Portland’s approach to homelessness enters a new era

In Portland, Oregon, a new mayor and the city council are in the early stages of a change of direction on tackling homelessness, even as the number of unhoused people in Multnomah County has risen to 7,500 and continues to tick upward. OPB reporter Alex Zielinski covers Portland city politics. She gave KUOW’s Kim Malcolm this update on the homelessness situation there.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: Back in 2024, Portland officials banned camping in public spaces, “when reasonable shelter is available.” They paused enforcement for a while but picked it back up this past November. What's happening now? Are people still camping on streets and in the parks?

Alex Zielinski: That policy was put on hold by Mayor Keith Wilson. He said he didn't want to enforce the ban until the city opened up more shelter beds. But in November, he determined that there were enough vacancies in some shelters to begin enforcement. As you mentioned, there are roughly 7,500 people living outside in Portland right now. There are not enough vacancies in these shelters to accommodate that entire population, which is a way to answer your question that, yes, there are still a lot of people camping on sidewalks and living in cars and Portland streets.

For now, we're really seeing a lot of the enforcement being focused on areas that police see as problematic encampments. Maybe there's criminal activity happening there, or people are building fires there regularly, or dumping waste into the groundwater. It's all pretty targeted.

You’ve written that people are being ticketed but no one has been penalized. Why not?

In the first few months of enforcement, about 20 people have received citations for camping in public. But these cases have all hit roadblocks. I dug into the court records recently and found that they all took one of three paths. A third of the cases are being thrown out by county prosecutors. A third are delayed because the person charged didn't show up to their court date. And a third showed up, but there was no public defender available to represent them, so their case was delayed.

In all of these cases, the people charged are being released back to the streets. They're not being held. So, it's maybe too early to make any determination here, but it's hard to see what the real consequences are for violating this ban and how it's really helping the homelessness crisis at all.

Your mayor came into office about a year ago, in January, with a pledge to bring street homelessness to an end, and to increase overnight shelter capacity. Tell us more about his larger plan and the results so far.

His plan was to open up 1,500 new overnight-only shelter beds by December 1, so less than a year. He was able to get funding and identify locations by his deadline. A few of those beds are still not available, but he says he’s met his overarching goal to open up all of these beds.

He had a bigger goal, as you mentioned, which is to end unsheltered homelessness as a whole by December 1 as well. That didn't happen. Thousands are still living outside. But he now says that was an unrealistic goal meant to motivate, and that the real goal was opening these shelters.

People are using these new shelters. They're very much treated like an emergency shelter bed, open during cold weather or a heat wave. It's just a bed or a mat in an open room. There's no storage or privacy or ability to leave and come back after, which means it doesn't work for everyone. Vacancy rates have been pretty high since these new shelters came online, but cold weather might change that, and some folks are really appreciating them.

What are the folks who are doing the enforcement, police and prosecutors, saying about the homelessness situation in Portland now?

Many I've spoken with are frustrated that the crisis has gotten so bad that law enforcement and the criminal justice system even needs to play a role. I spoke recently with some county prosecutors about the new camping ban. They say they do think it's a necessary tool to get people to move into shelter.

There's also another piece of it, that by having a new citation to enforce, police are legally allowed to stop people and ask them for their IDs and maybe run their names through a criminal database to see if there's a warrant for their arrest. They're picking up a good number of people on warrants this way, kind of using the guise of camping enforcement to make arrests on other charges, which prosecutors are happy about.

And how about homeless advocates and public defenders? What are they saying?

Similar to Washington state, Oregon has a public defense shortage. Public defenders I spoke with see this as just another way to burden their caseloads with criminal charges that could be addressed in other ways. There could be other ways to resolve these issues. They agree with a number of homeless advocates and service providers who say that this really isn't the right tool to address homelessness, that building more housing, investing in more mental health care and other social services is better than sticking people with a criminal citation.

In Portland, as in Seattle, there has been some tension between city officials and county officials on best practices around addressing homelessness. In Portland, has the increase in overnight shelter beds alleviated that tension at all?

Not really. The division here is around a few things. One is just the desire to create a variety of options for shelter, versus flooding the market with these overnight-only shelters. There's also disagreement over whether the city should be spending more money on shelter or on housing that people can eventually move into, because we have a housing crisis. So those disagreements, unfortunately, are still as strong as ever.

What are people who live in Portland saying about this new approach to homelessness? Are they seeing a change?

People are saying they're seeing fewer tents downtown and in their neighborhoods, and they feel like there's some kind of progress. Data also reflects some of this. Foot traffic has increased in downtown Portland, which has been kind of ground zero for the city's homelessness crisis, but polling still shows that Portlanders identify homelessness as its biggest issue, which has been the case for years, and it's not letting up.

Do you think there's enough support for the mayor to continue along this path?

It's hard to say. He recently introduced a plan to build more housing, which I think has gotten a number of councilors who are skeptical to his shelter-first plan on board. So, it really depends, and the second year will be a good way to measure that.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.