Gov.-elect Tina Kotek (D-OR) recently declared her state’s homelessness crisis to be her top priority. Her success in combating it will depend on the data she relies upon to build her strategy and the data she relies upon to determine best practices.
First, she must establish how many people in the state are struggling with homelessness. Oregon’s 2022’s Point in Time count, a federally mandated physical count of people experiencing homelessness across the country, is not yet available. The 2020 pre-COVID-19 count documented 14,655 homeless Oregonians, but considering that its largest three counties collectively reported a 65% increase in homelessness over 2020, a similar surge is likely to be found in those forthcoming numbers.
Those data won’t provide her with the whole story, however. The Oregon Department of Education reported 22,336 homeless K-12 students in the 2019-2020 school year, a figure that does not include the students’ parents or their non-K-12 siblings. So the governor must employ both counts to properly gauge the scope of Oregon’s problems and to better assess the homeless subpopulations for which she needs distinct strategies.
Equipped with this knowledge, she should then look to the data provided in “Homelessness: What is Fueling the U.S. Crisis?” This report details what occurred under the one-size-fits-all shift to Housing First — an approach that wholly defunded services such as mental health and substance abuse counseling, instead funneling all aid into housing subsidies.
According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Annual Assessment Report data, in the first five years under the institutionalization of Housing First as a one-size-fits-all approach to homelessness (2014-2019), there was a 20.5% increase in the unsheltered population. This despite a 42.7% increase in the number of permanent housing units dedicated to the homeless and a 200% increase in federal homelessness assistance spending in the decade leading up to 2019.
In California, the only state to fully adopt Housing First in 2016, unsheltered homelessness grew by 47.1% despite a 33% increase in the number of housing units dedicated to the homeless and a 101% increase in spending.
And this occurred during a period of historically high economic growth accompanied by rapidly rising real wages — clearly not Oregon’s economic climate today.
The lessons are clear. First, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to homelessness. We must fund services to address the underlying diseases with which the homeless struggle — mental illness and substance abuse, as documented by the UCLA Policy Lab. Then, as people begin to heal from their illnesses, they will need additional services, such as employment training and life-skills instruction, to ensure that once they enter their own housing, they can maintain it and sustain it.
Finally, homeless policy must look beyond permanent housing, which by its very nature isolates the homeless from the community they desperately need. It makes sense to create and fund congregate living environments where services are much more effectively and efficiently delivered.
This “People First” approach, further outlined in our new mini-documentary, is the governor’s road map to success.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
Michele Steeb is a senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation and oversees its initiative to transform U.S. and Texas homelessness policy. She is the author of Answers Behind the RED DOOR: Battling the Homelessness Epidemic, based on her 13 years running Saint John’s Program for Real Change, a California-based program for homeless women and children.
