Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson announced a plan Friday to quickly house hundreds of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in and near downtown Portland.
The plan will build off the county’s successful 2022 Move-In Multnomah pilot program, which used $4 million to place people into 214 privately owned apartments and houses over the course of four months, and what county officials have learned from Seattle’s effective Housing Command Center, Vega Pederson said.
After concentrating on downtown, Old Town and the Central Eastside through May, the county will work to house people living unsheltered in the Gresham area for the next many months, she said.
The new initiative, billed as Housing Multnomah Now, aims to better unify local and state efforts to address homelessness. Vega Pederson said the county will spend $14 million on it over the coming 12 months.
The initial focus will be a four-month drive to move 300 people living primarily in tents in and near downtown into apartments. The county would guarantee private landlords it will pay them a year’s worth of rent plus give them other protections such as mediation services if tenant-landlord issues arise.
From there, the county will pivot to focus on getting unhoused individuals on the county’s east side into permanent homes by January 2024.
The program’s success will rely in large part on swaths of workers on the ground dedicated to coordinating services for this population throughout the full year, Vega Pederson said. But she could not say Friday which nonprofits will help coordinate the work and where exactly the workers will come from.
She said she plans to ask the county board to allocate the $14 million left unspent from its 2022 allocation from the Metro homelessness services tax for the project. She said she also hopes the Legislature will approve Gov. Tina Kotek’s proposed $130 million in emergency funding to address homelessness across the state.
“We are pivoting so we no longer move people three blocks, but instead focus on moving people into housing and providing support from there,” Vega Pederson said during a Friday news conference.
Vega Pederson she hopes the same strategy can eventually help the thousands experiencing homelessness across the county.
Across Multnomah County, more than 5,000 people are experiencing homelessness and of those, more than 3,000 were unsheltered living in tents and sleeping bags or in vehicles, according to a count of homeless individuals in January 2022.
For the housing effort to be successful, Vega Pederson is calling on local nonprofits and landlords to help.
“The only real long-term solution to homelessness is getting someone into a home,” she said. “We need landlords to respond urgently to provide those living on our streets with a safe place to stay.”
The temporary Move-In Multnomah program that ran through the summer housed applicants in a matter of weeks, instead of forcing them to endure the months- and yearslong waits people typically experience. Vega Pederson said she hopes Housing Multnomah Now will mimic that.
The new initiative will guarantee landlords a year’s rent and a supportive worker who can help mitigate any issues between a renter and landlord. There will also be a landlord incentive fund to help landlords overcome obstacles of renting to individuals who they may not typically rent to, such as those with a criminal past or evictions on their records.
Housing Multnomah Now will also include relocating campers to Portland’s planned tent sites, its safe rest villages and the region’s shelter system, Vega Pederson said. While housing is the goal, Vega Pederson said the shelters will be temporary placements for people waiting to be housed. Once the city’s tent sites, which will cluster up to 100 tents per site, are launched, the county will provide housing case management for residents there, Vega Pederson said.
Nicole Hayden reports on homelessness for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She can be reached at nhayden@oregonian.com or on Twitter @Nicole_A_Hayden.