 31, 2025, growing the community’s existing work providing shelter and rehousing services for thousands of people a year. (This number is equivalent to 50% of the unsheltered people on the by-name list as of January 2024.)
- Adding hundreds more behavioral health beds and funding a drop-off sobering center.
- Increasing the number of adults leaving shelter for permanent housing by 15% by Dec. 31, 2025, and ensuring 75% of people housed in permanent supportive housing retain their housing 24 months after placement.
- Reducing homelessness among people of color, people identifying as LGBTQIA2S+ and other priority populations.
- Increasing the supply of affordable housing through regulatory changes, building conversions and new construction funding sources, among other strategies.
The plan serves as grounding for more transparent budgeting, data sharing and financial reporting; and facilitates a shared oversight structure that broadens and unifies the work of addressing homelessness and all of its root causes beyond just one downstream department, the Homeless Services Department.
The plan also formalizes collaboration between healthcare partners, the justice system, housing providers, service providers, treatment providers and government partners at all levels.
Collaborative oversight model
Key to the plan is its collaborative oversight model. The work of the Homelessness Response Action Plan is overseen by three committees: the Steering and Oversight Committee, the Community Advisory Committee and the Implementation Committee.
Learn more on the Committees webpage.