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Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson announced Friday morning a $14 million plan to house 300 homeless Portlanders in the central city and East Portland within the calendar year.
The ambitious goal, if approved by her board colleagues, will be funded by unused and unanticipated homeless services tax measure funds that weren’t spent in the last fiscal year. The $14 million would go toward outreach efforts and a one-year rent guarantee for landlords willing to house the participants. An iteration of this model already exists at the county, which under former Chair Deborah Kafoury was called “Move In Multnomah,” but was not geographically targeted.
Vega Pederson aims to first target the central city for four months and then expand the project to East Portland. If the plan is approved by the county board of commissioners later this month, Vega Pederson’s office will form a coordination group to guide the plan that will include representatives from the city of Portland, the Joint Office of Homeless Services, and service providers.
Regional elected officials, including Vega Pederson, visited King County in Washington state last month to learn about a pilot program it had launched that Pederson is now partly modeling her proposal after. It’s called “Partnership for Zero” and has shown early success, though there are important distinctions between Vega Pederson’s proposal and Seattle’s program.
For one, the King County program is funded in part by a laundry list of philanthropic donors and giant companies like Amazon, Alaska Airlines, Boeing, Kaiser Permanente, Nordstrom and Costco.
While the county isn’t partnering with corporations like Costco and REI, it is eyeing money from Gov. Tina Kotek, who recently unveiled a $130 million spending plan to tackle homelessness and increase affordable housing production.
Kotek has directed regional leaders to form “multiagency coordination groups”—akin to a command structure the federal governments stands up after natural disasters—if they want more state funding for homelessness.
In some ways, Vega Pederson’s announcement today provides an answer to key questions that were facing her as she entered office—about the slack spending of homeless services dollars, but also about her approach to sanctioned homeless camps.
Neither Vega Pederson nor state legislators have yet provided any money to Mayor Ted Wheeler’s six massive sanctioned encampments, a controversial plan he unveiled last year. For months now, his office has asked for money from the county to help fund those sites, which would each hold capacity for 150 people and provide basic services like laundry, restrooms and showers, meals and case management.
But now Vega Pederson tells WW she plans to help fund the wraparound encampment services once she sees one of the camps up and running. In short: She wants a proof of concept before she opens the county’s purse strings to the controversial idea.
“I do want to see the city get one of these temporary shelter sites open, but thereafter I am committed to providing the services necessary to support those living in the sites,” Vega Pederson says.
Wheeler secured $27 million from his colleagues on the Portland City Council last year to cover the costs of setting up three of the encampments. Mayoral spokesman Cody Bowman tells WW that the mayor’s office has secured letters of intent for two sites. “We have multiple sites that we’re really close to finalizing....I would say that one site with a service provider will be announced in the coming weeks.”