Invisible wins: How $1.4 billion has transformed Portland area homeless services – oregonlive.com:
In 2020, Portland area voters passed a 1% tax on businesses and high-income earners on the promise it would “end our homelessness crisis” – a campaign catchphrase – in 10 years.
Commercial vacancy in downtown Portland is 34% when 20% is considered a crisis level. Tax incentives work.
Five years and $1.4 billion later, more people are homeless than ever before and polls show the region’s voters are deeply skeptical that the money, currently set to sunset in 2030, has been well spent. As voters watch the crisis continue unabated, even many who support housing homeless people have told pollsters and reporters that they fear the money meant to help has been misspent, mismanaged and mostly wasted.
Ashley Garrison doesn’t think so.
Oh, well, then alright.
Garrison, 33, and her daughter Amelia live in a light-filled apartment in Milwaukie down the road from where Garrison grew up and where her mother still lives. Garrison’s toddler – bright, bubbly and blonde – knows her mother only as a doting parent and reliable producer of Goldfish crackers. But in the years before Amelia was born, Garrison was neither. She was living in a camper with no heat or running water, addicted to drugs and barely in touch with her family.
“This is the basis for me being able to change my life,” Garrison said of her two-bedroom apartment, which is paid for with an infinitesimally small sliver – about $25,000 a year – of the overall spending made possible by the regional tax.
Wait. Taxpayers are paying $25,000 year for her apartment? Why are we paying more than $2,000 a month for her housing? I do not understand how we’ve come to a place where people believe that we owe this standard of living to people who can’t afford it.
While such assistance has not yet ended homelessness in the tri-county area, it has ended Garrison’s homelessness. And the funding has quickly become critical to providing such services, especially in the face of the Trump administration’s threats to cut federal housing assistance. Garrison is one of at least 39,000 people who have received rent assistance, shelter or other help since the homeless services tax revenue first became available in 2021.
In fact, even as the homeless count has ticked steadily upward for five years running, the three counties have collectively met, or are on track to meet this year, the initial 10-year performance goals set for them in the measure. All three counties have added shelter beds and hired more street outreach staff. They’ve upgraded data systems, raised wages for frontline workers and improved communication channels with other public service agencies.
That’s fantastic. Your government at work. So we’ve ended or made significant reductions in homelessness, right?
But none of that work has stopped the flow of people into homelessness, which increased by 61% in the tri-county area between 2023 and 2025. As of December, approximately 18,000 people were homeless in the Portland metro region.
So maybe we’re throwing money at the wrong things? Perhaps incentives are misaligned somewhere? What do you think, five years and $1.4 billion later?
The fact that homelessness has increased, even as the new taxes boosted homeless services as promised, reflects the hard reality that government interventions only have a small effect on reducing the overall homelessness count.
Then might I suggest that government interventions are not the right avenue for tackling this problem.
The primary reason people become homeless is because they can’t afford a home.
What other reason could there be? If they could afford a home, they’d have a home, right?
In places like Portland, with an expensive housing market and high cost of living, there is little margin for error for people in low-wage jobs or reliant on fixed Social Security or disability payments.
It may be the case that they may have to move to a lower cost of living area.
People derailed by personal tragedy, physical illness, mental illness or addiction can go from housed to unhoused in a matter of weeks. Other events beyond most people’s control, like getting laid off or the death of a loved one, can also quickly land someone with minimal savings on the street.
This is where I think temporary governmental assistance or insurance is appropriate. (I will note that “minimal savings” is something of a life choice.) It’s not good for society to have people easily unhoused. We should support and incentivize around that.
If people are going to make bad choices, there’s really only a limited amount government can do about that.
…Dan O’Flaherty is an economist based at Columbia University in New York City. He has studied homelessness interventions for 30 years. Even the most effective of them, he said, have pretty modest results at reducing the overall homelessness count over time. But, he said, that doesn’t mean interventions that successfully house people shouldn’t be used.
Correct. They should be limited and temporary.
…the promise that the 2020 Portland area tax measure would “end our homelessness crisis” was made. It was printed on campaign signs. And 58% of voters endorsed it.
Andrew Hoan, president of the Portland Metro Chamber business association and an architect of the original tax, believed it so heartily that he threw his considerable professional weight behind convincing business leaders to both vote for the measure and pay the tax.
“The business community stepped up, put its money on the table, its money and those of its employees, for what we were understanding to be a $2.5 billion generational investment,” Hoan said. “We want to be at the table. We want to be part of this.”
But the measure has not ended the homelessness crisis, which Hoan sees as evidence of the measure’s “horrific failures” and “squandered” resources.
“Writ large, the measure had a goal,” Hoan said. “It is not meeting its goal.”
This was a horrible misjudgment and a ridiculous promise.