Multnomah County agrees to work with City of Portland on homelessness
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — The Multnomah County Board of Commissioners approved an agreement with the City of Portland on June 13 which unites the government bodies through a single “Homelessness Response Action Plan” — a sweeping set of policies designed to address homelessness in the region.
The Homelessness Response Action Plan, which the city and county began developing in June of 2023, will replace the expiring agreement between the city and the Joint Office of Homeless Services. Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson called the vote a “monumental step” for Multnomah County.
“This plan and the intergovernmental agreement between the City of Portland and Multnomah will allow us to make progress toward supporting our community members much more fully and better than ever before,” Pederson said.
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Pederson’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stacy Borke said at Thursday’s meeting that the agreement creates shared goals, strategies, outcomes, governance, urgency and focus for local agencies that handle homeless services, affordable housing, behavioral health and health care. The coordinated efforts, she said, will also “improve services and outcomes for people with housing insecurity, mental health challenges and substance use disorders.”
Some of the shared goals outlined in the action plan include sheltering 2,699 homeless people living on Portland and Multnomah County’s streets and adding 1,000 additional shelter beds by 2025. District 1 Commissioner Sharon Meieran, who was the only commissioner to vote against the agreement, expressed concerns that the action plan isn’t designed to keep people housed.
“We’ve talked about this many times,” Meieran said. “There’s nowhere for people to go from the shelters, which is the cliff people go off of whether they get into treatment or stabilization … any short-term options. So, we haven’t fixed that, which is a problem.”
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Pederson responded saying that the local governing bodies hope to work with their partners to get people into permanent housing after they leave the temporary shelters.
“We don’t want people to stay permanently in shelters,” Pederson said. “So the whole point of the shelters strategy is to create enough shelters that we make a measurable difference in the number of people who are sleeping outside on our streets and moving them through our shelter system into more permanent housing situations. So it’s a continuous flow of folks as we are addressing unsheltered homelessness on our streets.”
The agreement also establishes a system for monitoring and reporting the results of the Homelessness Response Action Plan and holds agencies accountable for its results through quarterly reports and publicly accessible dashboards for funding, performance and outcomes, Borke said.
With the approved agreement, the Homelessness Response Action Plan will take effect on July 1 and last through June 30, 2027.
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