Since we have been spending a lot of our class time hearing about what local agencies are doing to combat homelessness, I set out to do some research on what my hometown is doing to solve its housing crisis. Portland, as we know, has a high population of unhoused people that has only gotten worse since rent has increased significantly.
When I typed in “Portland homeless” to Google, the first article I saw caught my attention. Apparently back in 2015, the city of Portland aimed to provide a bed for every homeless child in the area. The shelter was city-funded and had an obvious “no turn away” policy which they prided themselves on. By February of 2016, the shelter was at capacity and since the city had made this promise, they were spending thousands of dollars housing children and families in motels (the cost of housing a family in a motel was $3,000 a month while monthly rent was $1,800). The lack of beds and increase in cost led the city to break its promise of offering a bed for each child and blamed the “no turn away” policy for the increase in homeless families the city was seeing.
I felt frustrated when reading this article because it seemed that the city had been moving in the right direction by acknowledging the lack of beds for children. But when things got costly and the promise seemed impossible, the city turned to blame the policy of allowing anyone to sleep in the shelter. If the city of Portland really wanted to solve this problem, they would need to take a look at the rising costs of rent and the gentrification process occurring on the east side of Portland.