Q&A: George Devendorf

The director of five Portland homeless shelters says people on the streets need more than spare change.

George Devendorf spent more than four years working with refugees on the streets of Kosovo, Bosnia and Sudan. He's not sure Portland's treatment of the homeless is much better.

The city's political spotlight has been glaring on the question of what to do about the 1,438 people living on Portland streets.

Those numbers are about the same as they were in 2011 (and actually show a decline from 1,642 people in 2013). Yet mayoral candidate Ted Wheeler made homelessness into a cudgel to batter incumbent Mayor Charlie Hales. Hales ducked out of the race—but not before declaring a housing emergency and pledging $30 million toward new shelter space.

Devendorf enters this fracas after working for the United Nations, then Portland-based international disaster-aid agency Mercy Corps. Since January, he's been the executive director at Transition Projects Inc., a Portland nonprofit that runs five shelters, including Bud Clark Commons, offering homeless people showers, laundry services and a pathway to long-term housing.

He sat down with WW to talk about why the numbers of homeless people don't move, how City Hall has changed its tune, and whether Portlanders are actually interested in addressing homelessness.

WW: What did you bring from all that international experience that's applicable to your new work?

George Devendorf: Malaria.

There are definitely similarities. When people get piled in next to each other a little too closely—which happens in refugee crises and happens with the homeless on our streets—you find that patience levels tend to start going down, frustration levels start to go up, and people begin to look at each other through different eyes. That tends to provoke, I think, a human tendency to look for otherness in the people that your attention is focused on.

We were struck by Mayor Hales' statement recently that the numbers haven't really changed since he took office, but now he's realized it's a crisis. Why in a trendless market is it suddenly a crisis?

The wheel has gotten a lot squeakier. I continue to think that these numbers fail to capture the way homelessness is being experienced by people in Portland. Maybe it's a product of Portland just getting bigger and having more folks around. This issue has needed more attention—and by attention I mean focus, research and funding—for decades. And now, to the extent that the City Council is showing an eagerness to try to up their game around homelessness, I think that can only be a good thing.

Which city do you think is doing the best in addressing homelessness: Portland, Seattle or San Francisco?

To do anything resembling an apple-to-apple comparison, you have to look at the housing markets and say, "Within that real-estate market, how are these cities nationally doing?"

Seattle's perplexing, because Seattle is ahead of Portland by at least a generation in terms of identifying and enacting the kind of publicly funded revenue streams that are essential to addressing immediate needs of the homeless—including mental health issues—and building and expanding the supply of affordable housing.

And yet we've seen a significant increase in their homeless population. This is what I referred to earlier as a very complex issue. It's hard to identify exactly which levers and which dials result in positive change. The fact that Portland's numbers have not gone up significantly in recent years is an accomplishment in itself. If you ask me to identify the causality behind that, I would struggle.

So what frustrates you here?

The No. 1 thing for me is realizing what it means when someone walks in and applies to get into one of our shelters. So if a woman walks in today, puts her name on our waitlist for Jean's Place, one of our older women's shelters, she's going to wait six months, so it'll be early summer when we open the door and allow her into that shelter. That's not for housing, that's for shelter. And I'll see women like that and, of course, men like that, increasingly African-American men like that, every day when I walk to work and every day when I walk home.

You'd like to think you're here to help, you'd like to think that help that you can provide is going to be relatively soon in coming, and in many cases it's not. These are long waits, and trying to give a "buck up" speech to someone who's living on the street today and letting them know that if they could just hang in there another couple years—that's a tough speech to give.

Your former employer, Mercy Corps: Every time there's a tsunami or earthquake or typhoon, people hit their cellphones and give. Is it fair to say that the philanthropic public would rather give to an exotic foreign disaster than an everyday local disaster?

Because my agency hasn't devoted a lot of time and resources in recent years to trying to attract private resources, to me, doesn't mean that the generosity is not there. So I'm not willing to say that.

What I will say is that Mercy Corps has been very effective at attracting resources for emergencies primarily overseas. When you're talking about any sort of natural disaster or a large-scale displacement overseas, there's a quality of innocence that gets attached to those who are most directly and most visibly impacted by that emergency or that disaster.

So this is a marketing issue?

I don't know that it's a marketing issue. People have genuine, personal experiences with homeless populations around Portland, and some of them are positive, some of them are neutral, and some of them are just not good.

Are you optimistic, then? Pessimistic?

Realistic. Yeah, realistically, we can do a lot better than we've been doing. Getting there is going to require the public debate around homelessness and what we do about it to go to a slightly higher, slightly sharper level. And by sharper I mean we're going to have to start talking about how it impacts our wallets.

Without resourcing, this phenomenon only heads in one direction. It's not the right one.

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