It’s been more than three decades since Portland homeless service nonprofit Transition Projects regularly operated nighttime-only shelters. While that was before Director Tony Bernal joined the organization, 27 years ago, the reason for ditching this model remains clear in his mind.

“The ability to have a place where you can not only sleep but stay and get connected to services, work toward an income, work toward housing,” said Bernal, whose nonprofit only operates 24/7 shelters. “You don’t get that at shelters open only at night.”

Last month, Mayor Keith Wilson met with more than 50 Portland homeless service providers to detail a $28 million proposal to end the city’s unsheltered homeless crisis that rests largely on the swift expansion of nighttime shelters. The goal — to keep people from resorting to sleeping on city streets — is universally celebrated among local homeless providers. But the road map laid out by the new mayor raises questions among those who are perhaps the most familiar with the work of operating a successful shelter in Portland.

“On first pass, it isn’t terribly realistic,” Bernal said. “We need a lot more information.”

Wilson can’t execute this vision, the key piece of his successful election, without long-standing providers’ support. Wilson will be looking to contract with these nonprofits to run many of his new shelters.

Many of these providers have seen similar plans proposed by Wilson’s predecessors fail. As Wilson scrambles to find money, space and staff to meet his plan’s ambitious timeline, shelter providers hope their experience can keep the latest pitch from meeting a similar end.

“I also don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good,” said Bernal. “If we can bring folks inside for a night, that’s better than not bringing them inside at all.”

Wilson’s proposal

Wilson’s goal is to open 3,000 new shelter beds by December to accommodate the nearly 6,000 people living unsheltered in Multnomah County. Half of those beds are anticipated to be paid for by city and county funds already earmarked for 24/7 shelter beds. Wilson will need to identify money to pay for the other 1,500, which he proposes being all nighttime shelter beds.

The $28 million price tag also includes opening four new day centers, which are places where people experiencing homelessness can take a shower, do laundry, and get connected to social services. These centers will be able to accommodate up to 600 people per day. The plan also covers the cost of four storage facilities which can hold personal items for up to 1,200 people.

The plan also adds a new rule for all 24/7 shelters: People can only stay for up to 90 days at a time, and they are required to regularly meet with social service workers and work on finding housing or work.

Yet the plan includes no funding or strategy for connecting people to permanent housing or other programs to ensure they aren’t returning to homelessness after their 90 days are up.

This model has longtime shelter providers scratching their heads.

“These requirements assume engagement will get you on a path to housing and income,” said Bernal. “You can meet with case managers all day and night, but without housing available, it’s not going to work.”

Bernal has seen some of the shelter guests who are extremely determined to find housing stay in shelter longer than anticipated, despite spending their days searching for housing or work.

To Marc Dones, the need for stay limits speaks to a bigger problem with the region’s homeless services system. Dones is a policy director studying homelessness at University of California San Francisco, and previously ran King County’s homeless service agency.

Through his work, Dones said he’s found that shelters where people stay for shorter periods of time can reduce unsheltered homelessness, but only if it is accompanied by access to permanent housing.

“Stay limits should not necessarily incentivize the person,” said Dones, “they should incentivize the system to say, ‘We need to have a solution for this person in x number of days.’”

Without that kind of planning, Dones said shelter limits could just create a system that cycles people in and out of shelter.

Thinking beyond nighttime shelters

Those who operate the few nighttime-only shelters in Portland agree.

“I think the nighttime shelter system is absolutely necessary as part of the continuum of care,” said Lance Orton, executive director of City Team, a nonprofit that operates a men’s nighttime shelter in Portland’s Central Eastside. “But I 100 percent believe that we need to pour energy and resources into places where people can go next.”

It’s an experience Orton knows intimately. Just over six years ago, Orton showed up at City Team looking for a place to sleep. He was living outside and addicted to heroin. After several days sleeping in the night shelter, he was connected to City Team’s residential recovery program, which offered addiction treatment, free housing, and a job working at the shelter for a year. It laid a path to more permanent housing and employment that he couldn’t imagine finding on his own.

Orton also sits on the board of Shelter Portland, a nonprofit Wilson founded in 2023 to address the city’s homelessness crisis. He believes in Wilson’s plan. He wants to see the city commit to more programs that help people in shelters become self-sufficient and housed, like the City Team program that helped him.

Wilson appears to be listening. On Monday, his office announced plans to pay for 50 new shelter beds for people seeking opioid addiction treatment. The shelter beds will be operated by Bybee Lakes Hope Center, a North Portland shelter open 24/7. The intent is to help shelter guests get sober and eventually into permanent housing.

“Homelessness does not have a one-size-fits-all solution,” Wilson said in a press release.

Yet Wilson hasn’t committed to boosting housing as part of that solution. In presentations before city officials and interviews, Wilson has pointed to other publicly-funded affordable housing programs in the region that can help meet the need. And, he notes, it takes a lot of time.

“It takes five years in some cases to build affordable housing,” Wilson said in a Monday interview with OPB’s Think Out Loud. “We cannot ask our citizens to wait on the street.”

A swift timeline

Wilson’s plan comes with its own time limits: It only covers the cost of these 1,500 new nighttime shelter beds for four months, from December 2025 to March 2026. By then, he estimates that the city can begin shrinking capacity at its shelters. Wilson proposes paying for just 750 beds across Portland by June 2027.

That’s because Wilson expects results by December.

Per Wilson’s plan, this December ramp-up of 1,500 shelter beds will coincide with the city’s full enforcement of its public camping ban, which hasn’t been fully enforced due to the city’s shortage of shelter capacity. Under the city policy, if a person camping on public property refuses to accept shelter, they can face arrest or a fine.

Wilson has used anecdotal data from other cities to predict that, once the city begins enforcing its camping ban, people living outside will “go back home,” stay on a friend’s couch, or otherwise remove themselves from city streets. He has not mentioned they could be another place: jail.

According to UCSF’s Dones, there’s no data to support the idea that enforcing a camping ban will end unsheltered homelessness.

“All the evidence is to the contrary: That [enforcement] lengthens people’s experience of homelessness by adding fines and potentially other legal ramifications that then block people’s ability to access housing,” Dones said.

Dones said that criminalizing homelessness doesn’t incentivize people to move into shelters.

“If we want people to say yes to the shelter options, then we need to design them in such a way that they meet people’s needs,” said Dones. “Not threaten them.”

Andy Miller is the director of Our Just Future, a Portland nonprofit that runs three 24/7 shelters and several affordable housing complexes. Miller has seen what happens when law enforcement officers drop people off at his shelters who may not want to be in a shelter — but believe it’s their only way to avoid penalties. He said they are usually disruptive, putting stress on guests and staff, or they immediately leave.

“Shelters best serve our community when no one is in shelter involuntarily,” Miller said.

Miller said he supports Wilson’s urgency to address unsheltered homelessness. But he, along with other local shelter providers, has many questions he’d like answered before considering running one of Wilson’s new shelters.

The plan still lacks clear funding, yet Wilson is confident state and other local government agencies will assist. It also relies on cost estimates that many providers say are far lower than what they’re willing to pay staff. And, with a shrinking social service workforce, it’s not clear if there are enough skilled workers to do the job.

Miller sees an opportunity for Wilson to slow down and listen to providers, to create a system that ends unsheltered homelessness for good.

“Our community needs a long-term plan and well-coordinated system to address and prevent homelessness in a sustained way,” he said. “Most providers are anxious to be part of creating that plan and system.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/02/05/portland-oregon-mayor-keith-wilson-homelessness-shelter-homeless-service-transition-projects/