Clackamas County has used its share of voter-approved homeless services taxes to bolster help for people living unsheltered – and it has paid off in vastly decreased homelessness.
Increasing outreach staffing from a single county employee to a team of two dozen nonprofit employees has been a huge factor in the success, the county’s deputy housing director said.
The number of Clackamas residents without homes decreased 65% since 2019, the year before the Metro supportive housing services tax passed, the county announced this week. The tax money, which Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties began receiving in July 2021, expands rent assistance, eviction prevention and other support services.
In January 2023, 410 people were experiencing homelessness in Clackamas County, with nearly half of those individuals living outside, according to a federally mandated count.
From July to December 2023, 128 households in Clackamas County moved into a home with temporary rent support, 223 households received long-term rent assistance that could last for life and 591 households were saved from evictions, according to the county’s latest supportive housing services quarterly report. These numbers reflect only those housed using the tax funding, not the total housed using all funding sources.
Those six-month totals surpassed the county’s original year-long goals to help 120, 203 and 313 households, respectively.
In all, 2,112 people were helped in those six months throughout all households combined, county officials said.
“These outcomes show that we are doing things right,” Clackamas County Chair Tootie Smith said in a statement. “We have incredible staff and our supportive housing services program has really blossomed. Ending homelessness in our county is quickly becoming a reality.”
Vahid Brown, Clackamas County housing and community development deputy director, said having the funds to build a new outreach program from scratch led to the housing success.
Previously, the county had a single outreach worker who would engage with veterans living in tents and in other unsheltered places to provide survival gear and put people on housing waitlists that could take years, Brown said.
Now, the county has contracted with six providers to send 24 outreach workers to the streets each day to work on getting people into housing. Using separate state funding, the county also hired eight more outreach workers to focus on rural parts of the county which are outside of the Metro regional government’s boundaries, meaning the supportive housing tax dollars can’t be used there.
“I don’t think there is a silver bullet for homelessness,” Brown said. “But there is a secret sauce and it is collaboration among community partnerships.”
The county is the backbone of the collaborative program. It tracks each person by name as they first engage with a street outreach worker, then are connected to a housing caseworker, placed in a housing unit with rent assistance and then are handed off to a case manager who helps them maintain long-term success.
The nonprofit outreach teams target a range of communities from veterans to Black, Indigenous and other people of color to refugees.
“It is a much more robust system, and it has been about a year since we’ve had this full coordinated outreach capacity,” Brown said.
While it took a substantial amount of time to get a completely new program off the ground, Brown said it was worth the work.
Brown said the county will work to maintain the outreach capacity while also looking to use the tax proceeds to build capacity in other areas in the coming year. Next, the county will prioritize creating housing supports rooted in recovery, whether that is recovery from trauma people experienced while living unsheltered, recovery from a mental health issue or recovery from a substance abuse disorder, he said.
As part of that effort, he said the county will offer to sell a handful of homes its housing authority owns to local nonprofits that wish to turn them into unique housing environments. Brown hopes this will lead to the creation of medical respite homes, sober living homes and other supportive group living for people who may not find success in a traditional apartment.
Nicole Hayden reports on homelessness for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She can be reached at nhayden@oregonian.com.