Throughout his first five months as Portland mayor, Keith Wilson has taken nearly every opportunity to tout his plan to end unsheltered homelessness by Dec. 1 and insist that his ambitious goal to have a shelter bed available for every person on the street who wants one is eminently achievable.
He doubled down on that message Friday in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive.
“No change in plans,” he said. “We’re on target. I’m optimistic.”
Prodded about the challenges to his plan, including mounting skepticism from partners, a lack of housing options for people ready to leave shelter and the fact that homelessness has increased every month since at least January 2024, the mayor held firm.
He said he invited Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor and adviser to President Joe Biden, to speak to local officials several weeks ago. Landrieu, he said, told the group, “You must have and hold an unrealistic goal, but then you and your team must work in a relentless fashion to make sure you achieve it.”
Wilson saw the message as inspiring. And yet, the facts on the ground indicate that he appears increasingly unlikely to hit his hoped-for target.
Wilson’s proposed method for moving people off the streets has been to quickly stand up 1,500 new overnight-only shelter beds. The mayor is now less than a fifth of the way to his goal with just six months left to accomplish it.
And the sheer volume of people who are now homeless in Portland and the tightness of the housing market are creating further challenges, experts say.
Wilson’s plan would create fewer shelter beds than there are people living outside based on the idea that people will move efficiently through shelter to housing. But without enough affordable housing options, people are staying in shelters longer and longer, county data shows.
All of this has deepened doubts among some of the politicians, local government bureaucrats and homeless service providers Wilson needs on his side to execute his plan.
Some members of the Portland City Council, for instance, say they are increasingly skeptical that the mayor’s approach will work as envisioned. Nevertheless, they are poised to sign off next week on the $63 million he’s earmarked in the city’s pending budget to do things his way. The outlay includes about $25 million to create new emergency shelters and day centers as well as $38 million for the city to continue operating a series of existing sleeping pod sites.
Candace Avalos, who chairs the council’s homelessness and housing committee, said she and her colleagues are unlikely to seek changes to Wilson’s proposal. But, she added, her committee will remain focused on developing a broader set of strategies to address the city’s humanitarian crisis.
“The mayor has really stuck his neck out and made this his campaign promise,” Avalos said. “If he can deliver, that’s great. He can take all the glory. If he doesn’t, he’s going to take all the blame.”
Councilor Steve Novick said he was prepared to set aside his own misgivings and see what happens.
“I’m willing to suspend disbelief and give him a chance,” Novick said. “There is an argument for investing in shelter — people shouldn’t be sleeping in the streets.”
A housing problem
The mayor has already made some progress toward his shelter bed goal. He opened 200 new overnight beds in January with the help of Multnomah County. And he’s used money from the city’s portion of opioid settlement funds to open 50 drug addiction recovery beds at the Bybee Lakes Hope Center in North Portland.
Another 180 city-run overnight beds are set to open this summer along with about 100 new private nonprofit beds, for a total of about 550 new beds open by late fall. The mayor said his team is in negotiations with various providers for additional shelter beds, but did not specify how many.
During Friday’s interview, he likened progress on his plan to the construction of the Empire State Building in New York City, a feat propelled by surging momentum and accomplished in just 410 days between 1930 and 1931.
“That first floor they built took like 20 days. The seventh floor took them 19 and so on,” he said. “We’ve got an awful lot of work to do between now and (Dec. 1). We’re not making this up as we go.”
Still, homeless services providers are increasingly dubious.
“Look, this is complicated,” said Daniel Hovanas, executive director of Do Good Multnomah, which operates eight shelters within Multnomah County. “He’s not ending unsheltered homelessness by Dec. 1. He’s adding 1,500 beds.”
Hovanas said sheltering people is incredibly expensive and without enough housing for people to move into, more shelter won’t fix the problem. Instead, he thinks the city should invest in increasing its housing supply so that shelters can move people through more efficiently and ensure anyone who can be housed finds a place to live.
“Invest in housing vouchers and retention teams,” Hovanas said. “Get people out of shelters, into apartments. We did that with state funding last year and had really great success.”
Hovanas said 88% of people his nonprofit helped early last year are still housed 16 months later. County data shows that about 82% of people who moved into some form of housing in 2023, remained in their new homes 24 months later. But without the extra funds made available to house people after the pandemic, exits from shelter to permanent housing have been slightly down systemwide so far this year over 2024 rates, according to county data.
Hovanas was one of several large Portland shelter providers who told Wilson in a recent public meeting that shelters don’t help people move into housing that doesn’t exist.
Tony Bernal, executive director of Transition Projects, oversees the largest shelter network in the city. He said 6% of the people he shelters have now been there for more than a year because there’s nowhere for people to go.
“That’s a fairly recent phenomenon,” Bernal said. It used to be that people with benefits like disability insurance could “get some sort of housing with it. But now it’s not enough to afford housing.”
Currently, the federally determined fair market rent for the Portland area is $1,628 for a studio apartment. And yet, the monthly insurance payment for a person with a disability or other issues that keep them from working is $967, according to the U.S. Social Security Administration. Even people eligible for Social Security benefits can be priced out of the Portland market if their working income came from a low-wage job.
Bernal said providers still work with people coming into shelter to get them signed up for whatever benefits they are eligible for, but now those people don’t leave once the benefits start. To leave, they’d either need additional financial help or cheaper housing.
For people without federal benefits, it’s even harder, both providers said. Rent assistance is limited. And affordable housing is scarce. According to data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Oregon has just 23 affordable rental homes per 100 extremely low-income renters. Only Nevada has fewer.
Meanwhile, evictions are up in Multnomah County, contributing to a steady stream of people becoming homeless. And the state is short on residential treatment beds for people with severe mental illness and substance use disorder.
City councilors are beginning to acknowledge the extent to which a lack of housing will impede the efforts of even the best executed shelter plan.
“Ultimately, our homelessness problem is that there’s not enough housing,” Novick said. “And it’s hard to imagine how we can build huge amounts of housing in the immediate future.”
Wilson said he’s doing whatever he can to offer more places for people to live in Portland. That includes everything from new incentives for developers to spur apartment construction and office-to-residential conversions to greater enforcement on short-term rentals and a pilot program to match prospective renters with rooms available in people’s homes.
“So you see, it’s not just shelter. It is a housing continuum,” Wilson said of his plan.
A growing homelessness crisis
The other daunting challenge Wilson faces is that the numbers are simply not in his favor.
Counting the number of people who are homeless is difficult, experts say. But the best way to get a reliable count is to create a “by name list” based on who has received publicly funded homeless services in the last 90 to 120 days.
In April, Multnomah County officials released a public dashboard with data from their first carefully curated and quality controlled list. According to the dashboard, more than 7,000 county residents are living outside. That number is nearly double the best available estimates from early 2023, on which Wilson had based his original plan.
Wilson said in April that he was sobered, but not deterred by the new information.
Asked Friday how adding 1,500 beds would adequately provide for the 7,000 people still on the street, Wilson gave two reasons. First, he said there didn’t need to be a bed for every person living outside because three to four people a year can occupy each bed, one after the other, if the system is working efficiently and people are moving on to permanent housing.
Right now, there are slightly more than 3,000 shelter beds available in Multnomah County. Most of those are full on any given night. Occupancy rates vary, but have stayed at or above 88% since the start of the year, according to county data. Were the city and county to add a bed for one out of every four people who is living outside right now, they would need 1,750 new beds, not far off the mayor’s target.
But for new beds to work as efficiently as the mayor wants, there must be a home available for everyone who is ready to move into one. Right now, providers say that’s not the case.
Second, he said Friday he had no plans to actively try to fill the beds. He said city officials would not seek out or “apprehend” people living in working and registered vehicles, or even sleeping on the street, and force them into shelter.
“Am I going to go and apprehend them? No, that’s their personal autonomy,” he said. “What we’re going to do is when that person does have that moment of clarity, whether there’s addiction involved or behavioral, when they’re ready, we’re going to be ready.”
At the same time, he has continued to push back against policies that he believes enable people to stay on the street. He praised the county’s recent decision to end the distribution of tents in all but the most extreme weather conditions.
“We’re never going to hand them a tent, because when you hand them a tent, nothing good happens when you’re in a tent,” Wilson said. “Nothing good.”
Wilson also said that he expected service providers to hold people in shelter accountable for working toward a plan to have stable housing. And that people living in a shelter full-time for more than 90 days who have not engaged with caseworkers may be moved “backward” into an overnight-only shelter.
Despite the focus from the mayor and hundreds of millions of dollars going into homeless services in the Portland area from the Metro homelessness tax, homelessness continues to rise in Portland.
Every month, more people become homeless than become housed. County officials have known that for a long time and the trend holds nationally. The forces creating that shift are not entirely within the control of any local government, according to Margot Kushel, a physician who studies homelessness at the University of California, San Francisco.
“Often mayors really take the blame for this problem, but ultimately we’re not going to solve this without the federal government,” Kushel told a room full of health reporters at a recent industry conference in Los Angeles. “Local governments don’t have the budgets to solve this.”
Wilson agreed that he can’t do it alone.
“If you’re expecting the mayor to be a hero, it cannot happen,” Wilson said. “The hero has to be 650,000 of us working in concert, using the resources of our communities and our neighborhoods to come together to care for our neighbors.”
©2025 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
