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Portland is a refuge for transgender people fleeing the storm of anti-LGBTQ laws that is striking red states—but, for many, getting here is just half the battle.
One in every five transgender people has been homeless at some point because of family rejection, discrimination and violence, according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. Of the 1.6 million homeless youth in America, up to 40% might be transgender, the NCTE says.
Some transgender kids come to Portland with stable families who buy houses in places like Irvington (see “They Arrived”). Others, young adults included, come to the city with little more than a backpack. For them, Portland may not be the haven they had imagined, because resources are constrained.
Portland’s Queer Affinity Village has an estimated waiting list of at least six months. Multnomah County has just one day shelter—Rose Haven—that serves women, children and gender diverse people, offering meals, clothes and diapers for infants. Rose Haven encourages people to arrive early for first-come, first-served showers because the schedule fills up quickly every day.
“I definitely don’t think we’re the utopia we make ourselves out to be,” says Erin Waters, director of equitable programs and services at the Black & Beyond the Binary Collective, a nonprofit that trains LGTBQIA2S+ Black leaders in combating white supremacy and anti-Blackness, in addition to hosting community dialogues. (Its BC3 Housing Safety Fund, an emergency rent assistance program, is “temporarily closed” and set to reopen “sometime in the Summer of 2023,” according to the collective’s website.)
Katie Cox, executive director of the Equi Institute, a group that provides first aid and safety net services partnering with the Q Center and Rahab’s Sisters, says it is serving more people than ever. In the past two months alone, the Equi Institute has helped 40 new transgender and non-binary people who are homeless.
For a perspective, the annual point-in-time count of homeless people in Multnomah County reported 80 transgender people unsheltered during one week in 2022, the latest year available. That’s almost double the 42 counted in 2019.
“In that context, 40 in two months is a big spike,” Cox says. The Equi Institute has worked with people from Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Mexico and even Russia.
Related: Portland is becoming a haven for gender refugees.
The transgender people most in need in Portland might be adults over 24, Cox says, because they’ve aged out of services for youth, but they aren’t elderly. Traditional emergency shelters, though inclusive of transgender people, are often dangerous, Cox says, eliminating another option.
“Most folks are not staying in regular shelters,” Cox says. “Folks that do choose to stay in the shelters absolutely experience discrimination and violence. Most of the time from the other residents who were staying at the shelter, and sometimes the staff.”
The result is that many transgender people couch surf for as long as they can and then end up living outside, which feels safer when compared to unspecialized shelters.
In 2020, Marc Jolin, then director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services, requested a combined $500,000 from the city and county to support transgender-specific services.
A year later, then-County Chair Deborah Kafoury announced a partnership with Black and Beyond the Binary Collective to directly help with housing costs for Black trans people. (About 1 in 5 unhoused trans people are BIPOC, according to the most recent point-in-time count.) The county dedicated another $50,000 this year to housing 10 transgender people and crafting future policies.
County officials could not tell WW the results of any of this spending by press deadline.
“We’re about to have a major problem on our hands,” Cox says. “We saw it coming.”