Report #8: Unified Leadership: Prerequisite for a Successful Homeless Policy
Unified leadership is a simple and well-tested principle necessary for success. Multiple leaders and uncoordinated management lead to incoherence in strategy, duplication of effort, gaps in practice, and a resultant waste of resources. Unfortunately, adherence to this basic principle is completely lacking in the response to homelessness in Multnomah County.
Current Situation
The response to homelessness in Multnomah County is divided between the county, the city, Metro, and the state. Each has different responsibilities, strategies, and policies. Their sources of funding are sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping, sometimes pass-through, with each funding stream having its own unique requirements. In addition, private charity funds some service providers, who may or may not coordinate with government-sponsored programs.
Differing Approaches
The most glaring example of different philosophies was the county’s policy (now ended) of giving out tents, sleeping bags, and tarps to the homeless, only to have the city throw them away during clean-ups and sweeps. Whether or not you think campsite sweeps are a good idea or not, the policy conflict was absurd and wasteful. It took years to resolve.
There are different philosophies for supportive housing, too. Some service providers aim to help their clients get back into normal lives. They offer wrap-around services including drug and alcohol detox and treatment, mental illness stabilization, skills training, job training, both temporary and permanent supportive housing, and similar support, all designed to make their clients self-sufficient. This process can take many months, but the success rate is good (typically 40% to 50%).
The County, on the other hand, adheres to a “Housing First” philosophy, which they have transformed into “Housing Only.” Their objective is to get everyone into housing as quickly as possible, regardless of their condition, with the assumption that they will then get better. But the County makes little or no effort to provide the appropriate level of services, resulting in long-term dependency. How many become self-sufficient is not known.
In addition, many homeless, especially the chronically homeless suffering from severe mental illness or drug addiction, are not ready for housing. In fact, trying to force them into housing is slowly bankrupting some service providers. Link Report #6.
Most recently, while the county continues with its “Housing Only” policy, the mayor is carrying out a plan to expand emergency shelters in the city. Again, whether you think this is a good plan or not, it runs counter to the county’s programs and receives no support from the county.
Funding
On the funding side, the primary sources of money for addressing the acute social problem of homelessness are from governmental entities: the federal, state, metro, county, and city. Additionally, charity provides significant support. In Multnomah County/Portland, the logical options for centralized leadership would be the state, metro, county, or the city. While we recognize that there are significant organizational and political hurdles for each in the way of achieving centralized leadership, somebody needs to be in charge.
Traditionally, the County has focused on behavioral health services, along with shelters and outreach. The city’s job was to address issues of affordable housing, cleaning the streets, and policing. However, increasingly, the City and County’s focus on homelessness has bled into each other.
The Metro Supportive Housing Tax, passed in 2020, raised a large amount of money that they allocated to the three counties, after deducting their administrative overhead. (Prior to this tax, Metro had no experience managing housing or funding for housing and had to create an entire bureaucracy from scratch) The county, in turn, passed some of this money down to the city’s housing operations, but kept most of it to expand the county’s homeless services portfolio to include supportive housing. This overlapped with the city’s affordable housing programs, resulting in multiple requirements, complex application processes, and multiple lengthy and uncoordinated wait lists.
On the Streets
The situation with the shelter system is no better. This was originally the county’s responsibility. But since the shelters run by the county were insufficient, the city has funded shelters, too. The new mayor has expanded this with several new overnight shelters and day centers. There are also several private shelters run by charities. Since no one entity is in charge, nobody is sure how many shelter beds there are in the county or city or what kinds of shelters there are (overnight, 24-hour, high- or low-barrier, women’s, men’s, walk-in or requiring reservations, etc.).
And again, since no one is in overall charge, there is no systematic way for homeless individuals to find an appropriate shelter with free capacity at any given time. It is up to the individual case worker or outreach worker to rely on their personal experience and personal contacts to find a bed. It usually requires several phone calls to find a free one. There is no centralized system; it depends on individual knowledge.
Outreach is similarly disjointed. These are the workers who should be a homeless person’s first contact with the service system, who should build trust, send the homeless person to the appropriate services, and start them on their road to recovery. The county funds over 100 outreach workers, spread over 20 non-profits. The city funds more, and private services often have their own outreach staff. Some of them do a good job getting people into services; some merely hand out water, blankets, needles, or straws. Some collect data to start an Individual Recovery Plan (IRP); some do not. Some that do collect data enter it into the overall Homeless Management Information System (HMIS); some non-profits use their own software that does not interface with other systems.
What the outreach workers do depends on the non-profit or government entity they happen to work for, and the individual worker’s motivation and experience. There are no county- or city-wide protocols for what to do, what data to collect, or accountability for their results…connecting people to the right services.
Gaps in Services
A homeless person’s path to recovery often goes through several stages, with the different stages often handled by different service providers. For example, an addict needs to go through detox/withdrawal management, generally followed by weeks of transitional housing with intensive support services. Medicaid, which funds most of the detox treatments, only provides for limited stays after which the newly sober person, still in need of extensive support, must move to another facility (often funded by a different agency with a different funding stream and its own requirements, which the newly sober person may or may not meet).
Once again, there is no central system to find the next placement. It relies on the individual case worker’s knowledge of what is available. Very often, no beds are available for the next stage of treatment, and the newly sober person is forced to go back onto the street. Back on the street, they are hard to find when a bed does become available, and they frequently relapse into addiction.
Similar situations happen in shelters, which have different allowable lengths of stays. When the allowable stay ends, the alternatives are often run by different non-profits, funded by different agencies with different agendas. Sometimes the individuals can seamlessly pass to an alternate shelter, sometimes they find space in temporary or permanent housing, sometimes they don’t and wind up back on the street. And in all cases, there is no central clearinghouse to keep track of where people can access needed services nor where they went.
Cumulative Overheads
The absence of unified leadership also leads to unnecessary overheads. This cannot be tolerated in an environment where we are going to have to do more to address homelessness with dramatically less money from the federal government.
It is hard to get an accurate figure on overheads as money cascades through the structure of homelessness funding. However, we can begin to approximate total overhead by examining the overhead involved in the Metro Supportive Housing Services (SHS) tax money. Metro states that its administrative overhead is 2.7%, but the reported figures indicate 5% or more.
Multnomah County received $140.4 million from SHS monies in 2024, of which $63.3 million flowed over to the Homeless Services Department (HSD). The County claims its overhead costs are 5.1%, but a more realistic figure is 15%. HSD’s 2024 report describes their Administrative and Overhead as 2.2%, but a review of the numbers appears to be at least in the range of 30%. It is difficult to tease out accurate overhead figures, but they multiply as the money flows downward, and the cumulative overhead can easily reach 30%.
And all of this comes before any money is spent on the homeless because, in general, governmental entities in Multnomah County do not actually provide services. Rather, they subcontract to nonprofits and church groups with their own overheads to provide food, shelter, medical care, housing, and job placement.
Conclusion
Like other jurisdictions that have had success, Multnomah County requires one entity to lead all efforts to end homelessness. We must overcome the political obstacles to unified leadership and eliminate the policy conflicts and overlaps, close the gaps, and all get onto one coordinated program. The current system seems designed more for bureaucratic convenience than to address the true needs of the homeless (and the taxpayers).
Sources
Supportive Housing: https://www.cbpp.org/research/housing/supportive-housing-helps-vulnerable-people-live-and-thrive-in-the-community
Bakersfield and functional zero chronic homelessness: Bakersfield and Kern County, California: Functional Zero Case Study - Community Solutions
Multnomah County 2025 Budget Review: www.tsccmultco.com/wp-content/uploads/MultCo-A-FY25-Budget-Review.pdf
JOH: 2023-2024 SHS Annual Report https://multco.us/file/joint_office_of_homeless_services_adopted_budget-1/download
Transition Projects 2023-2024 Annual Report: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/637bc5e7223fbf2204465446/t/682f6f6e262e5f37ea9e1377/1747939196571/FY23-24+Annual+Report.pdf
Multnomah Cost Allocation Plan: https://multco.us/file/fy_2025/2026_/download