PORTLAND — Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury released her proposed budget Thursday for the upcoming fiscal year, with nearly $150 million earmarked to address homelessness – a 22% increase from the year prior.
Between federal COVID-19 relief and a new three-county Metro supportive housing services tax for homelessness programs, the county is seeing “the largest budget that has ever been proposed” with new investments in housing that haven’t been possible before, Kafoury said during Thursday’s commission meeting. About a third of the budget is slated to come from the Metro homelessness relief tax that voters approved nearly a year ago.
If it is approved, as expected, the Portland area is likely to see a significant decrease in its unsheltered population as the money yields hundreds of new shelter beds, major expansions of rental assistance and delivery of wrap-around services to keep newly housed people off the streets.
“There is no denying just how great the need is right now,” Kafoury said.
The joint city-county homelessness budget, comprised of federal, state, county and city of Portland monies, would give about a third of the dollars to immediate shelter solutions, another third to long-term housing opportunities and the last third to outreach workers, employment opportunities, other supportive service programs and administrative costs.
Marc Jolin, the director of the joint city-county homeless department, said moving people from shelter to housing will address those individuals’ homelessness while also freeing up more emergency beds for others to access. The proposed budget is expected to expand supportive housing capacity by 1,300 individuals by pairing rental assistance with services such as mental health treatment. Additionally, the funds will use rental assistance to help an estimated 1,000 others stay in their homes. None of the dollars will be used to build new affordable housing.
“We have a huge bottleneck in the shelter system where people can’t move out of shelter and into housing right now,” Jolin said. “They either have to stay in the emergency bed where they are or exit and go back outside.”
Outside of the office for homelessness, programs in other county departments that overlap to also serve homeless individuals saw bumps in funding as well. Kafoury proposed to increase funding for eviction support, begin providing legal assistance for tenants, provide $7 million for renovation of a behavioral health resource center in downtown Portland that will serve homeless individuals and hire additional staff to increase domestic violence response services.
The county board will have a work session the first week of May to discuss the homeless spending plan. Public hearings will be held May 5 and May 12. The board is expected to adopt the budget June 3 for the fiscal year that begins July 1.
Here’s how Kafoury proposes that the homeless dollars be allocated:
OUTREACH WORKERS: $7.7 million
The proposed budget would create three new homeless street outreach teams, increase support for a volunteer-led medical street program and expand the team that helps people enroll in addiction treatment covered by the Oregon Health Plan.
Currently the city-county homelessness office deploys just one outreach team. That team is responsible for helping people who are camping on the streets or sleeping in cars access shelter, substance abuse treatment, medical care, behavioral health care, permanent housing and any other supportive service they need to improve their quality of life.
Kafoury is asking for $1.6 million to continue funding that team and $2.5 million of the homeless tax funding to add the three additional outreach teams.
She also proposed a half million dollars for outreach workers in the Springwater Corridor and East County who hand out survival gear including personal protective equipment, hand sanitizer, blankets, tarps, tents, socks, warm weather gear, food and water.
An additional $3 million is proposed for organizations throughout the county to provide those same supplies to the unsheltered individuals they serve. Providing these resources to community organizations leads to greater diversity in who receives the resources, ensuring that culturally specific organizations have the supplies needed for the underserved Black, Indigenous, and people of color they serve, she said.
Overall, the county expects nearly 2,000 additional people to be connected to housing, shelter or medical care through these outreach efforts.
EMERGENCY SHELTER: $51 million
If the budget is approved, emergency shelter capacity throughout Multnomah County would increase by at least 400 beds.
To maintain the status quo, the proposal asks for $9.9 million for year-round all-day all-night shelters for adults; $2.5 million for the Gresham Women’s Shelter, the downtown SOS Women’s Shelter and Jean’s Place, a shelter for women seeking a sober environment; $342,850 for alternative village-style shelters including Kenton Women’s Village, Dignity Village and St. John’s Village with plans to use funds to develop an additional site; $2.6 million for two family shelters in East Portland and one in North Portland; $1.7 million for domestic violence shelters; $1.9 million for youth shelters which include intensive case management; $15 million to continue operating COVID-19 isolation motel-shelters through the first half of the fiscal year; and $2.9 million to fund the temporary winter and severe weather shelters.
An additional $4 million is proposed for maintenance work that would improve current shelters and to do work that would improve buildings slated to be used for temporary weather shelters.
To expand operations, Kafoury proposed using funds from the new homeless services tax in the following ways:
RENTAL ASSISTANCE: $34.2 million
To prevent new homelessness and to quickly get people off the streets, 500 additional households would be awarded short- or medium-term rental payments, coupled with some supportive services. That rapid rehousing aid would be on top of the county and city’s typical capacity.
“We have additional shelters supports in this budget because we know shelter is needed in our community. But ultimately the goal is to get people into housing, and we know we can do it because we have been successful at doing it,” Kafoury said. “We just haven’t had the resources to do it at this scale before.”
The proposed budget would continue funding for a variety of specialized rental assistance, including:
The homeless services tax would expand rent assistance by providing:
SUPPORTIVE HOUSING: $30.6 million
For people who need more extensive support, the budget proposes expanding to 800 more households programs that provide long-lasting social service support to people with housing vouchers or receiving rental assistance.
These dollars often serve individuals with physically or mentally disabling conditions, those struggling to overcome mental health or substance disorders, or those who have been chronically homeless who need more support to transition back into a life lived indoors.
In-home supportive services can mean a caseworker visits an individual to help problem solve situations that jeopardize their housing. The worker might help them learn to pay bills, deal with a bill they can’t afford to pay, resolve conflicts with neighbors or resolve a maintenance issue.
It can also mean peer support from a person who also has lived on the streets who regularly checks in on well-being and emotional health.
“Perhaps someone was outside for a long time and they are struggling with the transition,” Jolin said. “A peer support specialist would help that person get through the emotions, the feelings of trauma from their experience, the potential feelings of isolation and vulnerability from transitioning to this new life.”
Finally, there is professional support, which can include clinical behavioral health services and day treatment for recovery.
The proposed budget would maintain funding for existing supportive housing services, including:
The homeless services tax would expand permanent supportive housing by providing:
EQUITY FUNDING: $6.9 million
The equity initiative Kafoury proposed in her budget plan would be funded primarily by the homeless services tax.
It would offer 30 culturally specific social service organizations that the county doesn’t currently contract with opportunities to help decrease homelessness by, for example, offering housing-specific mentorship, skill training and funding. The county would also teach organizations how to work with the county, including how to start the contracting process and how to tweak accounting and data collection to be in line with county processes.
This initiative will start by surveying organizations that are interested in contracting with the county to determine would supports they would need to do so.
“We have done things in the past like fund a position for an organization to help them expand internally … or cover expanded operating costs that are necessary to take on this work,” Jolin said.
Less than 2% of the proposed spending will come from general funds dollars and be used to provide equity training for city and county employees and staff from community organizations providing homeless services. The trainings would cover racial equity, culturally responsive care, trauma-informed care and de-escalation tactics, among other things.
EMPLOYMENT: $4.3 million
An easy-entry job program is proposed to launch using $3 million of the homeless services tax funding. The program would employ 100 people to pick up trash, remove graffiti and do other general maintenance work on public property. The program would also help those individuals secure housing. This would complement the already existing employment program.
If the budget is approved, the program could start as soon as July 1, but Jolin expects a slight delay as the city/county homeless office works with community-based partners to build out the program.
ADMINISTRATIVE, DATA, OTHER FUNDING: $9.9 million
The budget also includes a proposal to expand some behind-the-scenes jobs to support the growth of other programs funded by the homeless services tax.
The homeless services tax is proposed to fund collaborative work across agencies, to grow current administrative operations by adding additional operating staff and human resources staff, grow the current business office to handle the increase in funding that would be distributed to local organizations, update the current data collection method to better track housing progress, and increase current planning efforts to focus on future use of the homeless tax dollars.
