Deborah Kafoury: How Do We Solve Portland’s Homelessness Problem?

Monday, September 29, 2014

Deborah Kafoury, GoLocalPDX Guest MINDSETTER™

Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury

Imagine waking up each morning in your car. Your children are tired and cranky because sleeping in a crowded vehicle, packed with all your personal belongings, isn’t going to get you a peaceful night’s rest.

You don’t have a steady income anymore because you were just laid off from a job. Your kids are enrolled in school but their lives are irrevocably changed because you can no longer afford to put a roof over their heads with no money coming in.

And to make it all worse, everyone’s hungry, but you’re not sure where your next meal is going to come from.

Welcome to today’s brand of homelessness in Portland and Multnomah County. For decades, the stereotype of homelessness was the inebriated panhandler sitting in the doorway of a downtown business.

But that doesn’t tell the complete story.

Today, the face of the homeless in our community includes much more. More families are homeless. More children are homeless. More young people are homeless. And more people – including seniors – are one missed paycheck away from having their lives change for the worse.

By the numbers

Consider these statistics:

There are roughly 1,700 people who sleep outdoors each night in our community.
More than 3,000 schoolchildren in Multnomah County were homeless last year.
Two out of three lower-income residents spend more than half of their incomes on rent – putting them at risk of losing their housing.
The number of families who are homeless or near homeless is steadily increasing as our economy continues to falter.
Nearly half of those experiencing homelessness are people of color, even though they make up just 29 percent of the county’s population.
More than 400 homeless or chronically homeless veterans don’t have roofs over their heads.

These statistics should be enough to give anyone pause. But I worry that that not enough attention is being paid to this growing problem. It’s easy to turn away from something that we think doesn’t directly affect us. And when it comes to homelessness, it’s too easy to look the other way.

It's everyone's problem

When people in our community are homeless – it’s everyone’s problem. Children who are homeless have trouble being successful in school. People struggling with addiction won’t be successful if they don’t have a place to live. And parents who are homeless have a difficult time holding down a job. If we don’t find ways to get people stabilized with their housing, they will fall into situations that hinder their ability to thrive and be productive.

Simply put: This is a problem that’s solvable. We know what it takes to end homelessness. Now we just need to act.

Photo Credit: garryknight via Compfight cc

After years of stagnation, our local governments reached an agreement earlier this year to take a new approach to respond to homelessness. It didn’t make sense that for years the city of Portland handled single people who were homeless, while Multnomah County focused on families.

While the funding streams sometimes mixed from the governments, it often helped breed questions about who was really responsible.

Today, the county has an agreement in place with Portland, the city of Gresham and Home Forward – formerly known as the Housing Authority of Portland – to share the issue. It’s called shared governance. Under this new system, a variety of people with a common agenda are working to end homelessness in our community. They range from housing specialists to health professionals to public safety officers and even those who have experienced homelessness themselves.

The goal? To make a collective impact on ending homelessness.

And I am proud to be leading this new effort with City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, Mayor Charlie Hales, County Commissioner Jules Bailey and our partners.

Working together

We’re working together to figure out how we can increase the amount of affordable housing. We want to provide more opportunities for families to improve their financial situation and get stabilized where they live. Doing this efficiently will save the entire community money from skyrocketing healthcare costs, mental health treatment and services provided for people who are in need of a home.

That’s where the “A Home for Everyone” plan comes in. Under this new partnership, we’re working together to prioritize how we can best serve families with children, young people, adults with disabilities, women and veterans. We’re focusing our investments on six areas:

Housing – increasing the stock of affordable housing to get more people stabilized.
Income and benefits – making sure people who are homeless can tap into resources for which they may not know they are eligible.
Health – finding healthcare resources for families so they can be healthy and thrive, especially during difficult times.
Survival and emergency services – ensuring that when cold weather, domestic violence or some other calamity hits that our community has emergency resources set aside to help.
Access to services – providing education, job training and other resources to help people get back on their feet and reconnected with society.
Systems coordination – examining what we, as government, can do better to help those in the social services arena improve services to those in need.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, Sept. 30), marks the second meeting of the “A Home for Everyone” executive committee, in which we’ll be discussing the next steps of our plan. On Oct. 8, the shared governance’s coordinating committee will meet from 3-5 p.m. in Room C of the Portland Building, 1120 S.W. 5th Ave.

That meeting is open to the public and we’d like to hear from you.

It’s going to take more than a government agreement for us to cut into the problem of homelessness. We need a solid community effort where we all take responsibility. This isn’t about sharing a burden. It’s about sharing the work that leads to success. And we’ll recognize that success when we can go to bed at night, knowing that there aren’t people out there sleeping in their cars.

Deborah Kafoury is the Multnomah County Chair

Banner Photo Credit: Franco Folini via Compfight cc