The city of Portland has tasked its city administrator with aligning existing policies to create a unified housing strategy related to housing production, preservation and stabilization.

The strategy will be designed as an implementation tool with defined tasks and metrics. It will address homelessness and sheltering, permitting and development, land use and zoning, anti-displacement, workforce development and other innovative housing approaches, including social housing.

The Portland City Council on Wednesday voted 11-1 to approve the resolution (Councilor Dan Ryan voted no).

The city’s Homelessness and Housing Committee in May chose to send the resolution to the council for adoption. The city administrator will provide periodic updates to the committee, as well as submit a full draft of the strategy by Dec. 1.

According to American Community Survey data from 2023, half of Portland renters are cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing-related costs, while 28 percent are severely cost-burdened, spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing-related costs, the city’s resolution states.

In response to the housing emergency, the city has adopted and implemented numerous policies to address homelessness and housing instability. They include the Housing Production Strategy, the Housing Needs Analysis, the Anti-Displacement Action Plan, the Portland Inclusionary Housing program, the Affordable Housing Tax Increment Financing Set Aside Policy, and others.

The intent of the housing strategy is to see where gaps exist in the city’s policies. For example, the Housing Production Strategy did not address sheltered housing transitions. Councilor Loretta Smith asked for the strategy to identify gaps by district.

The strategy will be informed by cross-jurisdictional plans and agreements with Multnomah County, Metro, and the state to eventually create a regional system to address the housing crisis.

Ryan asked for rent regulations to be added to the plan, because it was not included in the resolution but discussed during the committee meeting. Councilor Candace Avalos said the overall objectives, including rent regulations, will be discussed further by the committee.

Council President Elana Pirtle-Guiney said Portland has some of the smallest units in the U.S. being delivered to the market. She would like to see the strategy include housing for families of all sizes, she added.

The unified housing strategy draft will be presented to the Homelessness and Housing Committee by Dec. 1.

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Project name: Meridian Gardens

Location: Portland

Completion: September 2024

Size: 40,361 square feet

Owner: Central City Concern

Architect: Ankrom Moisan Architects

Interior Designer: Ankrom Moisan Architects

Engineers: Tapani Plumbing, Ecotope, MFIA

General Contractor: Walsh Construction

Submitting Company: Walsh Construction

Other Key Participants: Portland Housing Bureau, Multnomah County Joint Office of Homeless Services, Department of Behavorial Health Services, Oregon Housing and Community Services, US Bank, Umpqua Bank

Subcontractors: All Trades General Contractors, Ambrose Glass, Andres Landscape, Applied Technical Systems, AT Publix, B&T Striping & Curbing, Berrien Concrete, Best Cabinet & Granite Supply, Brothers Construction, Buffalo Welding, Castle Masonry & Restoration, Centurion Fire Protection, Civic Construction, Columbia Allied Services, Elemental Energy, G&L Janitorial, Gorilla Hardware, Ha’s Painting, Interior Technology, Jack’s Overhead Door, Kodiak Pacific Construction, KONE, Lauzon Contracting, Mt. Hood Corps., NW Umpqua Roofing & Waterproofing, PARCA Floors, Pioneer Sheet Metal, Pioneer Waterproofing, Point Monitor, Polaris Electric, RDF Builders, Sign Wizards, Specialized Pavement Markings, Standard TV & Appliance, Tapani Plumbing, Ultra Quiet Floors, United Brothers, Vale Insulation Group, WESSCO, WMX Construction, Zavala, Zochert Fence

A new affordable housing development in Southeast Portland is taking an innovative approach to addressing homelessness by combining permanent supportive housing with recovery services.

Meridian Gardens, the third phase of Central City Concern’s Division Street Campus, offers 85 units for individuals and couples experiencing or at risk of homelessness who are in substance use disorder treatment or recovery.

Located in the Powellhurst-Gilbert neighborhood, the development features Single Room Occupancy and studio apartments. Sixty-five units provide permanent supportive housing with federal rent assistance vouchers, while 20 homes are reserved for households with incomes between 31 percent and 50 percent of the area median income.

The project stands out for its holistic approach to housing instability, following the “housing first” model that prioritizes providing individuals with permanent housing as a foundation for addressing other challenges. By approaching affordable housing with holistic and integrated solutions, the project reduces the barriers to affordable housing and disrupts the cycles of instability that often accompany homelessness.

Meridian Gardens includes amenities designed to create dignified living spaces: shared computer workstations, recovery group rooms, trauma-informed design, and raised garden beds shared with a neighboring building. The Central City Concern’s Puentes recovery program provides culturally responsive services delivered by peer support specialists.

The development also demonstrates significant commitment to sustainability as Central City Concern’s first all-electric building. Sustainable features include solar panels, EV chargers, a heat pump hot water system, and mini-splits for every unit. The project even includes an emergency generator to increase building resiliency during power outages.

In collaboration with the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance and Portland General Electric, the project incorporates a monitoring system to collect data on energy use and equipment performance in low-income, mid-rise multifamily housing.

Transportation accessibility was another key consideration. Metro contributed $500,000 through its transit-oriented development program, supporting the creation of affordable housing near public transportation. The complex is located on Division Street, where TriMet’s FX2-Division high-capacity bus line offers service to Downtown Portland every 12 minutes throughout most of the day.

Critical partners in developing Meridian Gardens included the Portland Housing Bureau, Multnomah County’s Joint Office of Homeless Services, Department of Behavioral Health Services, Oregon Housing and Community Services, US Bank and Umpqua Bank.

Walsh Construction surprised the 30 percent MWESB goal on the project, achieving 36 percent.

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At Glisan Landing in Portland’s Montavilla neighborhood, families have taken up residence in the Aldea building’s 96 units. Residents can enroll in an on-site preschool.

Across a small courtyard, in the 41-unit Beacon building, residents who were homeless or at risk of losing their homes have access to case managers and culinary training. Renters have access to a program offering help with resumés, job interview practice and employment searches.

A nonprofit café that opened on Monday offers at-risk individuals training as baristas.

“We want to help them not just get a minimum-wage job, but set them on a path to wealth creation,” said Christine Putterman, development director for Stone Soup, the nonprofit group that operates the café.

Such heady goals were made possible by Portland-area voters, who approved more than $911 million in two separate affordable housing bond measures in 2016 and 2018.

As a result, dozens of midsize affordable housing buildings have risen in Portland and surrounding communities, providing thousands of homes to at-risk residents, often with attached social services.

But now, the flood of affordable housing funding is slowing to a trickle.

Both the Metro and Portland bonds are largely spoken for, officials said. The local governments intentionally marshaled the resources quickly, spending the funding on projects in local communities before construction and acquisition grew any more costly.

That enabled the bonds to produce more units than originally projected. But as a result, the $652.8 million Metro bond is nearly exhausted — it’s about 90 percent allocated — while the $258.4 million Portland bond is completely ascribed to various projects.

“The Portland bond is fully allocated,” said Danell Norby, housing investments and portfolio preservation manager for the Portland Housing Bureau.

If they’re not followed upon, the approximately 80 bond-funded projects could come to represent a generation of affordable housing — a discrete, one-time allocation of public and private resources that was discontinued.

That leaves the city and region at risk of stalling the progress it has made in increasing affordable housing, experts said.

“That’s where I’m hearing a lot of concern,” said Dave Otte, a principal and owner at Holst Architecture, a local firm that has designed seven total projects funded by the two bonds. “The resources are dwindling, and the need is increasing. So, both of those are going in the wrong direction.”

A reckoning with homelessness

Before the pandemic, homelessness in Portland grew steadily as rents and home prices outpaced both wages and inflation. Then the pandemic kicked the problem into a higher gear, with unsheltered homelessness nearly doubling from 2017 to 2022 as a fentanyl wave took hold.

Complaints followed from residents and business owners of public drug use, vandalism and other petty crimes that made Portland the subject of national media attention.

Politicians tried a number of strategies to clean up the city: The state recriminalized drug possession, and the city founded Portland Street Response to respond to nonviolent calls and pursued harm-reduction strategies. Shelters sprang up in unusual locations via conversions of a former county jail and a string of outdated motels.

Elected leaders also turned to what many officials and advocates identified as the root cause of the problem: a lack of affordable housing.

Generations of restrictive zoning, byzantine permitting processes and resistance to building affordable apartments had resulted in a dire supply-and-demand crunch. There were simply too few housing units for the population, leaving thousands of low-income residents without shelter in a game of musical chairs with life-and-death consequences.

Portland-area voters threw an enormous amount of money at the problem. In 2016, they approved a $258.4 million housing bond. Metro followed up with a larger regional housing bond in 2018, with $652.8 million going to affordable housing projects in Portland, Hillsboro, Beaverton and Gresham, and three Portland-area counties.

The bond added affordable homes in places that hadn’t previously been targeted for subsidized housing, including Happy Valley, said Emily Lieb, housing policy director for Metro.

“The intent was really to distribute investments everywhere in the region,” she said.

Sites with access to transit and amenities were given priority. In some cases, developers had already acquired a site and came to local jurisdictions seeking bond funds. In other instances, the sites were publicly owned. In at least one case, the land was donated (by the Strong family in Alberta) for a 75-unit project.

The bonds formed the foundation of the finance stack for dozens of affordable housing projects. Local bond funding is only one source of affordable housing spending, paying for less than half of a typical project’s costs. Federal low-income housing tax credits, state programs, construction loans and other sources added more.

So that $911.2 million in taxpayer-approved bonds leveraged more than $3 billion in affordable housing projects.

The results

The city of Portland has completed 1,551 units, with 308 more in some stage of construction in 15 total projects with the proceeds of the city bond. That’s higher than an initial goal of 1,300 units. (The Portland Housing Bureau administered both the Portland bond and the city’s portion of the Metro bond. Only one project — Hollywood Hub in Northeast Portland — used funds from both the Metro and city bonds).

Metro expects to add approximately 5,600 units from the regional bond once it’s fully spent — far more than the original goal of 3,900 units. Of the higher total, 2,410 units have been completed, 1,491 are under construction and 1,327 are in preconstruction, Metro officials said in May.

As of December 2024, 62 Metro projects were providing homes for an estimated 9,500 to 16,000 people. Three or four more projects are expected to be added to the total.

“The bond has been a huge success,” Lieb said.

Unlike the infamous monolithic “projects” that were built in American cities in the mid-20th century, chronicled in social-science literature and pop culture products like “The Wire,” the buildings were kept relatively small and interspersed in neighborhoods.

The buildings were designed to be largely indistinguishable from market-rate apartments.

“I really can’t imagine that your average Portlander would be able to point these out by the building and say, ah, that’s affordable housing,” Housing Bureau spokesman Gabriel Mathews said.

Certain developments are intended to serve seniors, veterans and families — demographics that are sometimes ignored by for-profit multifamily developers.

“They’re not just buildings,” Lieb said. “These are thoughtfully designed properties that are designed to meet the needs of specific communities that are most impacted by the housing crisis.”

Developments were designed to fit into neighborhoods rather than become impositions.

“These are beautiful, in many cases, highly efficient buildings with 99-year affordability,” Norby said.

The burst of construction came at the same time as a post-Ferguson reckoning with racism, redlining, forced relocations and other tactics that had shaped Portland neighborhoods.

Building on existing preference policies, local governments and developers contracted with women- and minority-owned firms such as Colas Construction to build many of the projects.

“There was a more intentional focus on community engagement and equity throughout the project design and delivery,” Norby said.

Economic impact

The affordable housing bonds have buttressed construction and related industries during a slowdown for private-sector projects. As private developers sat on the sidelines, bond money sluiced through the local economy.

“It has obscured a true downturn that otherwise would have happened,” said Noel Johnson, an independent local housing developer. “The good news is that all of this public money kept our construction trades busy longer than they otherwise would have. That’s a good use of public money — that’s Keynesian economics 101.”

The Metro bond alone has supported an estimated 3,000 living-wage jobs, according to the regional government.

Holst Architecture has been among the beneficiaries of the bonds. At any given time, about one-third of the 50-person office is working on bond-funded affordable housing projects, Otte said.

“We’ve kind of ridden the wave of what is getting funded and what is penciling for developers — whether they’re affordable-housing developers or market-rate housing developers — and it changes over time,” Otte said. “Having the affordable housing bond has shifted our focus.”

The bonds have funded affordable apartment types that would not otherwise have been built, Otte said. Private developers tend to build smaller units, which are typically more profitable than alternatives.

“It’s hard to make larger units pencil,” Otte said. “They’re harder on pro formas. They’re more expensive to construct. So, I think a subsidy on those was wise, even though it was harder to deliver.”

Metro is managing the end of the regional bond measure. Interest earnings have added to the tax revenue, and Chief Operating Officer Marissa Madrigal last month approved $26 million to be distributed to local governments to offset unexpected cost increases and help finish projects.

Still, public officials say that much more affordable housing is necessary.

“As huge as the impact of this program has been, we know there’s still significant need,” Lieb said. “So, Metro is looking at different options to continue funding affordable housing in the future. We know there isn’t a lot of appetite right now among voters for a new property tax.”

The Metro Council is considering allowing the use of the supportive housing services tax to fund affordable housing projects.

At the city, six tax-increment financing districts approved last year will provide money in the Eastside and Central City. But revenue will come in slowly at first, and spending will be limited to projects inside the districts’ borders.

Despite the massive public investment, homelessness has continued to grow. A 2023 count found 4,355 individuals unsheltered, and an additional 2,467 in shelters and transitional housing.

Mathews, the Housing Bureau spokesman, said affordable housing is keeping those numbers from further worsening.

“It’s hard,” Mathews said, “to quantify the homeless folks that you’re not seeing because the units are there.”

Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected to reflect a numerical error in unit count related to the city of Portland housing bond. Also, the nature of the Strong family’s donation has been clarified.

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Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson last week signed into law a bill that sets limits on rent increases, making the state among the first in the nation to provide such protection for tenants.

With the rent stabilization measure, House Bill 1217, Washington joins states like Oregon and California that have sought new ways to curb homelessness.

Bill sponsor Sen. Emily Alvarado, a West Seattle Democrat, said the measure sets common-sense guardrails on the state’s rental-housing market “so that hardworking families and older adults don’t get unchecked excessive rent increases.”

“Housing is not a luxury; it’s a basic human need,” Alvarado said at the bill signing. “And everyone in this state deserves a stable and affordable home.”

The measure caps rent increases at 7 percent plus inflation or 10 percent — whichever is lower. The restrictions include single-family homes. The rent-increase cap for manufactured homes is 5 percent. Lawmakers approved the plan on a 54-44 vote, with five Democrats joining the Republican opposition.

Ferguson praised Alvarado and the many advocates across the state who worked hard to get the bill passed. It almost didn’t happen.

The bill successfully moved through both houses, but two amendments added on the Senate floor sent it into a conference committee. Those amendments increased the cap from 7 percent to 10 percent plus inflation and exempted single-family homes. Opponents of the bill argued that developers would leave the state if it became law and said similar policies in Oregon and California added to those states’ financial burdens instead of slowing the homeless crisis.

Oregon’s rent-control bill was passed in 2019 and later updated to cap rent increases at either 7 percent plus the annual 12-month average change in the consumer price index for the U.S. West, or 10 percent — whichever is lower.

The conference committee got the cap down to 7 percent plus inflation or 10 percent — whichever is lower, and restored protection for the 38 percent of renters who live in single-family homes.

“This law is a good beginning,” Alvarado said. “It’s long overdue and it’s urgently needed. Forty percent of the people in the state of Washington are renters or manufactured homeowners and before today they had no protections over how high the rent can go, leading to pain and to devastating destabilization of families and communities.”

Ferguson also signed nine other bills to help homeowners and renters. He said when he campaigned for governor, affordable housing was the top issue voters raised, so he supports bills to help make it easier to secure housing.

“Let’s make this the session of affordable housing,” he said before signing the first measure.

The other measures included limits on certain provisions in rental agreements, notices for mobile home communities, and property tax relief for disabled veterans.

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SAN FRANCISCO — California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday urged cities to clear homeless encampments, escalating once again his efforts to address an intractable issue of his time in office: the makeshift tents that line many underpasses, parks and local streets in the state.

Newsom’s administration drafted a local law that counties, cities and towns can directly adopt or modify to achieve the Democrat’s goals. He’s also releasing $3.3 billion in voter-approved funds to expand housing opportunities and treatment options for homeless residents.

“The time for inaction is over,” he stated. “There are no more excuses.”

Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, made tackling homelessness a priority of his administration when he took office in 2019. Other Democrats in government have since joined the effort to crack down on encampments. More than 187,000 Californians need housing; the state has one quarter of the nation’s homeless population.

With tents lining streets and disrupting businesses in numerous urban areas, homelessness has become one of the most pressing public health and safety issues in California and one sure to dog Newsom if he runs for national office.

His declaration comes a year after the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for officials to ban homeless individuals from camping outside in public. It was a ruling welcomed by many Democratic leaders, including Newsom, despite critics describing the decision by the conservative court as cruel.

The key provisions of the model ordinance announced Monday include prohibitions on “persistent camping” in one location, a ban on encampments that block sidewalks and a requirement that local officials provide notice and make every reasonable effort to identify and offer shelter prior to clearing an encampment.

Providing a ready-made local law could bring uniformity to how cities and counties deal with encampments though Newsom is urging local officials to modify his proposal as needed.

Major cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have already started clearing out encampments, saying they are not fair to children, seniors and people with disabilities who need access to sidewalks and parks.

San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, pledged to clean up city sidewalks. Meanwhile, in San José, Mayor Matt Mahan has proposed arrests if a person refuses shelter three times. Both cities have ramped up the number of shelter beds available, so more people have somewhere to go.

In Los Angeles, first-term Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat, has made clearing encampments a priority. But sagging tents, makeshift shelters and rusting RVs remain an all-too-common sight in just about every neighborhood. An annual tally last year estimated that more than 45,000 city residents were homeless.

Efforts to reduce homelessness are facing increased stress, as the city contends with a nearly $1 billion projected budget gap along with the massive and costly job of rebuilding the Pacific Palisades neighborhood that was destroyed in a January wildfire.

Bass’ office did not promptly respond to a message sent Monday seeking comments on Newsom’s announcement.

Critics say there is no evidence that punitive policies reduce homelessness, and camping bans make it harder to link people up with stable housing and employment. People may lose critical documents or contact with a case manager, forcing them to start all over again, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

The California State Association of Counties stated that the state has not provided as much money to address homelessness as it says it has, and that half of the money has gone to housing developers.

In 2024, California voters approved a measure that imposes strict requirements on counties to spend money on housing and drug treatment programs to tackle the homelessness crisis. It was a signature proposal for Newsom, who campaigned for the measure’s passage.

Under the measure, counties are required to spend about two-thirds of the money from a voter-approved tax enacted in 2004 on millionaires for mental health services on housing and programs for homeless people with serious mental illnesses or substance abuse problems.

The governor has also pushed for laws that make it easier to force people with behavioral health issues into treatment. And he has repeatedly threatened to withhold state money from cities and counties that do not step up to address homelessness.

But despite the roughly billions of dollars spent on more than 30 homeless and housing programs during the 2018-2023 fiscal years, California does not have reliable data needed to fully understand why the problem didn’t improve in many cities, according to a 2024 state audit.

The audit found California spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness over the previous five years but did not consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money improved the situation.

Editor’s note: Associated Press writers Christopher Weber and Michael R. Blood in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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By JOSH BOAK
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden is ready to propose a 5 percent cap on annual rent increases for tenants of major landlords as he tries to show he’s doing something about the high cost of housing, according to a person familiar with the plan.

The proposal, to be announced while the president visits Nevada on Tuesday, is being championed by Biden in the middle of a tense presidential campaign and a time when housing costs have been a major driver of overall inflation.

But the plan would require solid Democratic control of Congress to become law. Additionally, most policymakers have said the best way to limit housing costs would be through more construction and changes to land use regulations.

The person familiar with the plan spoke on the condition of anonymity because the proposal has not yet been formally announced.

Biden himself previewed the announcement at his NATO news conference Thursday, folding it into comments that blamed inflation on companies trying to maximize their profits in the aftermath of the pandemic.

“It’s time things get back in order a little bit,” Biden said. “If I’m reelected, we’re going to make sure that rents are kept at 5 percent increase.”

The Washington Post first reported Monday the details of the plan, which would only apply to landlords who own 50 or more units. The price cap would not apply to units that have yet to be built.

White House officials declined to comment.

The median national rent was $1,411 a month in June, up from roughly $1,150 in early 2021 when Biden became president, according to Apartment List.

Asking prices for rentals jumped in the aftermath of the pandemic and have since cooled, but the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies found in its most recent report that half of renters were “cost burdened” because they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing and utilities.

In recent months, housing has been a primary contributor to keeping the consumer price index elevated at 3 percent annually. Inflation has been a fundamental obstacle for Biden politically as he competes against Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee.

The president has proposed policies designed to increase home construction, but industry representatives were quick to criticize the rent cap as ineffective for addressing the overall shortage and possibly leading to fewer habitable units than the country would otherwise have.

“This is not going to create a single unit of housing — which is what is needed to create more housing opportunities for Americans,” said Sharon Wilson Géno, CEO of the National Multifamily Housing Council. “This is really a campaign-driven piece of rhetoric.”

Géno noted that landlords need to be able to keep up with costs such as maintenance, insurance and state and local taxes. If those costs exceed what they can charge for rent, the risk is that landlords will do less to maintain their properties and tenants could be worse off.

“What does that mean — the quality of the housing suffers,” she said.

But affordable housing advocates said that if Biden’s proposal had already been in effect, it would have likely reduced evictions and homelessness.

“The recent unprecedented increases in homelessness in communities across the country are the result of those equally unprecedented — and unjustified — rent hikes of a couple years ago,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “Had such protections against rent gouging been in place then, many families could have avoided homelessness and stayed stably housed.”

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By Claire Rush, Janie Har and Michael Casey
The Associated Press

PORTLAND — Tossing tent poles, blankets and a duffel bag into a shopping cart and three wagons, Will Taylor spent a summer morning helping friends tear down what had been their home and that of about a dozen others. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last.

Contractors from the city of Portland had arrived to break down the stretch of tents and tarps on a side street behind a busy intersection. People had an hour to vacate the encampment, one of more than a dozen cleared that July day, according to city data.

Whatever they couldn’t take with them was placed in clear plastic bags, tagged with the date and location of the removal and sent to an 11,000-square-foot (1,020 square meter) warehouse storing thousands like them.

“It can get hard,” said Taylor, 32, who has been swept at least three times in the four years he’s been homeless. “It is what it is. … I just let it go.”

Angelique Risby, 29, watched as workers in neon-yellow vests shoveled piles of litter into black garbage bags. Risby, who has been homeless for two years, said she was prepared for a drill she’s done multiple times.

“Everything that I own,” she said, “can fit on my wagon.”

Tent encampments have long been a fixture of West Coast cities, but are now spreading across the U.S. The federal count of homeless people reached 580,000 last year, driven by lack of affordable housing, a pandemic that economically wrecked households, and lack of access to mental health and addiction treatment.

Records obtained by The Associated Press show attempts to clear encampments increased in cities from Los Angeles to New York as public pressure grew to address what some residents say are dangerous and unsanitary living conditions. But despite tens of millions of dollars spent in recent years, there appears to be little reduction in the number of tents propped up on sidewalks, in parks and by freeway off-ramps.

Homeless people and their advocates say the sweeps are cruel and a waste of taxpayer money. They say the answer is more housing, not crackdowns.

The AP submitted data requests to 30 U.S. cities regarding encampment sweeps and received at least partial responses from about half.

In Phoenix, the number of encampments swept soared to more than 3,000 last year from 1,200 in 2019. Las Vegas removed about 2,500 camps through September, up from 1,600 in 2021. And in Minneapolis, camp removals have more than doubled from last year to 44 through Nov. 9, according to city records.

But even officials at cities that don’t collect data confirmed that public camping is consuming more of their time, and they are starting to track numbers, budget for security and trash disposal, and beef up or launch programs to connect homeless people to housing and services.

“We are seeing an increase in these laws at the state and local level that criminalize homelessness, and it’s really a misguided reaction to this homelessness crisis,” said Scout Katovich, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of sweeps and property seizures in a dozen cities, including Minneapolis, Miami, Albuquerque, Anchorage and Boulder, Colorado.

“These laws and these practices of enforcement do nothing to actually alleviate the crisis and instead they keep people in this vicious cycle of poverty,” she said.

But California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose state is home to nearly one-third of the country’s homeless population, says leaving hazardous makeshift camps to fester is neither compassionate nor an option.

He is among Democratic and Republican leaders urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a controversial 9th Circuit appellate court ruling that prohibits local governments from clearing encampments without first assuring everyone living there is offered a bed indoors.

San Francisco, which was sued by the ACLU of Northern California last year for its sweeps and property seizures, is under a court order to enforce the ruling.

“I hope this goes to the Supreme Court,” said Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, in a September interview with news outlet Politico. “And that’s a hell of a statement coming from a progressive Democrat.”

Earlier this month, crews in Denver erected metal fencing as police officers called to residents to leave an encampment covering several downtown blocks. A bonfire blazed against temperatures in the teens and snow covered the ground around tents.

“The word ‘sweep’ that they use … that’s kind of how it feels, like being swept like trash,” said David Sjoberg, 35. “I mean we’re not trash, we’re people.”

He said he and his wife would “wander a couple blocks from here and see if we get yelled at for being there.”

David Ehler Jr., 52, left the encampment with his toiletries, a sleeping bag, tent and a propane heater.

Ehler has been homeless in Denver for about two years after a friend kicked him out. He said work was hard to come by in Connecticut, where he lived before Colorado, and the public has no idea how big a problem homelessness is.

“It started ever since the COVID, people losing their jobs, losing their houses, losing their apartments, losing everything,” he said. “And this is where they end up.”

Sometimes, numbers can’t explain what a city is doing.

The city of Los Angeles said its sanitation department responded to more than 4,000 requests a month from the public at the end of 2022 to address homeless encampments, double the amount the previous year.

But the agency would not explain whether that meant the encampment was dismantled or simply cleaned around or how large the encampments were, directing AP to the city attorney’s website for definitions. The city defines an encampment as a place where at least one person is living outdoors.

In contrast, Portland clears some 19 encampments every day on average, according to the mayor’s office. Crews have shut down nearly 5,000 camps in the city of 650,000 since November 2022, but residents continue to report new clusters that need to be dismantled.

Crews have even found bodies of overdose victims in tents, said Sara Angel, operations manager for the contractor that clears encampments for the city.

“If we never cleaned a camp in the city of Portland, I just don’t know what Portland would look like,” she said. “I don’t think that we’re making it better by moving them, but I don’t think that we’re making it worse.”

Removing encampments is costly — an expense more cities, counties and states have to budget for. Several cities queried by the AP provided some cost breakdowns, but officials at others said comprehensive costs were difficult to get given the multiple departments involved, including police, sanitation and public health.

Denver reported spending nearly $600,000 on labor and waste disposal in 2021 and 2022 to clean about 230 large encampments, some more than once. Phoenix said it spent nearly $1 million last year to clear encampments.

Despite all that spending, said Masood Samereie, little seems to change on the streets. The San Francisco real estate broker has seen businesses lose customers because of people camped on sidewalks, some clearly in mental distress, and he wants tents gone.

“It’s throwing money at it without any tangible or any real results,” Samereie said.

Being homeless is supposed to be a temporary event, he added. “Unfortunately, it’s becoming a way of life, and that is 100% incorrect.”

For homeless people, sweeps can be traumatizing. They often lose identification documents, as well as cellphones, laptops and personal items. They lose their connection to a community they’ve come to rely on for support.

Roxanne Simonson, 60, said she had a panic attack during one of the four times she was swept in Portland. She recalled feeling dangerously overheated in her tent. “I started yelling at them, ‘Call an ambulance, I can’t breathe.’ And then I changed my mind, because if I go, then I would lose all my stuff,” she said.

And yet, cities can’t stand by and do nothing, said Sam Dodge, who oversees encampment removals for the city of San Francisco. His department, created by the mayor in 2018, coordinates multiple agencies to place people into housing so crews can clear tents.

“Saying, ‘This is not working, this is dangerous, you can do better than this, you have a brighter future than this,’ I think that’s caring for people,” said Dodge, who has worked with homeless people for more than two decades. “It seems immoral to me to just … let people waste away.”

One August morning, Dodge and his crew surveyed about a dozen structures and tents, some inches away from vehicles zipping by.

Four outreach workers fanned out, asking people if they had a case manager or wanted shelter indoors. Police officers stood by as Department of Public Works employees, masked and wearing gloves, hauled away a rolled-up carpet. The block was crammed with bicycles, ladders, chairs, mattresses, buckets, cooking pots, shoes and cardboard.

City officials are particularly frustrated by people who have housing, but won’t stay in it.

Michael Johnson, 40, has been homeless in San Francisco for six years. Before that, he lived with his pregnant girlfriend and was a driver for a commuter van tech start-up. But he lost his job, and their baby died.
He was assigned a coveted one-room pre-fabricated structure with a bed, desk and chair, a window and locking door. But his friends aren’t there and to him, it feels like jail, so he’s sleeping in a tent.

At his tent, friends hang out, including Charise Haley, 31, who says shelter rules can make grownups feel like children. She left one shelter because residents weren’t allowed to keep room keys and had to ask staff to get in.

“Then you get pushed somewhere else,” she said. “There’s too many directions. But never an end solution.”

There are many reasons why someone might reject shelter, say homeless people and their advocates. Some have been assaulted at shelters, or had their belongings stolen. Sometimes, they don’t want to pare down their belongings, or follow rules that prohibit drugs and drinking, officials say.

Of the 20 people at the San Francisco encampment, six accepted temporary housing and seven declined, said Francis Zamora, a spokesperson for the Department of Emergency Management at the time of the August operation.

Two people already had housing and five wouldn’t communicate with outreach workers, Zamora said. The city has connected more than 1,500 people to housing this year. It’s unclear, however, if they remain housed.

Many cities say they link camp residents to housing, but track records are mixed. Homeless people and their advocates say there are not nearly enough temporary beds, permanent housing or social services for drug or behavioral health counseling so people caught up in sweeps just get kicked down the road.

In New York City, more than 2,300 people were forcibly removed from encampments from March to November 2022, according to a June report from Comptroller Brad Lander. Only 119 accepted temporary shelter, and just three eventually got permanent housing.

Meanwhile, tent encampments had returned to a third of the sites surveyed.

“They just totally failed to connect people to shelter or to housing,” Lander, who opposes sweeps, told the AP. “If you’re gonna help them, you have to build trust with them to move them into housing and services. The sweeps really went in the opposite direction.”

A spokesperson for Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams, Charles Lutvak, disagreed. He said 70% of camp sites cleared were not re-established and homeless residents accepted offers of shelter at a rate six times higher than under the previous administration.

“Despite the inherent difficulty of this work, our efforts have been indisputably successful,” Lutvak said in a statement.

The city of Phoenix cleared out a massive downtown homeless encampment by a court-ordered deadline this month, and said it had helped more than 500 people find beds in shelters and motels.

Encampments were not a serious issue in Minneapolis until the pandemic, when they became more commonplace and much larger, drawing thousands of complaints. In response, the city closed down more than two dozen sites where 383 people were camped from March 2022 until February.

At the same time, Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, launched a program last year aimed at finding short- and long-term housing for homeless people, including some living in encampments.

“We are hyper-focused on housing,” said Danielle Werder, manager of the county’s Office to End Homelessness. “We’re not walking around with socks and water bottles. We’re walking around saying, ‘What do you need?'”

In Portland, the encampment dismantled in July was cleared again, in September and November. Two dozen newly installed boulders helped keep the camp from being reestablished along parts of the sidewalk.

Kieran Hartnett, who’s lived in the neighborhood for seven years, said there was fighting, drug use, open fires and vehicle break-ins around the encampment. Some tents were on grass just outside his house, which was particularly stressful when people started acting in erratic ways.

He hopes the people moved from the site are getting help.

“I understand the argument that clearing them just moves them to somewhere else, and they don’t really have a better place to go,” he said. “On the same account, I feel like you can’t allow things to just fester.”

“There’s not a good solution to it,” he said.

Thomas Peipert, Angeliki Kastanis and Christopher Weber also contributed to this report.

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By Adam Beam

The Associated Press

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — At the start of 2022, Thomas Marshall weighed 311 pounds. He had been hospitalized 10 times (including six surgeries) in five years. He had an open wound on his left leg that refused to heal – made worse by living in a dirty, moldy house with five other people, two ball pythons, four Chihuahuas and a cage full of rats.

More than a year later, Marshall has lost nearly 100 pounds. His wound has healed. His blood pressure has returned to normal levels. His foot, which had nerve damage, has improved to the point he goes on regular walks to a park.

Lots of factors are at play in Marshall’s dramatic turnaround, but the one he credits the most is finally having stable housing, after nonprofit Sacramento Covered helped him get a one-bedroom, 500-square-foot apartment in a downtown high-rise. He has hardwood floors, white pine cabinets and a glass jar filled with Bit-O-Honey candies.

“To me it’s the most important 500 square feet I’ve ever had,” he said. “Living here has just improved my well-being in every possible way.”

Marshall’s story is part of a radical rethinking of the relationship between housing and health care in the U.S. For decades, Medicaid, the joint state and federal health insurance program for people with disabilities or low incomes, would pay only for medical expenses. But last year the Biden administration gave Oregon and Arizona permission to use Medicaid money for housing – a nod to reams of research showing people in stable housing are healthier.

Now California wants to join those states, building on the success of programs like the one that got Marshall housing. Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed spending more than $100 million per year in the state’s Medicaid program to pay for up to six months of housing for people who are homeless or at risk of becoming so; are coming out of prison or foster care; or are at risk for hospitalization or emergency room visits.

It would be the biggest test yet of using Medicaid money for housing. California has the nation’s largest Medicaid program, with more than 13 million patients – or about a third of the state’s population. California also has nearly a third of the nation’s homeless population, according to federal data.

“It’s a huge step toward breaking down the silos that have gotten in the way of taking care of the whole person rather than limb by limb and illness by illness,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of consumer advocacy group Health Access California.

It would also be an expensive step. California is expected to have a $22.5 billion budget deficit this year, and it could get bigger in years to come. Meanwhile the state’s Medicaid spending is projected to increase by $2.5 billion over the next three years, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office.

“What we’re really doing is expanding the welfare state, which is going to become just a huge financial problem,” said Wayne Winegarden, senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, a group that advocates for free-market policies.

California experimented with using Medicaid money for some housing-related expenses in 2016 when it launched a pilot project in 26 counties. While Medicaid did not pay for rent, it paid for things like security deposits and furniture.

In Marshall’s case, he pays his own rent, using some of the $1,153 per month he gets from Social Security and Supplemental Security Income. But Medicaid paid for his security deposit, bed, sofa, table, chairs and nearly 3½ gallons of Pine Sol. Marshall said keeping his apartment clean is one thing that helped his leg wound finally heal.

Over five years the program has reduced expensive hospital stays and emergency room visits for people on Medicaid, saving taxpayers an average of $383 per patient per year, according to an analysis by researchers at UCLA.

Now California wants to go further by using Medicaid money to directly pay some people’s rent. Democratic Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula, who chairs the budget subcommittee that will vet Newsom’s proposal, said lawmakers are supportive. Arambula spent a decade as an emergency room doctor.

“I became very good at being able to get cockroaches out of people’s ears,” Arambula said. “The living conditions of many of our communities, especially in our rural communities, really can affect a person’s ability to get adequate sleep, to be prepared for the next day and to stay healthy.”

Advocates for homeless people say they welcome such programs but spending more money on rent isn’t enough, noting the state still has a massive shortage of affordable housing.

Kelly Bennett, founder and CEO of Sacramento Covered, said that during California’s first experiment with using Medicaid money for housing services, workers often needed up to eight months to place a patient in an apartment. In some cases, people have waited for years to find a place.

“Even when you have the deposit money and you have some rental subsidy, it’s still very, very challenging to find units – and to find units where the landlords will lease to our clients,” Bennett said.

Marshall said he grew up in Sacramento and got a degree in dietic technology and culinary arts. But a 30-year addiction to meth landed him on the streets from the late 1990s through about 2006. He camped at an old landfill, often eating leftovers from people’s picnics at a nearby park.

He applied for apartments at multiple subsidized housing buildings, but never made it off the wait list. He needed about a year to get his current apartment, for which he pays $186 per month with the help of a subsidy.

“I feel like I’m electric. … I have power and ability to do things that I could not do for a very long time,” Marshall, 64, said. “Whatever years I’ve got left now, I’m going to spend them up here in the glass tower.”

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By Claire Rush

The Associated Press

PORTLAND – Oregon lawmakers on Tuesday passed a sweeping, $200 million package addressing housing and homelessness, displaying a bipartisan will to tackle two of the state’s most pressing crises.

The vast majority of the funding – about $157 million – is aimed at boosting services to prevent evictions and homelessness. The money will go toward increasing shelter capacity, addressing youth homelessness, and funding rapid rehousing efforts and rental assistance programs.

“This bill will help us build more housing, get people off our streets and make our communities more safe,” Democratic state Sen. Aaron Woods, who carried one of the two bills in the package, said on the Senate floor.

Like much of the U.S. West, Oregon has struggled with a surge in homelessness driven in part by high housing costs and a lack of affordable options. Analysts and agencies estimate Oregon is short 140,000 housing units, and federal data shows its homeless population has increased by 22 percent since 2020.

The crises are affecting both cities and rural regions. About 4,000 of the nearly 18,000 homeless people in the state live in rural areas, according to the latest 2022 federal point-in-time count.

The Senate approved the package Tuesday night, with half of the chamber’s Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp, voting in favor. The legislation previously passed the House with support from both parties.

Lawmakers pointed to the package’s investments outside cities – nearly $27 million is earmarked specifically for rural areas to combat homelessness – as the fruits of cross-aisle negotiation.

“I have rural communities in my district as well that need this housing opportunity for our homeless. Homeless don’t just reside in urban communities,” Republican state Sen. David Brock Smith, who represents a rural southern Oregon district, said on the Senate floor. “I’m going to be a yes vote so that I can be a part of the solution.”

The package will also direct $20 million to ramp up factory-produced modular housing, in a bid to meet Gov. Tina Kotek’s housing construction target of 36,000 units per year – an 80 percent increase over current production.

Republican state Sen. Daniel Bonham, who voted against the package, said cutting bureaucratic red tape and creating more incentives for housing developers would better address the issue.

Some members of the public submitted written testimony opposing the high spending. But most representatives of nonprofits and housing groups expressed support, saying it would help communities that are disproportionately impacted by homelessness and the affordable housing shortage.

“Promoting stability in the state’s housing laws will increase the well-being of communities of color in Oregon,” Jenny Lee, deputy director of the Coalition of Communities of Color, said in written testimony.

The package will now head to Kotek’s desk for her signature.

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By Claire Rush

The Associated Press

SALEM — Oregon’s newly sworn-in Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek signed three executive orders intended to combat homelessness on her first full day in office Tuesday, a sign of how critical the shortage of affordable housing has become in the state and across the nation.

The orders call for boosting construction and marshaling resources to help the nearly 18,000 people living outside in Oregon.

Advocates welcomed the measures. But they said that shoring up mental health and addiction services must also occur to help people move off the street.

Just last year, Oregon lawmakers passed a spending package that included $400 million to address homelessness and housing. But soaring inflation, rising rents and a spiraling drug addiction crisis have meant that that money hasn’t gone far enough to reduce the state’s homeless population.

The first executive order declares a homeless emergency for most of the state; the second directs state agencies to prioritize reducing homelessness; and the third sets a housing construction target of 36,000 units per year – an 80 percent increase over current production – in a bid to address the state’s housing shortage.

Oregon is among the five states – along with California, Louisiana, Tennessee and Arizona – that since 2020 have seen the largest increases in the numbers of people living outside. Its homeless population has since grown by more than 3,300 people – a 22.5 percent increase, according to an annual report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Kotek described the emergency declaration, which applies to regions where the number of unsheltered homeless people has increased by at least 50 percent since 2017, as similar to “what we do when there’s a natural disaster.”

“This is a man-made disaster,” Kotek told reporters during a briefing at the State Library of Oregon in Salem on Tuesday. “This is a humanitarian crisis.”

The declaration instructs the state’s emergency management agency to provide assistance, support and resources to municipalities and create an inventory of vacant and available state land that could be used for potential construction projects.

Like other West Coast states, Oregon is struggling with a housing shortage. The state is short 110,000 housing units and needs to build 550,000 homes over the next 20 years to keep up with demand, officials have estimated.

The goal of building 36,000 new homes per year outlined in Kotek’s second executive order would allow the state to meet that target. Housing advocates have welcomed the order but say that removing bureaucratic red tape will be key to making sure that quota is met.

It can take years to go through the various and often costly permitting and review processes before a project team can even break ground, said Trell Anderson, executive director of Northwest Housing Alternatives, which has 800 affordable housing units under construction in the state.

“We’re sprinting and running as hard as we can, getting units built,” Anderson said. “But the economic engine that is causing homelessness just seems to be picking up pace.”

While the affordable housing shortage and rising rents are among the main drivers of homelessness, insufficient mental health and addiction resources are also fueling the crisis.

Oregon has the highest drug addiction rate of any state and ranks last in access to mental health treatment, according to federal data from the 2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Moving someone off the street and simply giving the person keys to a new unit is not enough, advocates say. Many people need treatment and counseling with access to trained professionals in their living environment in order to ensure they stay housed.

“It’s more than just the housing unit itself,” said Andy Mendenhall, CEO of Central City Concern, a housing and homeless services nonprofit in Portland. “It’s the housing unit, plus the supportive services to help folks remain engaged with their health care, their behavioral health care, and help navigate them and create community, so that folks can engage in healthier behaviors.”

Kotek will also ask lawmakers to approve $130 million in emergency funding to help move people off the street, describing it as an “additive” to the $400 million in housing spending approved by lawmakers last year. She said she hopes to build upon the initial funding proposal with a larger, more comprehensive housing and homelessness package during the legislative session, which starts next week.

Oregon’s House Republican caucus said it wants to work on bipartisan solutions to address homelessness but expressed wariness about new spending.

“Taxpayers must not forget that we have already invested heavily into providing more housing and services,” the caucus stated.

Democrats still control both chambers of the Legislature but lost their three-fifths supermajority in November’s election, meaning they will need some Republican support to raise revenue through taxes.

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