For four decades efforts by the city and county to collaborate, coordinate and implement plans to address homelessness have failed. Most recently, almost ten years ago, with A Home For Everyone, the former mayor and former chair hugged as they committed to reducing homelessness by 50 percent. We’re living in a tragic and devastating version of Groundhog Day. With $350 million a year to spend on homelessness, we should be making a tremendous difference. But things just get worse.
Instead of doing the work to actually understand how many people are actually living on the street, who they are, and what they need, we've spent months creating yet another plan that does nothing new except add more politics and less transparency into the system. Do you wonder why we keep failing? This is why. We keep doing the same things and expect a different result.
This isn’t an IGA, it’s a CYA. It’s like a used car salesman slapping a coat of paint on a car that won’t run and trying to sell it as new. A new paint job won’t help this vehicle run. This IGA is a lemon.
Let’s start with the opening statement that totally misidentifies the problem it’s trying to solve.
There is no chance we are going to create a path to actual progress as long as we begin and end with oversimplified political tropes like “the main problem with homelessness is not having enough housing”. Yet in this CYA it’s literally the opening and defining statement.
In reality there are as many reasons for homelessness as people who have lost their homes. But these can be generally summarized in three main categories.
Situational or episodic homelessness is the first category and is self explanatory. People lose housing because of a situation. A job loss, an illness, a divorce. Getting some help - rent assistance, light case management, weatherization of the home, will get the person through the situation.
Income/rent disconnect is the second category. People on fixed income are at the mercy of the smallest changes in rent. With escalating rents, people on fixed income can’t pay. This especially impacts seniors and people with disabilities, who may need affordable housing, rent assistance, case management, or changes to their homes so they can age in place.
These first two categories of “homelessness” require straightforward approaches. Not just more building, but home sharing, rent assistance, help in aging at home, etc. The solutions are achievable if we begin by identifying these cases correctly and culling them out.
The third category is something entirely different. This is what most people actually think of as homelessness and this is where the city and county have utterly failed. The vast majority of people who lose their housing for whatever reason and are on the streets develop or have worsening SUD and/or mental illness. This requires a totally different, much more expensive and time intensive approach, and that is where our system completely falls apart.
We should have started this process by creating an accurate, by name-count and individual tracking system to separate the categories outlined above and begin a casework accountability system. But this IGA just wants to get past the county’s failure to move 300 people off the street a year ago by boldly promising to move nearly 3000 without any discussion of how. It’s announcing a moon shot and allocating money for buying rocket fuel without a rocket or any idea of where to point one. That’s not a surprise, because the entire goal is political distraction instead of action.
From its totally flawed premise, the IGA just gets worse.
There is no accountability built in. In fact, no small efforts were made to keep accountability away through this process. The County Auditor wasn’t even notified that there WAS a process, let alone engaged from the beginning, as any serious effort would have considered in step one.
As of a month ago there hadn’t been a single public board work session on the HRAP or the IGA. I had to request a public work session so the Board could raise questions and the public could tune in. There were so many questions remaining as of two days ago that, without public notice, the board voted unanimously to have another discussion when two board members couldn’t even be there. The materials for the presentation today, which should have been submitted over a week ago and posted publicly as of last Friday, were not sent to the board or posted until late yesterday.
Saying that community was “engaged’ in the process is a joke, with the nicely curated collection of comments obtained at the end after everything was baked. Nothing in the IGA was substantively changed as a result of the charade of community engagement.
This degree of obfuscation and pushing something through with this little accountability doesn’t happen by accident. This is Operation Ramrod.
Related to accountability is the concept of measurable outcomes. Deliverables. And the bottom line is that this lemon doesn’t have any. I’ll make this very clear by just exposing the three supposed “outcomes” to daylight.
- The first sounds like it promises to decrease the number of people living outside. But that’s not what it actually says, let alone does. Because we have no idea how many people are living outside now, how many are becoming homeless as they fall victim to drugs, economic pressures or personal physical health and mental health challenges, or what they need. So a number was picked literally out of thin air - 50 percent - based on an inaccurate, incomplete list submitted by some organizations to the county. And voila, we are told that many people - 2699 - will be removed from the street in the next year and a half. Hearkening back to promising 300 in 6 months and achieving 7, it just seems like bigger numbers only represent bigger lies.
The problem we need to target is how to get to a net reduction in the number of people living on our streets. Through prevention of homelessness and getting people treated, served and housed. Right now, the action moving most people off the streets of Portland is neglect, caused by government incompetence. That’s right - death is the competition, and it is literally the only thing moving the numbers in Multnomah County. But you can bet that won’t be tracked and publicly released either.
- The second so-called deliverable is that 1000 new shelter beds will be added. But as was very clear, again this number was snatched out of thin air. It means nothing. I’ve asked repeatedly, but no one can tell me how many beds we currently have, so how can we know we can or will add 1000 more? And why is the number 1000 when we have more like ten times that number living unsheltered? That number was pulled out of somewhere with the intention of impressing, but it stinks.
- Finally, the third deliverable is that no one will be released from hospitals or other facilities to the street. We of course have no idea how many people this encompasses, have failed to engage hospitals or other systems to try to understand what it would mean to change their systems, we have no idea what people need or how much it will cost to discharge them to other settings, or what it will mean to keep people in hospitals simply because there's nowhere for them to go. This is political grandstanding and a pathetic attempt at shifting responsibility in as unprofessional a way as I have ever seen.
Saying something like “we’re going to stop discharges to the streets” is an impossibly asinine statement. All of this - this whole lemon of an IGA - is designed around looking like it’s doing something rather than actually doing something.
And the whole marketing plan is being leveraged by a threat.
That if we do not adopt this IGA the sky will fall. That our system will erupt into chaos. That things would be worse than they are now if this doesn’t get approved. That is blatantly false. The current IGA spells out what will happen if it is allowed to lapse. It does not state that things will revert to pre-IGA times. We have budgets, individual contracts, and agreements. The IGA requires that processes not be disrupted for providers or people receiving services.
It’s essential to realize that Something is NOT inherently better than doing nothing. Taking time to do something right is the exact right approach here. In the end it saves time AND money. Most of all, it allows us to save lives.
Those trying to push this IGA through via Operation Ramrod don’t want the kinds of questions about accountability, measurable outcomes, or road maps, I’ve been asking for. They don’t want us to have time for true open honest public debate. They want us to look to the wizard on the screen, instead of revealing the desperate person behind the curtain.
It won’t take much time to actually pull together real experts to craft a real plan to replace this sham. As with everything the county should be doing but isn’t, we just need to ensure four things:
- That what we’re doing is based on data with clearly predefined, rational, achievable, meaningful goals.
- That the goals connect people to life-saving services, treatment and housing.
- That we build processes to achieve individual outcomes, not justify more and more spending.
- That we embrace accountability as a means to learn what works to save lives.
If we fail to plan effectively now, we are effectively planning to fail.
To vote to approve this IGA, entrenching the status quo while eliminating accountability, making a joke out of the idea of clear measurable goals, and putting politics over people, is a complete abdication of responsibility for addressing the problem of homelessness in our community. Homelessness will only increase under this new agreement.
This IGA SHOULD NOT PASS!
And despite all of this, I’m under no illusions about whether the IGA and the poor excuse for a plan it represents will pass. At least at the county. The go along to get along approach that’s gotten us where we are isn’t going to stop this farce.
I can only vote NO. But while the county celebrates with a press release, I call on city councilors - most of whom want to be mayor - to recognize the glaring lack of accountability. No serious contender for leadership of this city can endorse this sham. The county is committed to projecting bigger lies, not changing lives. The city must put an end to the charade.
This IGA is nothing more than a CYA for the county, but it leaves any candidate for mayor who votes for it exposed as a fraud. Like every other Portland voter, I’m hoping someone will demonstrate the brain and backbone to start taking our problems seriously. It’s time to stop trying to get elected by press release, and start showing the courage of caring about actually making a difference. I think people are desperate for real progress and for honesty, not more political theater.