Credit: Tara Faul
The focus of the next two years in Oregon politics is likely to follow the contours of one of the biggest issues in the state: homelessness.
How it plays out is likely to be shaped not by large policies or spending strokes but by details that from a state level may look almost microscopic. In the coming months, that is where the important answers may be found.
The stakes are both social and political. Oregon voters have not unseated an incumbent governor since 1978, but Gov. Tina Kotek has reason for concern. Winner by a modest plurality in 2022, she has polled poorly since, and in two months earlier this year Morning Consult marked her as the least popular governor in the country.
She now enters the second half of her term on the argument that she would be effective in delivering action on one of the state’s key problems. Homelessness and housing probably have been Kotek’s key issues, and these concerns also are top of mind for many Oregonians. The problem, which Oregonians have for a decade listed as a major issue for the state, remains large. Nearly 23,000 people in Oregon remain unhoused, according to last year’s federal point-in-time count. Kotek’s initiatives have revolved around expanding housing stock, a subject she has tackled long before she became governor. In 2019 as House speaker, she backed House Bill 2001 to require that higher housing density be allowed in what had been single-family zones, in Oregon’s larger urban areas.
As governor, she has pushed for major state spending of hundreds of millions of dollars, including $880 million in state bonding, to increase housing stock by about 36,000 homes annually. Affordability, however, is another question — meaning that its impact on homelessness is unclear as is the impact the new homes will have on homelessness.
She also is proposing $217.9 million to increase shelter beds, plus another $188.2 million to help rehouse people, as well as $173.2 million to help avert evictions from rentals or other properties. These are not small amounts, and they reflect a seriousness of intent, but how well they will ease homelessness is uncertain.
In many places, including in downtown Portland but also in other cities, homelessness is less visible now than it was half a decade ago. But that doesn’t mean it’s gone away; in many cases it’s just been relocated.
Part of the problem has been that homelessness seems like an amorphous blob, hard to define, enumerate, even accurately describe. That seeming inability to get a handle on it leads to frustration, and in turn to a political problem. If you don’t fully understand, and in some depth, what the problem consists of, you’ll have a hard time solving it.
What’s been missing is fine-grained information about the individuals who are unhoused: their circumstances, why they have no housing, what particular obstacles they face and what it would take to get them settled. All have individual stories. Because the unhoused population is so varied, the answers can come only case by case.
That data may be coming, and maybe just in time to provide the basis for the Oregon Legislature to more precisely target money and other resources.
Take a look at Built for Zero, a national effort to end homelessness that focuses on veterans and on the “chronically” homeless.
Close to 100 communities nationally — and six around Oregon — have joined Built for Zero and started developing detailed information about individual people who are homeless and posting statistical and geographic information online to help the community better understand the problem and what is needed to solve it.
Lane County and the cities of Eugene and Springfield joined a Built for Zero effort in 2019. They began developing information about individuals in various sectors, completing a count for veterans and for chronically homeless single adults in September 2021. Over three years, they found the number of homeless people in the Eugene area is much larger than the point-in-time studies indicate. But they also obtained specific, detailed information about that population which has made outreach from governments and others more effective.
Portland, Gresham and Multnomah County joined a similar effort in December 2021, and Multnomah officials said that after two years of intensive research, data from it will be ready for use early this year.
That data is likely to provide the kind of information that will allow for surgical, rather than broad-brush, use of government and other funding to help move toward solving the problem. How the Legislature reacts to what is being learned now on the local level may say a lot about how Oregon deals with homelessness. And even about Kotek’s rationale for reelection two years from now.
This article originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.