Multnomah County’s Homeless Services Department has proposed closing 675 shelter beds as one tactic for addressing an $87 million hole in its budget for the next fiscal year.
The news is a blow to shelter providers, who said it would be an immense challenge to house the people currently staying in those beds. While not every bed that would be defunded is currently full, there are still close to 600 people facing the loss of their shelter spot in three months’ time.
“We lack both the staffing and budget to find solutions in 12 months, let alone 120 days,” said Andy Miller, director of Our Just Future, which operates one of the shelters that could be closed. “We’re really concerned. We’re looking to the county and the city to find any relocation resources that might be necessary.”
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Under the department’s initial budget proposal, seven shelters would close entirely, one would have fewer county-funded beds and several motel voucher programs would end. Department leaders have also proposed trimming an emergency rent assistance program, reducing programs aimed at job training and eliminating 16 county jobs.
None of the recommendations made by the homeless services department about how to reallocate its funding in the face of cuts will be final until voted on by the County Board of Commissioners in June.
Anna Plumb, interim director of the county’s homeless services department, sent an email to county commissioners Thursday morning listing the shelters that would face closure under the plan. Those include Beacon Village and Walnut Park in Northeast Portland, the River District Navigation Center in Northwest Portland, Laurelwood, the Clark Center and Chestnut Tree Inn in Southeast Portland.
The county has also proposed eliminating 100 county-funded addiction recovery beds at Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland and four motel voucher programs.
Plumb told commissioners in her email that she and her team had reviewed multiple factors, including cost per unit, population served, the state of the shelter facility, program location, and program outcomes.
In December, about 5,100 of the county’s more than 17,000 homeless people were staying in some form of shelter, according to county data. Most of the nearly 3,400 publicly maintained shelter beds in the county are currently funded by Multnomah County. The rest are funded by Portland, which also faces budget woes in the coming year.
“After these reductions, (the Homeless Services Department) will be funding 1,226 remaining adult shelter units and 1,597 units of county-funded shelter overall,” Plumb wrote.
She wrote that the decision to close hundreds of 24/7 shelter beds will allow the county to keep people who are currently living in county-supported housing in their homes. The hope is to reallocate some of the saved shelter funding to housing support.
Notably, one of the shelters set to close was recently highlighted in a county report on how efficiently shelters move people into permanent housing. Overall, just 16% of people staying in shelters moved to permanent housing in the last fiscal year, according to the report. But Chestnut Tree Inn, a motel shelter for women run by Our Just Future, was among the top performers.
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“We really want to better understand the rationale for why the county would close one of the most successful shelter programs in Multnomah County in terms of moving people into housing,” Miller said. “The program there was designed by our team to achieve those outcomes and by the county’s own report, we’re getting them.”
Plumb told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an email that the primary reason the Chestnut Inn was facing closure was that the leased facility faced increasingly high maintenance costs.
She also acknowledged the success Chestnut Tree Inn has had in moving people into housing and said the program was proof that shelters should have plenty of rent assistance available to distribute to shelter residents ready for housing.
“One reason we are reducing shelter units is to protect funding for housing placement and the reduction in shelter units will be accompanied by a re-allocation of shelter-based housing assistance,” she wrote. “This will mean that all remaining shelter units can have better housing outcomes.”
Plumb’s consistent message has been that the goal is to keep as many people housed as possible in the face of immense budget challenges.
“You can’t do more with less, but you can always be more efficient and more effective if you are targeting the right type of programs,” Plumb said in an interview in late January. “The goal with how we think about right-sizing the system is to ask ‘how can we help more people exit shelter to housing?’”
The expected drop in the department’s funding would equate to a 26% reduction from the current fiscal year’s budget of $334 million for the county’s Homeless Services Department and would result in hard choices.
This is the second budget year in a row the county Homeless Services Department will absorb a significant reduction.
Budget meetings begin in April. But conversations with people staying in potentially closing shelters will begin immediately, Miller said.
“We’re going to get asked, ‘where do we go?’” he said Thursday. “I don’t have an answer today. And we need an answer quickly. That’s going to take funding and coordination that, to date, we haven’t seen.”
Austin De Dios contributed to this report.
