Steven Rock, a self-described “fifth-generation San Franciscan,” knows resilience runs in his family. He says his grandfather, great aunts, and uncles lived through the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the subsequent fires that ravaged the city and left some 225,000 people homeless. His family recovered, along with the city, and started a small chocolate company that was eventually purchased by Blommer Chocolate in 1951.
Rock has lived in Portland for the last 28 years, but he has been homeless for the last 18 months after a dispute with his neighbor led to an eviction. Because of his eviction record and very limited income—he depends on Social Security—he has struggled to find a place to rent. From October through December 2025, Rock was staying at the Salvation Army–run emergency overnight shelter located at the corner of 15th and Northrup in Portland’s Pearl District. The shelter operates from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.—other church-based shelters in the city do not open until 9 p.m. Outside of these hours, shelter residents are back on the streets.
Rock chose this shelter because it’s located fairly close to his 6:30 a.m. Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In December, he described his routine: “I get up at 5:30, walk about nine blocks, and then I go to the dawn patrol meeting.”
He is proud that he has been sober for the last six months, and he doesn’t want to spend another winter walking in the rain, standing in lines that stretch around the block for overnight-only homeless shelters that offer only the bare bones for survival—a roof and a bed—rather than more holistic care aimed at helping someone become stably housed. He hopes to find a permanent place soon, noting he’s not sure how much more mileage his 70-year-old body can take.
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During his 2024 election campaign, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson promised to end unsheltered homelessness within one year. It was arguably the core tenet of his campaign and what motivated voters to elect him—a trucking company CEO and Portland native—to the mayor’s office. His plan centered on using existing infrastructure and partnering with current shelter providers to establish emergency low-barrier overnight and day shelters across the city, with a stated goal of creating 1,500 new shelter beds by Dec. 1, 2025.
Wilson’s administration allocated $24.9 million of external funding toward this goal. So far, it has opened seven new low-barrier, overnight-only homeless shelters covering North Portland and Southeast Portland, as well as one new day shelter on the border between grungy Old Town and the swanky Pearl District. Under Wilson’s plan, three additional family shelters are being run by Portland nonprofit Agape Village at undisclosed locations. Most operators of Portland’s overnight shelters—The Salvation Army, Agape Village, and CityTeam—are faith-based organizations with varying levels of experience in shelter management.
The newest addition, which opened on Jan. 5, 2026, is SE Grand Recovery; run by Transition Projects (the only non-faith-based overnight shelter operator), it is located in the gritty Buckman neighborhood in Southeast Portland. As reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting, Transition Projects stopped running overnight-only shelters decades ago before recently reversing course, citing a need to provide overnight-only shelters for people with substance use disorders.
To address the inherent problems of overnight-only shelters, the mayor added a day shelter. This space is operated by Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit organization that operates about 650 individual pod-like sleeping spaces, called residential shelter units, located in clusters called “Safe Rest Villages” that are dotted around Southeast and Southwest Portland. Jeff Dickey, the director of Urban Alchemy’s Portland operations, says the organization values lived experience in its outreach workers and sees this as a critical component of transforming urban spaces with love and respect.
The execution of the mayor’s plan has drawn heavy criticism from across Portland’s political spectrum. Many experienced homeless services providers say the mayor’s version of shelter is the least effective at moving people out of survival mode and into stable housing. The plan has also been accused of a lack of transparency, especially considering the large expenditures involved. Shelters typically fall under the purview of the county, which raises questions about what the city should prioritize and how allocating local funds toward shelter might come at the expense of other solutions.
This is all occurring amid the Trump administration’s cuts to funding for homeless services and attempts to require homeless service providers to comply with ideological mandates or risk losing their funding. Nationwide, this is seen as a departure from Housing First principles, an attitude also reflected by Mayor Wilson’s administration.
Mayor Wilson’s commitment to resume police enforcement of camping bans, his evident preference for faith-based shelter operators, his recent parting with social housing expert and Portland Housing Bureau Director Helmi Hisserich, and his financial commitment to temporary half measures has left local housing advocates wondering whether Wilson is aligning himself with the federal government’s attitude toward homelessness. Lauren Armony, the voices for housing justice manager at Welcome Home Coalition, a network of housing advocates and providers. In an email, she wrote that “our local [governments] have broadly reflected the priorities of Trump’s administration in housing and homeless services funding simply by adopting a shelter-first strategy to homelessness, as opposed to [a] Housing First [strategy].”
Overnight Shelters Are Not Evidence-based
Brandi Tuck was 24 years old when she became the executive director of Path Home, an organization based in Southeast Portland that works with families experiencing homelessness. For the last 18 years, Tuck has led the organization, which takes a holistic approach to homelessness through homeless prevention programs, rapid rehousing programs, permanent supportive housing, and intentional shelter spaces.
Path Home’s shelters are trauma-informed, both in their physical design and in the way they offer various types of care and service coordination to residents. In 2019, Path Home opened Oregon’s first shelter featuring trauma-informed architecture. It incorporates a connection to nature with natural light and wood. It has minimal color contrast, and everything inside is intentionally flexible yet organized, erring on the side of spaciousness. There are no posters or flyers on the walls. Path Home’s approach to care is centered around giving power, control, and choice to people in survival mode, helping them regain a sense of autonomy so they can navigate what is happening in their lives.
“Shelter should always be trauma-informed, and shelter should always be a short stopover,” Tuck says. “The biggest thing for me is having the ability to have housing placement out of shelter, and that is not a component of the mayor’s plan in Portland.”
Transparency and predictability are bedrocks of trauma-informed care, essential for cultivating the long-term relationships needed to transition people from survival mode to permanent housing. Longtime homeless service providers would like to see more of these principles in their relationships with the city. For example, Tuck says, Path Home was not informed about the request for proposal (RFP) process to operate the new temporary emergency shelters.
That’s not necessarily new. According to Armony “the city’s RFP process has been a problem for a long time.” In this case, Armony says, “multiple providers had to hear through word-of-mouth because they didn’t get direct outreach.”
Given how the process went, Armony suspects the mayor’s office had a preselected list of providers that it invited to participate in the request for proposal process. She wants to understand how Wilson’s administration made this list.
“I have not seen any transparency on the part of the mayor,” she concludes.
The mayor’s office refutes this. The process was “thorough, neutral, and statutorily mandated,” Robert B. Layne II, senior communication strategist for Portland Solutions, told Shelterforce in an email. Mayor Wilson’s administration, he added, “stands by [its] transparent and equitable procurement process.”
Tuck admits that her organization wouldn’t have applied even if it had been made aware of the process. “We abandoned the nighttime-only model because the outcomes weren’t as good. Families reported that [the] model did not work for their children, and we progressed in our understanding of best practices and started using evidence-based models that work,” she wrote to Shelterforce.
Path Home’s approach is effective. Based on data from fiscal year 2024–25 that Tuck shared with Shelterforce, Path Home showed an over 90 percent success rate in moving families from shelter into housing. The process took an average of 106 days, and 87 percent of those families kept their housing in the long term, meaning they remained housed 12 months after all services and rent assistance from Path Home had ended.
Path Home’s data starkly contrast with the latest annual report on shelters released by Multnomah County. Exit rates from adult shelter to permanent housing averaged 16 percent over the last year, with congregate shelters—the focus of the Mayor’s plan—performing the worst out of the three shelter types with a 12 percent exit rate. The county’s goal was 41 percent.
Although adult and family shelters serve different populations, the data on the county dashboard show that the small number of people who are able to access permanent supportive housing from adult shelters consistently surpasses the county’s goal of 75 percent staying in that housing 24 months later. For both Path Home participants and the broader homeless population, the numbers related to retention after housing placement are clear.
Tuck and Armony say this proves what they have long known. Housing First—or, as they prefer to call it, “engaged social housing first”—works when implemented properly.
“The Housing First model has nationwide, worldwide data to show that it works even for people with co-occurring substance abuse disorder and mental illness,” Tuck says.
It is discouraging, Tuck and Armony say, to see evidence-based, effective, and long-term solutions sidelined in favor of more punitive, less effective, and ultimately very costly measures like sweeping public encampments, issuing criminal citations for unsanctioned camping, and warehousing people in emergency overnight shelters inside vacant spaces that lack the basic elements needed to make them effective at solving the issues they claim to address.
“That kind of environment is not the best environment to help people heal and move through whatever is going on in their lives that led to homelessness,” Tuck says.
Working Homeless
Opening NW Northrup Shelter, one of the overnight shelters run by the Salvation Army, was opposed by many in the Pearl District, including the Pearl District Neighborhood Association (PDNA). While some critics’ fears have been eased now that the shelter is operational, there are still some who oppose the shelter on principle.
Linda Witt, chair of the PDNA Shelter Oversight Committee, says, “We believe [homelessness] could be handled more effectively by not putting shelters in high-density residential neighborhoods.” She also claims that the shelter has led to increased crime. Data released in June, however, show that person and property crimes have actually decreased at greater rates in the vicinity of Portland’s Moore Street Shelter and Burnside Shelter (SAFES) compared with reductions in those categories citywide. Total crime around SAFES was down 2.5 percent compared to crime during the preopening period. Around the Moore Street Shelter, total crime was down 12.5 percent. Data was not available for the area around NW Northrup Shelter at the time of publication, but, according to Erick Widman, owner and attorney at Passage Immigration, a law firm located one block north of NW Northrup Shelter, he has “only seen positive results” since the shelter opened.
He noted that campers who used to live across the street from his office are gone, and his “staff has not had any negative interactions with homeless individuals who are using the shelter at night.”
Witt is quick to acknowledge that her initial perception of who would use the shelter was wrong. “I was absolutely floored to see how many of the participants were the working poor,” she says. “How come these people are not in low-income housing or rent-supported housing or Section 8?” (The answer, of course, is that there is not enough housing to serve everyone who is eligible. For Section 8—before the current proposed cuts—for example, there was enough for less than 1 in 4 eligible households.)
Witt is also critical of the developer and property owner of the commercial building that now houses NW Northrup Shelter, Vanessa Sturgeon, saying she “never entered into a discussion with the nearby business owners” regarding the shelter plans, and alleging that she and Mayor Wilson “signed the agreement before they even notified the neighborhood.”
The lease for Sturgeon’s property runs until 2037. Although it includes an opt-out option for the city after nine months (with a six-month rent penalty), and every two years thereafter, the agreement still raises questions about whether the mayor’s approach is truly meant to be temporary.
Sturgeon and Mayor Wilson declined Shelterforce’s interview requests, as did every active emergency overnight shelter operator, in what appears to be a coordinated directive from the mayor not to speak with the press. This was initially confirmed by the city press office but later retracted. Further attempts to clarify were ignored.
Concerning Similarities
For Candace Avalos, chair of Portland City Council’s Homelessness and Housing Committee and District 1 City Councilor, the impacts of the federal government’s changes to homeless services funding on local permanent supportive housing efforts underscore the urgency for Portland. “We need to fill those gaps now that the federal government is clearly not going to fill [them],” she says.
For her, the gaps that need filling are clear.
“People need rental assistance . . . We need to slow the inflow into homelessness,” she says, pointing to the latest county data that show people are still becoming homeless faster than they are leaving homelessness.
Avalos is frustrated that her city is pouring money into temporary solutions. “It concerns me to have our city’s agenda look in line with the Trump administration’s,” she says.
Avalos introduced a “Slow the Inflow to Homelessness” bill in December 2025 that would urge the mayor to allocate approximately $21 million in unspent Portland Housing Bureau money toward renter-stabilization programs, resources for tenants, and other underfunded initiatives that have taken a back seat during the mayor’s emergency shelter plan. The bill is cosponsored by Avalos’s fellow District 1 Councilors Loretta Smith and Jamie Dunphy. During a committee meeting that month, the bill was advanced to the full council with a 3–2 vote.
One of the no votes came from one of Portland’s most vocal detractors of the engaged social housing first approach, District 4 Councilor Eric Zimmerman. During the Nov. 4, 2025, Homelessness and Housing Committee meeting, Zimmerman responded cryptically to a Welcome Home Coalition report’s finding that 91 percent of respondents would move into housing if they could afford it by saying, “Everyday Portlanders would be somewhat alarmed by the way that this was presented today.” During the same meeting, he also called Housing First a “push . . . to get people into a housed situation who were not ready for a housed situation.” Zimmerman’s public comments ignore evidence disproving his claims, focusing instead on sensationalized instances of individuals experiencing mental health or substance use issues in supportive housing.
Zimmerman did not respond to Shelterforce’s request for comment.
Armony, who presented during the meeting, would like to know who Councilor Zimmerman was referring to when he issued judgments about people not being ready for housing. To her, the statement highlighted Zimmerman’s lack of understanding. “He doesn’t understand how close to homelessness many Portlanders are at this very moment,” she says.
Armony also notes that needing long-term community care and case management—resources offered by engaged social housing first models but not by emergency shelters—to readjust to stability “doesn’t mean someone isn’t ready for housing. That means someone just needs support to be housed.”
Laura Golino de Lovato runs Northwest Pilot Project (NWPP), a Multnomah County–based provider that connects low-income and very low-income seniors with safe, permanent, and affordable rental housing. Senior citizens are the fastest growing homeless population. NWPP provides the case management and rental assistance needed for many seniors to be housed in existing rental units. The biggest barrier for de Lovato’s senior clients is income relative to market-rate rents. Because of this, NWPP underwrites the portion of rent its clients cannot afford on their own. The program also helps clients connect with landlords.
De Lovato says the mayor’s focus on overnight-only and temporary daytime shelters doesn’t “actually end unsheltered homelessness.” In an email to Shelterforce, she wrote that she would have used the money the mayor allocated toward shelter beds for rental assistance instead, because “it gets people into real housing.” She added that the emergency shelter model is “not a good way for relationships with outreach workers to be built.”
While de Lovato recognizes that emergency shelters could be useful during extreme weather-related incidents or natural disasters, they are not the foundation of a solutions-oriented approach to homelessness, she says.
One part of such approach, she says, would be to reduce the barriers currently barring people from obtaining housing. “If you have a past eviction, if you have any sort of rent debt, if you have a criminal conviction, if your credit score is 500 [or] 550,” she says, you’ll often be rejected.
The mayor’s plan does not tackle these barriers. Although Mayor Wilson has declared victory, more people in Portland are living unsheltered than before he came into office. Additionally, emergency shelters under the mayor’s plan only track percentage use rates. Even by this measure, many shelters are not close to being fully utilized, despite consistently high rates of homelessness. Laura Rude, communications and data coordinator for Portland Solutions, the city’s hub for addressing homelessness, wrote in email to Shelterforce that “the number of available overnight shelter beds is not meant to meet demand—rather, [it’s meant] to exceed it.” This, however, is not currently the case, as the latest Multnomah County data on unsheltered homelessness show that in September 2025, 7,446 individuals experienced homelessness. In September 2024, 5,844 people were living unsheltered. This means the newly added 1,500 emergency shelter beds will not even cover those newly experiencing unsheltered homelessness since Mayor Wilson took office. (Almost all of Multnomah County’s homeless population is located within city limits.)
The mayor plans to take on ways to increase the city’s housing supply next, according to an email from Rude. “The mayor [will work] to remove barriers and delays in our current permitting and development systems, will consider critical reforms, and [will] look for ways to secure and maximize funding … to increase local affordable housing supply,” she wrote.
Unfortunately, Mayor Wilson’s plan doesn’t mention systemic barriers that prevent individuals from accessing existing housing.
The mayor’s plan has not ended Steven Rock’s homelessness. He has managed to transition recently into a motel shelter instead of an emergency shelter, and is working with NWPP. He hopes to once again be one of its success stories; about 10 years ago, NWPP helped Rock secure housing.
Rock recently experienced sciatica for a couple of months. Although he was able to get around and manage the pain with medication, he says that a stable and permanent roof over his head would help protect himself from the next catastrophe.
“I really don’t think that seniors should be wandering around without a roof over their head,” he says. “It’s hard enough getting old.”
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Having this discussion pitting acute sheltering vs. housing misses the point. To have a legitimate discussion/report, one would need to include more detail on Portland’s housing cost of living, Portland’s vacancy rate and volume of affordable and deeply affordable housing. Those are the drivers of the volume of homelessness, not sheltering. Waiting to work on affordable housing until a second phase is clearly a mistake, since it is the key driver in the volume of homelessness.
On the other hand, like many cities, the cost and slowness of bringing affordable and deeply affordable units on-line precludes eliminating street homelessness and produces the need for short term (and engagement) solutions as well. It sounds like the newly minted overnight shelters fall short on taking advantage of the engagement opportunities for their clients to connect with robust housing and other services. The adversaries in the article should be collaborating on taking advantage of that opportunity by extending the programming into the day at the “overnight ” sites.
Housing First forms of Permanent Supported Housing is an important component of a well functioning and only controversial in the political realm. It struggles, however, where the system of care isn’t funded or staffed to provide the “Supported” part.
If not already in place, perhaps a community-wide bed board for shelter bed and affordable apartment tracking could be considered to maximize the use of the housing stock that is available and to begin to quantify demand vs. capacity.