Accountability and Oregon’s Homeless Crisis: Steve Duin column
Published: Apr. 27, 2024, 7:07 a.m.
By Steve Duin | For The Oregonian/OregonLive
Doug Marshall has spent 30 years doing his part with the homeless. He brings some interesting thoughts to a week that featured the U.S. Supreme Court hearing oral arguments about people dealing with homelessness and public safety in Grants Pass, and the Portland City Council once again debating the same.
After moving back to Portland in 1993, Marshall invested 16 years venturing out with Blanket Coverage, which works with the chronically displaced. He and his wife, Carol, also started The Jesus Table, which offered weekly meals and connections for the impoverished at Cedar Mill Bible Church.
In 2019, Marshall decided he wasn’t doing enough. “Like most Oregonians, I was getting more and more frustrated that the crisis was getting worse, not better,” he says, “so I started Hope for the Homeless.”
Marshall, recently retired from a career in commercial real estate, first reached out last December after I wrote about “The vicious paralysis of Multnomah County.”
Marshall took exception to my contention, “There is nothing in place to identify the providers who are doing the best work to move people from a tent on Columbia Boulevard to more permanent shelter.”
“That’s exactly what we do at Hope for the Homeless Foundation,” Marshall said. “We objectively measure whether an organization is succeeding.”
The foundation is relatively small, handing out grants of $40,000 to $80,000 each year to four nonprofits working with the homeless. Recent recipients include Blanchet House, Transitional Youth, Agape Village and the Bybee Lakes Hope Center.
In the application process, Marshall asks those holistic recovery organizations to provide specifics on the number of people they tried to stabilize and house, their ongoing success rates, and the cost of those efforts.
Those are questions, Marshall contends, the nonprofits are rarely if ever asked by Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services. Hope for the Homeless only awards grants to the organizations that can document their effectiveness.
The eight grant recipients that focus almost exclusively on the chronic homeless reported helping to stabilize and house 551 people at a cost of $7.8 million.
The average cost of each beneficiary – $14,188 – is “chump change,” Marshall argues, “compared to the alternatives: incarceration, which is $51,000 annually, or ‘affordable housing’ at $490,000 per unit.” In late 2022, Mayor Ted Wheeler said that figure was the going rate for new construction in the city.
Over the last four years, Marshall has formed several conclusions.
He believes the surge of homelessness is fueled by addiction, mental illness, and trauma, not a lack of housing:
“Homelessness and affordable housing are separate crises. We’ve conflated the two. I’ve never had a conversation with the executive director of a nonprofit who said, ‘When we got this person stabilized, we couldn’t find permanent housing, so we had to kick them back onto the street.’ There are housing vouchers all over the place.”
(The Joint Office would seem to agree, noting that 99% of the tenants who moved into permanent housing in the first year of the Supportive Housing Services Measure “remained stably housed 12 months later.”)
Unlike the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Marshall believes that people of faith have a role to play in this dilemma. When the Ninth Circuit ruled in 2018 that cities cannot prosecute the homeless for sleeping in public if there are more homeless individuals than “available shelter beds,” the court insisted that shelters with a “mandatory religious focus” can’t be included in the count.
That is one overwrought safeguarding of the First Amendment Establishment Clause.
Finally, Marshall maintains that his small stab at accountability is made more essential by the struggle with priorities and diligence at Multnomah County and the city of Portland.
County Commissioner Sharon Meieran agrees: “Doug Marshall is spot on. This is exactly the work the County would be doing if we actually cared about being effective, had a plan, and were interested in measuring results to show progress.”
Instead, Meieran notes, the city and county have simply “resolved,” in an intergovernmental agreement (IGA), to reduce “unsheltered homelessness” for 2,700 people by December 2025.
That is delusional. “Gibberish,” Meieran adds. “The IGA is about protecting government from accountability, not providing for government accountability. We’ve created a shell game so that outcomes can’t be tracked even as large amounts of money are being exchanged.”
In the week’s conversations about all this, someone reminded me that the heart of the matter is what the homeless need, not what they deserve.
The mix of shelter, incentive, solace and stability varies. No, Grants Pass, people suffering homelessness don’t deserve a night in jail. But neither do the homeless “deserve” carte blanche on every city park, sidewalk and storefront on the West Coast.
As the number of homeless increases, so does the community’s frustration. The U.S. Supreme Court can’t resolve that ongoing disaster.
-- Steve Duin
