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On Monday evening, Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury sent an email to all five Portland City Council members and their chiefs of staff with the subject line: “Our shared commitment to ending homelessness.”
On its face, it was a fact sheet about the accomplishments of the city and county’s Joint Office of Homeless Services, in which both governments pool millions of dollars to help people off the streets.
Just below its face, the email appears to be a rejection letter—and a reprimand.
Last week, Mayor Ted Wheeler unveiled an ambitious and unfunded plan to upend how the city and county address homelessness. He seeks to build massive sanctioned campsites with up to 500 people, ban street camping over an 18-month period, and start construction on 20,000 units of affordable housing by 2033.
In her email, Kafoury is responding to the unspoken tension underneath this plan: the future of the Joint Office of Homeless Services.
As WW first reported Oct. 13, Wheeler and City Commissioner Dan Ryan penned a letter to Kafoury on Oct. 12 with a laundry list of requests for the county, in addition to asking her to sign on to the massive campsites concept.
They wrote that they expected the county to operate all funded shelter beds, a total of 2,400; manage all six future safe rest villages; provide wraparound services at all shelters, including security; fund and build stabilization centers; and build three large camping sites that the mayor’s office announced last Friday.
What loomed over the letter was the city’s implicit threat that if Kafoury refused to participate, Portland could walk away from its funding of the Joint Office—in 2023, the city will contribute $45 million, about 17% of the office’s $262 million budget.
The city and county are amid renegotiation of the contract that governs the Joint Office after both parties agreed to extend it by a year to smooth out wrinkles.
In the letter Kafoury sent to City Council members on Monday, she wrote at length about the Joint Office’s accomplishment in lifting people out of homelessness—particularly around housing people.
“And I know we hear from community members who think that doesn’t happen, or can’t happen. They even think people on the streets can’t or aren’t ready to be housed, when we all know that’s not true,” Kafoury wrote. “Housing first has never meant housing only. I strongly agree with you that we cannot lose sight of that work. I sound like a broken record, but it really is the only thing that ends homelessness.”
She added: “But I also want us to be more careful and accurate in how we talk with the public about housing.”
She mentioned a report by the mayor’s office last week that found the average wait time for a Home Forward apartment (the city’s housing authority) is five years. Kafoury said that isn’t the case for those housed by the Joint Office.
“We found, on average, for the people housed last year, it was a couple of months,” Kafoury wrote.
She reminded the city that it hasn’t yet contributed $1 million to hire and retain outreach workers despite its commitment to do so, and asked that the city stop pitting the “housing first” model against shelter.
“Please do your part to correct the current narrative that we have ignored or de-emphasized these services,” Kafoury wrote, adding that the Joint Office is looking to acquire two more motel shelters, two safe park sites and another congregate shelter.
And for her part, Kafoury promised nothing city officials requested of her in their Oct. 12 letter.