Even facing the high stakes of failure, local leaders’ approach to solving homelessness has long seemed aimless and accidental. A lack of coordination among agencies, feuding between Portland and Multnomah County officials and incomplete data have only made it more difficult to help the thousands of people living unsheltered.
So, last week’s unveiling of a homelessness response action plan by Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler marked a dramatic shift in tone. The 47-page draft document lists nine broad goals, each with specific objectives, aimed at stitching together a comprehensive system to respond to homelessness. It recognizes the critical roles that health care, behavioral health, affordable housing policy, funding streams and governance structures must play to effectively help those who are homeless now and prevent more from joining their ranks. And it seeks to spread the authority and ownership of our homelessness crisis across a broader set of players.
“It’s about creating a bigger table. It’s about having more voices, more people who are actually working on solutions,” Vega Pederson told The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board. The plan, she added, will create a system that won’t depend so much on who’s in office but rather will “outlast personalities and actually get and drive real results.”
The plan signals Vega Pederson’s recognition that the county’s tight control of the region’s homelessness response, run through the Joint Office of Homeless Services, has failed to yield much success. The need for progress demands a genuinely collaborative approach.
Whether the plan will mark a dramatic shift in results, however, is a much trickier question, considering local governments’ poor record of follow-through. With the draft now out for public input, Vega Pederson and Wheeler must also work with their fellow elected leaders with a focus on vetting what is achievable and set expectations accordingly. They cannot afford to burn any more of the public’s faith in government’s ability to match promises with results.
For now, the talk is big. The plan calls for housing or sheltering within two years 2,699 people – half the known population of those living on the streets or in vehicles. It aims to increase the number of people who move from temporary shelter to permanent housing by 15 percentage points. Goals include developing housing strategies for neglected groups who are particularly vulnerable to landing on the streets, such as youth who leave foster care and people discharged from health care facilities.
The plan envisions building a round-the-clock sobering center, adding another 505 shelter beds beyond current commitments and identifying 20 commercial buildings in Portland for possible conversion to housing. It calls for collecting better data for longer periods of time, developing software to provide real-time information on shelter vacancies and dozens of other specific outcomes to achieve in the next few years. And it lays out a new governance structure that more fairly splits power among the county, city and East Multnomah County communities while creating a separate implementation committee with nonprofits, health care partners, local agencies and others.
It’s fair to question whether this will be a plan of action or just a wish list. Changing governance alone is a tall order. And while the plan builds on existing work and expertise, agencies face a significant amount of heavy lifting on how to turn so many ideas with set targets into functional programs and services.
In other words, the success of this transformation depends on impeccable implementation and transparency. That means planning the details, moving with sustained urgency, rolling out programs, monitoring progress, adjusting as needed, reporting back to the community and ensuring that programs continue operations for the long-term, not just a year or two. These have not been strengths of city and county agencies in recent years. Portlanders have seen long delays in the city’s siting of homeless shelter sites; blown deadlines by the county in delivering highly-promoted programs; funding lags for cash-strapped contractors – all while the county has had to draw up spending plans on the fly to use some of the millions in new tax dollars rolling in.
Vega Pederson told the editorial board that the county has brought on a number of key people over the past year who are helping shore up operations. But the county health department remains in flux with no permanent director leading its behavioral health program – a huge vulnerability at a time when the county must build out its behavioral health system both out of sheer need, but also as a result of House Bill 4002. The bill, which passed the Legislature earlier this month, recriminalizes drug possession while calling on counties to provide those caught with drugs with treatment opportunities that keep them out of the criminal justice system.
The county is right to be ambitious in developing a strategy for addressing homelessness, but it must also ground its ambitions in realistic assessments of its capabilities and competence. As necessary as it is for local leaders to be ambitious, it is even more urgent that they be effective.
-The Oregonian/OregonLive Editorial Board