The causes of homelessness are complex, but the solution always involves stable, affordable housing. Our community is facing a crisis, and we need more of everything. While each person’s and family’s path to ending their homelessness is unique, there are things that we know work. A plan MUST bring together local, state, and federal resources and include the following approaches, interventions, and solutions:

• Permanent housing — Wages aren’t keeping pace with rent prices, and our local builders can’t keep up with demand. We’ve taken steps to build more affordable housing, but we need to do more. We should prioritize preserving existing housing when we can and making sure that vulnerable community members have access to stable housing.

• Emergency shelter — We need more shelter beds. That means building more low-barrier beds, and more clean and sober beds. It means recognizing that people need the ability to choose an environment that will support them in getting back into housing.

• Supportive Services — In addition to the needed mental health, addiction recovery, and physical healthcare services, we must invest in job training and employment services and housing retention supports so that people who successfully move back into housing can rebuild their community of support and remain housed.

• Making Medicaid work for people in need: People experiencing homelessness and housing instability often lack access to basic physical and behavioral healthcare.. When people are left behind and can’t access services, it’s because our government systems aren’t built with them in mind. We need to find ways that we can leverage existing County programs and make them perform better for people in need. This includes ensuring continued access to women’s healthcare without any barriers. Medicaid and other healthcare programs are successful when they take into account the needs of our most vulnerable, including families with children.

• Keeping Multnomah County healthy and safe: Multnomah County plays a critical role in ensuring that our community is healthy and safe. The county plays a role in ensuring that our restaurants and food carts are safe to eat at, ensuring that vaccines and emergency healthcare are available, and ensuring that seniors and people with disabilities have access to the services they’re entitled to. We need a county commission that is holding our healthcare system accountable for better outcomes and better service.

• Addressing Behavioral Health: Our community is suffering from an overdose crisis, and we must increase opportunities to increase safety, decrease the burden on our first responders, and create new beds and access to addiction services via sobering centers, transitional recovery housing, and continued investments in harm reduction approaches. We also must fund mental health services for people experiencing homelessness because we cannot continue to wait for Medicaid eligibility, people need and want help now. 

Gun violence in Multnomah County has increased at a heartbreaking pace. The causes of this violence are complex, but what we can do is clear.

• We need to ensure that our criminal justice system is a reflection of our shared values and actually aids the community. There is no hiding that there is a high amount of distrust and frustration with the current criminal justice system.. Nothing undermines community trust in the criminal justice system more than a wrongful conviction or a failed prosecution of someone who committed a crime. Better coordination between the Local Public Safety Coordinating Council and the state agencies responsible for the courts and criminal defense is needed to help our community start to repair.

• Better and more effective funding for programs and policies that actually prevent crime. When people interact with the county's criminal justice system, odds are they already attempted to interact with another part of the county. They tried to get housing support, access to services, and other safety net resources. Those needs do not just go away. We need to ensure that when people are getting ready to return to the community, they are given access to services to help them gain employment, healthcare, and housing.

• We need our systems to be responsive and communicate with each other. Too often, people are a few steps away from stabilizing, and systems take too long to respond to allow them the access that they need. I’ve seen too many situations where someone almost got into housing, but their expungement records didn’t get there in time. We need to cut red tape where we can and align our systems so that we can respond in a timely fashion to expungement requests so we don’t lose housing opportunities for people as they recover from homelessness.